Potential Human Health Effects Of Air Pollution-Related Climate Change

 

The global nature of air pollution dispersion raises the issue of the potential impacts on global climate change of human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases such as methane (CH3). These gases are natural constituents of the atmosphere, and they are necessary for the maintenance of the Earth’s climate in that they prevent the planet from being much colder than it presently is. However, since the dawn of the industrial age, mankind has begun to steadily increase the release of massive amounts of these greenhouse gas pollutants through the combustion of fossil fuels, which had previously safely stored the carbon far below the Earth’s surface in layers of sediments from eons ago. The release of this pollution has not only local consequences in terms of the potential human health effects from the particulate and gaseous pollutants that result, but also has the global potential to both raise the average global temperature and change the North–South temperature gradient of temperature, thereby causing disruptions in the weather patterns around the globe. These changes may also cause an increase in the worldwide sea level of the oceans, potentially causing the flooding of islands and low-lying shorelines around the globe. These changes, while to-date within the range of past climate variations, can nonetheless cause needless major disruptions in the economies and shorelines of countries around the world. Furthermore, they will also have the potential for major changes in global public health, because the occurrence of heat-related illness and infectious disease would also be likely to increase by rising global temperatures. Since many measures to address this potential problem will probably involve a reduction in the combustion of fossil fuels, and since a reduction of their emissions will also reduce the release of the health-related air pollutants (such as PM and O3), there will be local air pollution-related public health benefits that will accrue to cities, states, and nations that take measures to control climate change by reducing fossil fuel combustion (Cifuentes et al., 2001; Thurston, 2007).

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