Ozone — worse than global warming?

So says Dutch scientist Frank Raes, who says that ozone-caused drops in agricultural productivity could turn out to be worse than global warming

(Raes) estimates that each year India loses five billion dollars in crops because of ozone, followed by China, with 2.5 billion dollars.

They are followed by Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and the east and west coasts of North America.

By 2030, says Raes, India will lose 20 percent of its crops through damage, compared with less than five percent through man-made global warming.

As Raes notes, often the ozone problem is worse in the country than in urban areas, due to the time the chemical cycle in the atmosphere takes to produce ozone.

One of the worst ozone areas in the U.S. is arguably its most productive agricultural area — California’s Central Valley. The Yahoo story just has cropland ozone figures from the Midwest, but given that the Valley is one of the country’s 10 worst ozone areas, the problem has to be more severe there.

But, given California’s geography and wind patterns, along with booming population grown inside the Valley, this problem, if not intractable, is certainly not one of easy solution.