Skip to main content

Air pollution


 The pollutants of air are  numerous and this is as a result of byproducts of an advanced technological society. As long as man has lived in cities, he has and will continue to pollute the air. Major cities around the globe must now strive to deal with dangerously rising levels of air pollution. With the advent of population migration and growth; urbanization, which is the agglomeration of people in space, the rate of the acquisition of automobiles for instance, has quadrupled over the past century, that is from the 1950’s up till now. And as such, the rate of air pollution has also quadrupled.
Noted also, smog from these cities in recent times especially before the Covid-19 pandemic, drifted into many sub-urban and rural areas where it has been fed by cars, incinerators, and heating and generating plants.
Urban air pollution was once considered a problem of merely smoke in the air and the main source of the smoke obviously was industry which burned great quantities of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

The word “smog” was coined and was generally assumed to simply denote a mixture of smoke and fog. There’s however, a chemical explanation for the smog problem because cities which do not have heavy industrial complexes like burning coal or oil have had to deal with severe smog problem. Certain compounds that are present in car exhaust emissions-gaseous hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen- are invisible as they enter the atmosphere. Once in the air, however, they react under the  influence of sunlight to form the ingredients of photochemical smog, a noxious form of pollution that brings tears to our eyes and makes us cough and choke as we breathe it. The combination of large numbers of cars and local weather conditions make cities like Los Angeles, California and China particularly subject to photochemical smog. But cars are a major source of air pollution all around the world.

For instance, photochemical smog put Mexico City on the list of the world’s most polluted cities. Cars, buses and trucks, account for sixty percent of the ongoing air pollution with carbon emissions somewhat exceeding those of Los Angeles. In Sidney, Australia which was once believed to be the cleanest environment at a time, has since been plagued with a high percentage of automobile emissions in the air,  higher than that of any city in the United States.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HYDROPOWER!

Can there be a green approach to this age old phenomenon which has powered our homes and businesses, and solved our energy quests and problems for decades?  Hydropower has encouraged the significant expansion of dams which has damaged and divided ecosystems according to a report from the ' Green New Deal' proposition for Europe by Diem 25(Democracy for Europe Movement 2025).                                                                                                       Another report shows that in the Balkans, some of the wildest rivers in Europe, and also a hot spot for fresh water biodiversity are under threat from around 2800 already planned hydropower plants projected to be constructed over the next few years. So bac...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oceans: Our Natural Carbon Sinks

  June 8 is World Oceans Day. This is the day that the United Nations has set aside every year to convey the importance of our oceans. It is important that we observe these days with utmost precision and care, and not just think that these are just days that the organization chooses to use, so they can  keep up with the ceremony of things or just keep busy. No! They are there,  as a reminder of our duty and responsibility towards our environment,  and the earth in general.  It is vital that we follow and do our own little bit to proffer solutions to our dying planet. And if everyone contributes their own quota to the sustainability of the environment, then we would have gone a long way in ameliorating the problems we have created by our own actions and leave at least a better place for posterity. Oceans are natural carbon sinks that grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to use in photosynthesis by plants under the sea. These are plankton, corals, algae and oth...
Post a Comment
Read more

#Climate Action

  Climate can be defined as the atmospheric conditions of a place over a particular period of time. If conditions are altered even in the slightest bit, there is climate change. Most recently, in different parts of the world, climate change has become an increasingly growing problem, stemming largely from man’s quest to solve his energy problem and answering that quest by employing the use of three primary fossil fuel resources namely: coal, petroleum crude oil and gas.  Coal is the most abundant fossil fuel resource in the United States, China and major parts of Africa. As oil prices have   plummeted and the availability of oil is slowly declining, the use of coal again is most likely going to increase if the United Nations Decade On Ecosystem Restoration strategy isn’t strictly adhered to especially in oil producing nations of the world. And this has tremendous environmental problems and consequences caused by the sulfur content of coal and not to mention the release of...
Post a Comment
Read more