Global Warming is the result of air pollution. Justify your answer.
Answers
Answer:
Global warming, also known as climate change, is caused by a blanket of pollution that traps heat around the earth. This pollution comes from cars, factories, homes, and power plants that burn fossil fuels such as oil, coal, natural gas, and gasoline. Global warming pollution knows no boundaries.
Answer:
Global warming, also known as climate change, is caused by a blanket of pollution that traps heat around the earth. This pollution comes from cars, factories, homes, and power plants that burn fossil fuels such as oil, coal, natural gas, and gasoline. Global warming pollution knows no boundaries.
Explanation:
Air pollution: a critical health risk worldwide
At the first WHO Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health in 2018 WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called air pollution a “silent public health emergency”. Approximately 7 million premature deaths annually are due to the effects of air pollution, about 4 million of which are due to ambient (outdoor) air pollution. Beyond shortening lives, air pollution can negatively impact our day-to-day lives, causing respiratory illness and leading to days of missed work and school. Children are especially vulnerable to the impacts of air pollution: exposure to air pollution in early childhood, when the lungs are still developing, can lead to reduced lung capacity that persists through adulthood.
Health and ecosystem impacts of key short-lived climate-forcing pollutants
Black carbon (BC, also known as soot) is a component of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Particulate matter is the air pollutant that is most harmful to human health and the primary driver of air pollutant-induced mortality.
Methane (CH4) does not have any direct human health effects in the sense that inhaling typical ambient concentrations of methane is not harmful to human health. However, methane has a very important indirect human health impact, because it is a precursor to ground-level ozone (O3, also known as tropospheric ozone), which causes asthma and other respiratory diseases and contributes to air pollution-related premature deaths. Ozone also damages plants and leads to USD 11–18 billion worth of crop losses each year.
Climate change: We need action on air pollution and greenhouse gases
To reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 (or even 2) degrees Celsius, rapid reduction of CO2 emissions is absolutely necessary, but will not in itself be sufficient. The IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C stresses that deep reductions in emissions of non-CO2 climate forcers, particularly the air pollutants methane and black carbon, are also crucial. And while the decarbonisation of the economy will generally reduce emissions of both CO2 and air pollutants, pursuing the phaseout of fossil fuels is not enough – for either air quality or climate. First of all, emissions from additional sectors are also important: for instance, methane and black carbon emissions from agriculture have important health and climate impacts, and emissions of coolants (particularly hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs) from the cooling sector are especially potent climate warmers. Second, it is important to consider both CO2 and air pollutants when designing and selecting climate and air quality measures in order to ensure that the desired benefits can actually be achieved. Some technologies that are promoted as climate-friendly – combustion of biomass and other biofuels for home heating or transport, for example – may emit more particulate matter, including black carbon, than the technology it replaced, and thus continue to harm human health and potentially warm the climate.