Energy, pollution and climate change are familiar terms to most people, but what do you really know about smog, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change?
Any Los Angeles resident will speak of dirty skies and persistent haze. People with asthma or suffering other respiratory ailments need to stay inside their homes on bad days or rely on medical inhalers to breathe. More than half a million deaths worldwide (estimated) every year are directly attributed to an excessive amount of airborne pollution.
The combination of atmospheric oxygen, ultraviolet rays and fossil fuel emissions causes soot and smog pollution, which in turn forms acid rain. Clean rain water is pH-neutral, meaning it is non-corrosive and restorative (quite apart from being essential for all life). Pollution in acid rain causes it to become acidic: on contact with rocks, metals or plants, corrosion occurs and results in decay, destroying many living and non-living things.
More developed nations have managed to greatly reduce smog since the 1980s, due to lowered sulfur concentrations in gasoline and diesel fuels. Automotive improvements and reduced emissions from coal-based power stations may have reduced smog in the past 20 years, but the problem has not been eradicated. Increasing demands for (often coal-fired) electrical energy and the constantly-rising number of automobiles filling the world’s highways exacerbate the problem. Concentrations of two greenhouse gases in the air – carbon dioxide and methane – have been rising, which has triggered global warming concerns.
The concentration of carbon dioxide today is much higher than it was 420,000 years ago, and it has been identified as a direct contributor to the rise in the Earth’s surface temperature by 0.6 degrees in the past century. The 1990s were the warmest decade, with 1998 taking the cake as the warmest year recorded in the last 1,000 years.
Scientists predict that a 2°C (roughly 4°F) rise in the Earth’s average temperature will incur the following devastating effects:
- More weather events of larger magnitude;
- Higher ocean levels, causing massive floods that will devastate low-lying areas;
- Increased occurrences of drought which will affect food production;
- Emergence of new and rapidly-spreading diseases.
Where do these gases come from? Carbon dioxide is the result of burning carbon-based fuel, such as gasoline, coal, oil, wood and natural gas. Almost all energy economies in the world today are carbon-fueled. Fossil fuels take a long time to form: half a million years ago, our current fuel was made up of living things. Peat in swamps absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of the photosynthetic process in plants: the Earth’s crust absorbed the dead matter over time, sealing it tight and without oxygen. Since it couldn’t rot, the plant matter became part of the shifting soil and heated ground which was compressed over many centuries to form soft coal deposits.
Today, we collect this coal from shallow open-pit mines. If the coal were heated and churned under intense heat and pressure, hard coal (as well as oil) would be created – just like that found in the deep recesses of our underground coal mines.
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