London: Holy smoke arising from Hindu funeral pyres, Muslim cemeteries and Buddhist temples are responsible for almost a quarter of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming on the Indian subcontinent and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, a new study has claimed.
Researchers have long suspected that the rituals of religious devotion in India, Nepal and South Asia, may be a factor in the level of brown carbon and soot which pollutes the air in the region, but until now little work has been done to quantify the size of the problem.
According to researchers from US state Nevada's Desert Research Institute and the Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla University in Chhattisgarh, the impact is "huge" - 23 per cent of particles from human burnt fossil fuels in the atmosphere and a major source of carcinogenic volatile organic compounds, a report in the Telegraph said.
