Study Links ‘Smog’ To Arctic Warming

ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2006) — NASA scientists have found that a major form of global air pollution involved in summertime “smog” has also played a significant role in warming the Arctic.

In a global assessment of the impact of ozone on climate warming, scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, evaluated how ozone in the lowest part of the atmosphere changed temperatures over the past 100 years. Using the best available estimates of global emissions of gases that produce ozone, the GISS computer model study reveals how much this single air pollutant, and greenhouse gas, has contributed to warming in specific regions of the world.

According to this new research, ozone was responsible for one-third to half of the observed warming trend in the Arctic during winter and spring. Ozone is transported from the industrialized countries in the Northern Hemisphere to the Arctic quite efficiently during these seasons. The findings have been accepted for publication in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

Ozone plays several different roles in the Earth’s atmosphere. In the high-altitude region of the stratosphere, ozone acts to shield the planet from harmful ultraviolet radiation. In the lower portion of the atmosphere (the troposphere), ozone can damage human health, crops and ecosystems. Ozone is also a greenhouse gas and contributes to global warming.

Ozone is formed from several other chemicals found in the atmosphere near the Earth’s surface that come from both natural sources and human activities such as fossil fuel burning, cement manufacturing, fertilizer application and biomass burning. Ozone is one of several air pollutants regulated in the United States by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The impact of ozone air pollution on climate warming is difficult to pinpoint because, unlike other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, ozone does not last long enough in the lower atmosphere to spread uniformly around the globe. Its warming impact is much more closely tied to the region it originated from. To capture this complex picture, GISS scientists used a suite of three-dimensional computer models that starts with data on ozone sources and then tracks how ozone chemically evolved and moved around the world over the past century.

The warming impact of low-altitude ozone on the Arctic is very small in the summer months because ozone from other parts of the globe does not have time to reach the region before it is destroyed by chemical reactions fueled by ample sunshine. As a result, when it is summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, ozone-induced warming is largest near the sources of ozone emissions. The computer model showed large summer warming from ozone over western North America and eastern Europe/central Asia, areas with high levels of ozone pollution during that time of year.

The new results identify an unexpected benefit of air pollution control efforts worldwide, according to lead author Drew Shindell. “We now see that reducing ozone pollution can not only improve air quality but also have the added benefit of easing climate warming, especially in the Arctic.”

The research was supported by NASA’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling and Analysis Program.

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(May 31, 2007) CTV.ca News Staff

A new study from the University of Alberta has found that in Edmonton alone, motorists spend 5,000 hours each day idling in fast-food drive-thrus while waiting for their orders — an action that is having a serious impact on the environment.

“We found that in Edmonton, drive-thrus contribute about 23.5 tonnes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere every day,” Amanda Dacyk, the author of the study told CTV’s Canada AM on Wednesday.

The researchers, who are natural resource economists from the U of A, set up a station at a Tim Hortons drive-thru and monitored the type of vehicles, the number of vehicles, and the amount of time each spent idling in the drive-thru from the time it entered the line-up until it drove away from the final pickup window.

“Our study was conducted primarily in Edmonton,” Dacyk said.

“We did some measurements at one Tim Hortons and then we expanded our measures out to include restaurants from the whole city.”

Dacyk said researchers conducted the study because many Canadians use drive-thrus every day without considering the consequences of their actions.

“It’s just become kind of a part of our culture and we thought maybe we should look at the full spectrum of results from this activity,” Dacyk said.

Dacyk is quick to point out that the study is not scientific. Students timed vehicles at one Tim Hortons location, calculated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated, then came up with a figure based on the total number of Tim Hortons locations in the city.

However, she said it is not their intention to definitively prove the amount of emissions caused by drive-thrus, but to draw attention to the impact of one unnecessary act.

“Before any actions are taken, I think we need to have a lot more research to really get the true scope of this problem. This is a preliminary study,” Dacyk said.

“But as a society, if we decide that these are unnecessary emissions that we want to get rid of, there are several options, from education campaigns to incentives for people to use the counters instead of the drive-thrus, and at the far end of the spectrum, we could go into things like regulation of the drive-thru services.”

She said Tim Hortons was chosen for the study simply because it has a busy drive-thru.

Tim Hortons has said it is working to reduce the amount of time customers spend waiting in drive-thrus in order to curb emissions.

The University of Alberta in Edmonton is one of the top 100 teaching and research universities in the world serving some 37,000 students with more than 11,000 faculty and staff. Founded a century ago, the university has an annual budget in excess of $1 billion and attracts more than $480 million in external research funding. It offers close to 400 undergraduate, graduate and professional programs in 18 faculties.

This is extraordinary… worth the quick-see read. It is of value because of the doctors options to see exercise as a need and that the current urban environment is just not being correctly adjusted to promote exercise and health. Beautiful presentation.

This goes to the core of one of the other options that an anti-drive thru approach should be doing – which is how do you build a sense of community with coffee shops located for cars and not people, not only do we not get local gathering places but how we want people not to walk in the car park.

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• Staff and agencies
• Society Guardian,
• Tuesday April 15 2008
• Article history

About this article

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Tuesday April 15 2008. It was last updated at 16:13 on April 15 2008.

A Birmingham university report has identified a ’strong correlation’ between deaths by pneumonia and traffic emissions in England. Photograph: Andy Butterton/PA

Thousands of people in England have died from pneumonia caused by pollution, a report suggested today.

There is a “strong correlation” between deaths, engine exhaust fumes and other transport-related substances, according to the study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Professor George Knox, emeritus professor at the university of Birmingham, looked at details of atmospheric emissions, published causes of death and expected causes of death from 1996 to 2004.

The data, gathered from 352 local authority areas in England, was used to calculate the impact of pollution on death rates.

He wrote: “Correlations with pneumonia deaths were exceptional. High mortality rates were observed in areas with elevated ambient pollution levels. The strongest single effect was an increase in pneumonia deaths.

“Road transport was the chief source of the emissions responsible although it was not possible to discriminate between the different chemical components.”

In total, 386,374 people died from pneumonia in England during the eight-year period but there were widespread regional variations.

In the 35 (10%) local authorities with the highest disease-specific death rates, there were 53,821 pneumonia deaths. This was 14,718 more than the expected national rate, the study showed.

Calculations revealed that pneumonia, peptic ulcers, coronary and rheumatic heart diseases, lung and stomach cancers and other diseases were associated with a range of combustion emissions.

Other relevant factors were social deprivation, smoking, binge drinking and living in the north of England. When the social factors were taken into account, the data still revealed that deaths from pneumonia were strongly and independently linked to emissions, with the exception of sulphur dioxide from coal burning.

Knox said many of the pneumonia deaths were probably caused by “direct chemical injury”.

“Total annual losses as a result of air pollution, through pneumonia, probably approach those of the 1952 London smog,” he added.

“Excess deaths assigned to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and rheumatic heart disease, two diseases with chronic respiratory inadequacy, can also be interpreted as directly contact toxic.

“The excess deaths from lung and stomach cancers and peptic ulcers are more difficult to interpret but the same pollutants may have acted as adjuvants to other agents, facilitating their access to sensitive tissues.

“The lung cancer and stomach cancer associations were identical in men and in women, reducing the likelihood of a specific occupational effect.”