Archives par mot-clé : Air Pollution

better to know...?

Climate Activists Are Wrong About Which Energy Source Reduces Air Pollution

by S. Graham, June 20, 2024 in WUWT

oday’s media are filled with concerns about air pollution. But few people know which energy source has produced the greatest modern reduction in air pollution. The answer isn’t wind or solar energy.

During the 1950s, my grandfather had a coal furnace in his basement, like many homes in Chicago. Five days after a winter snowfall, the snow was covered with a visible black film of dust from coal furnaces. Our younger generation does not know the original reason for “spring cleaning.” Every spring, homeowners would wash their inside walls to remove coal dust.

It was the rising use of gas fuel, primarily natural gas along with propane, that produced the greatest reduction in air pollution in the United States and across the world. Gas furnaces and stoves have replaced wood in businesses and homes in developed nations. And natural gas power plants have replaced coal-fired plants to generate electricity, with gas becoming the leading fuel for industry.

Natural gas and propane are clean-burning fuels that emit no harmful pollutants when burned. When gas heating is substituted for coal or wood heating, indoor particulate pollution is reduced by 1,000 times.

Today, 70% of US homes use natural gas or propane, a percentage that has been rising for decades. Gas fuels have also become the leading heating and cooking source in Europe, providing 83% of heat energy in the Netherlands and 78% in the United Kingdom. But there are still 70 million wood stoves in Europe.

The World Health Organization estimates that 2 billion people in developing nations still cook using open fires or inefficient stoves fueled by kerosene, biomass (wood, charcoal, animal dung, or crop waste), and coal. These fuels generate harmful indoor air pollution. Indoor air pollution is estimated to cause more than 3 million deaths annually in poor nations. Emerging nations need gas fuels to boost health and well-being.

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climate-debate

Climate Change, Lies And The Lancet

by P. Homewood, January 7, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch

The Lancet has published its latest annual report on health and climate change, which inevitably orders us to stop using fossil fuels or the kids will get it!

It is the usual load of overhyped rubbish of the sort we have seen in previous years.

The executive summary contains a number of questionable claims and statements which seriously undermine the report’s integrity and reliability.

For a start, it claims that ‘a child born today will experience a world that is more than four degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average.’

Really? A temperature rise of three degrees in 50 years or so? Even the highly discredited climate models don’t regard this as realistic. For the Lancet to state this as a bald-faced fact calls into question the objectivity of its contents.

It then proceeds to list all sorts of ways in which health is already being impacted by climate change, including disease transmission, air pollution, extreme weather (which apparently will affect women more – yes, that’s got me and all!), wildfires, heatwaves and goodness knows what else.

Yet, tucked away in Figure 5 is the dirty little secret that mortality rates from climate-related causes have been plummeting since 1990.

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better to know...?

Claim: Air Pollution, Not Greenhouse Gases, Is the Main Cause of Global Warming

by Anthony Watts, October 19, 2018 in WUWT

NOTE: I don’t necessarily agree with this [at all], but I thought it worth exposing – Anthony

In a recent article in the Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International, Transdyne Corporation geoscientist J. Marvin Herndon makes the startling claim that climate scientists, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have been chasing the wrong culprit for global warming and climate change.

From the article, “Fig. 3 is a copy of [Gottschalk’s] Fig. 2 to which has been added three relative-value proxies that represent major activities that produce particulate pollution.”

From the article, “Fig. 3 is a copy of [Gottschalk’s] Fig. 2 to which has been added three relative-value proxies that represent major activities that produce particulate pollution.”

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pollution-contamination

Substantial changes in air pollution across China during 2015 to 2017

by University of Leeds, October 17, 2018 in ScienceDaily

A study by the University of Leeds has examined measurements from more than 1600 locations in China and found that more than 50 per cent of the locations showed a significant decrease in concentrations of sulphur dioxide and fine particulates that make up a large portion of air pollution.

The team used datasets from 2015 to 2017 consisting of hourly assessments of concentrations of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Sulphur Dioxide (SO2), Ozone (O3), and fine particles measuring less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5).

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