Increased carbon dioxide emission is responsible for global warming and associated with climate change. Environmentalists have been warning us for a long time that the greenhouse gases would increase the rate of human mortality by increasing the level of pollutants that would adversely affect our health.
There has been a large increase of patients with respiratory distress worldwide, resulting from high level of pollutants. The only handicap that lay in establishing a direct relation between greenhouse gases and health hazards was th lack of any concrete data.
This lacuna has been filled recently by Mark Jacobson a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Jacobson has established the direct cause and effect relation between carbon dioxide emission and human mortality through a state-of-the-art computer model that incorporated scores of chemical and physical processes spanning over 18 years.
Jacobson’s study attributed the rise in respiratory diseases to the increase in the volume of ozone that is highly corrosive to the lining of the respiratory tract if inhaled. The rise in temperatures in the urban areas from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, increases the chemical rate of ozone production. The rate of ozone production is further accelerated by the increase in water vapor in the air from the high temperature.
This study takes the US as its model. However, this applies to every city on earth with a high level of pollution from carbon dioxide emissions. Governments should impose strict emission norms to prevent respiratory illness and increase in mortality from it from acquiring deadly proportions.
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Source: science daily