Pollution in the Air

Problems, Policies and Priorities

R. S. Scorer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000699180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

Originally published in 1973, this book has enduring relevance in the 21st Century. Asking difficult questions it encourages the reader to think about the individual and societal changes which are needed to protect the planet and the health and prosperity of future generations. Despite the title of the book, it covers air, water and land pollution, evolution, the industrial revolution, the growth of technology, climatology and meteorology, pollution legislation and the economics of a green economy.

1 The Need for Air Pollution

‘The atmosphere is the bad breath of life.’

An atmosphere of pollution

Every breath pollutes the air. Every corpse or decaying leaf emits poisonous odours. Now that man, animals, and vegetation have been joined by cars, ships, aeroplanes, houses and a host of industries as polluters of the air we are worried. Yet if we look at our world we find that in one sense our whole atmosphere is pollution. We need to accept this viewpoint because although our way of life has introduced polluters on a quite new scale in this century, the atmosphere is not one of absolute purity. The one we are fouling is an atmosphere whose very composition has been determined over geological time by the unwanted emissions of life and death on earth.

The lifeless planets

The Earth’s atmosphere is unlike that of any other planet. The Moon and Mercury have no atmosphere because their gravitational pull is not enough to hold gases to their surfaces. Mars has a very tenuous layer of gases on its surface, with very little water and other compounds of hydrogen, and its winter polar ‘ice’ cap is probably made of carbon dioxide crystals (’dry ice’) such as we use in cold boxes.

Venus has succeeded in retaining about a hundred times as much atmosphere as the Earth even though it is smaller, and the result is that it is very hot on the solid surface of the planet. It is too hot for any life to be there. It is also very dark because the whole planet is completely covered with clouds. We know from this fact that the clouds are not made of water like clouds on Earth, but are composed of ammonia or methane or some other substance which does not condense easily into droplets of rain like water does.

Jupiter and Saturn are so large that they have much denser atmospheres than Venus. Jupiter in particular cannot possibly support any life because the temperature and pressure at its solid surface are much too high, and it must be very dark there indeed. The outer planets – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – are very much further away from the sun, and are probably far too cold to be able to support life unless, like Jupiter seems to have, they too have great internal sources of heat.

The Earth’s atmosphere was not created as it now is. There are carbonates in the rocks which contain a much greater total amount of oxygen than the atmosphere. All the chalk and a large part of the limestone and coral were created by living organisms which must have extracted the oxygen from the atmosphere; thus there must have been much more gaseous oxygen or carbon dioxide at some stage in geological history.

Nitrogen now composes four-fifths of the total mass of the atmosphere, yet there are thunderstorms and other mechanisms which cause It to combine with oxygen and ultimately become nitrates in the ground. It is life that has filled the air with nitrogen, and our atmosphere is quite different from those of other planets in this respect. When life began we do not know how much of the world’s nitrogen was gas, but it was almost certainly very much less than today. When we learn about nitrogen in chemistry lessons we find that it is a rather inactive gas, yet all the nitrogen in the atmosphere must have been part of living substance at some time in the past, and cycling continues as fast nowadays as ever.

Carbon dioxide is only about one-two-hundredth of the atmosphere, and water vapour about one-thousandth of its mass, yet both these substances are passing all the time in enormous quantities through animal and vegetable forms of life. One of the reasons for believing that life does not exist on the other planets is that their atmospheres are composed to a much greater extent of the compounds of carbon and hydrogen such as methane and ammonia. Perhaps Venus and Jupiter are destined many millions of millions of years hence to grow life forms which will transform their atmospheres into living media with ever-changing beauty in their skies, at a time when our own planet is in its final evolutionary decline, but in terms of human life as far ahead as we can imagine they are dead planets.

The ocean contains several million times as much water as the atmosphere, and dissolved in it is much more carbon dioxide than exists in the atmosphere; there is more life in the ocean and more energy from the sun used in the ocean to create protein than on the land. The ocean is the main reservoir of biological activity which has made our atmosphere what it now is. No other planet has an ocean, or even a body of water that could be called a sea, or lake, or even a pond. At best Mars may have slight occasional dew, while Jupiter and Venus are too hot to have liquid water on their surfaces. Probably Jupiter’s two largest satellites Ganymede and Callisto are almost hopeful as homes for life and I will leave them to the optimistic imagination of science-fiction writers. They will be in the news before long when space probes are improved but I fear they will be as barren as Mars and Mercury.

The living atmosphere

The Earth is a living treasure in an almost barren universe. That we humans are the latest product of its evolution does not entitle us to think of it as ours, to be done with as we will. We are but one element in the continual birth and death of species. For us to be able to live as we do in an atmosphere which offers such great beauty and opportunities there needs to continue the same old exchange of gases as has gone on for thousands of millions of years. If we upset the continual cycling of the atmosphere which is not only the source of the needs of all life forms but also the main depository of their pollution we shall find our own lives in danger. This could happen if we become too numerous or if we add to the biological cycles such a large tonnage of industrial effluents, the by-products of our affluence, that they begin to change the composition of the atmosphere and ocean.

Some pollutants which we produce may turn out to be good for our world, others may be terribly destructive. The possibilities for changing the situation for the better arise mainly from cultivation, using the cycles as they now exist. But at the same time our industry and cities are feeding ever-greater amounts of new and often obnoxious substances into the air and water and it is these we need to watch and control.

Because it is continually being renewed by life forms and cleansed by rain, the atmosphere has a great capacity for recovery from almost any damage we do to it. It is this very fact which has made the evolution of life forms so productive and viable on Earth. Nature is continually experimenting with thunderstorms and volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, and so on, and nothing we have done artificially so far compares in magnitude with what has happened naturally. Our environment is not fragile, it is very resilient and powerful indeed. We need have no fear that the weather will suddenly turn sour on us, for long before that could happen we would have killed the life in our seas upon which we depend for our food, and the malodorous coasts would long since have forced us to change our ways. The atmosphere will be the last natural force we might damage because it is so full of motion.

Where then are the dangers?

What are smogs?

The air circulates so rapidly and is cleansed so efficiently most of the time that we get used to putting smoke and various gases into it and they simply ‘go away’. But sometimes part of the atmosphere becomes stagnant for a few days, and the pollution there begins to build up into a pall, and this we call a smog. We don’t like smog because we are used to pleasant skies, and yet most of us survive them without scars. Only a few very old or young or infirm are killed, and these are few compared with the daily slaughter on the roads or the terrible death rate from smoking diseases. Even suicide is a cause of more deaths than air pollution. Smogs are not a catastrophe for us comparable with war. Smogs will not seriously hurt humanity directly.

Nevertheless smogs and other kinds of air pollution cause much squalor and unpleasantness in cities. They also do very serious damage to vegetation. Insects and birds then begin to be harmed, and all biological activity in the immediate environment of the cities producing the pollution is lowered, and begins to move away. California, which used to be a land where spinach, beans and pine trees grew in great abundance, is now having progressively to give up cultivating them. Soon the peaches and figs will suffer, too, and this wealthy community will find itself living in a barren land instead of in a green paradise, importing its food from territory not yet spoiled.

Cities have always done this. The ground is paved over and built upon; industries take the place of grassland, horses and birds gradually move away except for the parasitic pigeons and starlings who like a city’s winter warmth, and have learned to join with man in ruthless greed. But a city is a deliberate construction, and we hope it will remain surrounded by farms where the natural cycles are exploited, and indeed encouraged, by careful husbandry. A state or country which turns Itself into a city in this sense must depend on another part of the world for its sustenance, and the world, being finite in size, can only support a certain number of such states. We have not yet reached that number, but the growth of industry and population is making us approach it at an ever-increasing rate. The trouble arises because we have a commercial and economic way of life which is dependent on growth, and unless we take steps to slow down growth we shall find that when the world is full we have no political and social organisation capable of governing our people without growth. Anarchy will then be the first catastrophe that will befall our race.

The expansion of water pollution

The second danger lies in the fact that rivers, lakes, and seas do not circulate as rapidly as the air. Consequently, where too much pollution is emitted it overwhelms the biological mechanisms which digest it normally, and the forms of life in the water are changed, and changed for the worse.

When life forms are destroyed, their environment is quickly changed because they are not there to keep it in its original form, and the result is that it is very difficult for them to return. The polluted areas therefore tend to expand and the pollution is not digested in the areas where the old life has been destroyed. Around Japan and in the Baltic Sea, the polluted areas are rapidly joining up and the fisheries progressively being ruined. Since the present trends make it certain that humanity will make more pollution every year, the prospect is that a very much larger area of sea will be rendered useless before anything we may try to do will have any effect at all. To reduce pollution of the sea is therefore a matter of desperate urgency.

Since it is the high concentrations of water pollution that are harmful we may have to use the atmosphere as the main vehicle for carrying away unwanted material. The products will then be distributed over a very large area in small concentrations which can be digested by nature. This we already do when we incinerate our rubbish. We turn it into gases and fine dust particles and the atmosphere ‘carries it away’. Because our burial grounds have coffins and products of the stonemason’s ‘art’ to digest as well as human bodies, they are extremely inefficient at their job, and for this reason we are having to use cremation. Some cities find that the easiest way to dispose of the branches cut from the trees in their streets and parks is to burn them, and this has to be done in an expensive incinerator, not in bonfires, in order to avoid obnoxious pollution by smoke.

The destruction of species

Insecticides are a different problem altogether. They have become a dangerous form of pollution because although they are very well dispersed by the wind and by being washed down rivers into the sea, certain forms are removed from the water by plankton and other low forms of life and not deposited in the mud of the sea bed. The plankton are eaten by fishes which in turn are eaten by other fishes which in turn are eaten by yet other fishes or by sea birds or by man. These last forms of animal life are therefore described as being at the end of the food chain or at the top of the ecological pyramid, and it is in them that some of these poisonous substances become concentrated.

It is possible that some animal forms may be made extinct as a result of this because they succumb to the poison when they have consumed enough of it. There is no indication that man will suffer this fate because of any poison already loosed into the ocean but this is partly because the food we eat is subject to continual chemical analysis and we are warned in time not to eat the animal that precedes us in the food chain as soon as it becomes dangerous: we eat something else instead.

Nevertheless, it is very bad to allow any form of food to become inedible. In the Baltic Sea, mercury compounds have been found in dangerously high concentrations in some fish, and the sale of them for food has had to be prohibited. The mercury originated as a fungicide used in the logging industry to protect timber from deterioration before it reached the sawmill.

But life forms are to be treasured not merely as food. Their genetic heritage is the accumulated wealth of thousands upon thousands of years of evolution and it can never be re-created by man. By comparison with the greatest works of art they are priceless treasures, and should not be allowed to die because of man’s carelessness. Such a death would be perhaps more tragic than the extinction of the tiger or the great auk which, though noble in themselves, are not the particular friends of man that the fishes are which supply one of our main sources of food.

Sulphur: food or poison?

How our attitude towards a form of air pollution can change is well illustrated by the case of sulphur dioxide. A whiff of it in the chemistry laboratory will set anyone coughing, and it can kill although it scarcely ever does. Concentrations which animals can tolerate can do serious damage to some forms of plant life. On the other hand, it is widely used as a food preservative because it prevents the growth of undesirable bacteria without being in the least poisonous. It was once commonly used as a disinfectant after a room had been occupied by a person with an infectious disease; the room was sealed, a sulphur candle burned in it, and the sulphur dioxide so produced was left for a day or two to do its work.

Sulphur dioxide became known as a pollutant because sulphur is contained in almost all coal and oil. The pungent gas put out by a coke brazier is sulphur dioxide, and we keep our distance but do not worry about breathing because, even if it makes us cough, we soon recover. It turned out to be fairly easy to measure chemically, and so there are now instruments established all over the industrialised world, recording the amount of sulphur dioxide in the air. It became a measure of the degree of pollution.

We do not use carbon dioxide or water vapour as measures of pollution because there is so much of both of them in the atmosphere already that we could not attribute them to the pollution source with any certainty, even though they are the two most plentiful components of what comes out of any chimney (except of course for the nitrogen, all of which went into the furnace from the air in the first place).

In any normal school or college textbooks about the air, sulphur dioxide is not listed as a normal component of it. It is regarded as a pollutant. But it is essential to all forms of vegetation, unless they are fed with artificial fertiliser, for there to be some sulphur dioxide in the air. All forms of life need sulphur. Sulphur dioxide is so quickly removed from the air that it is not regarded as a genuine component: its residence time is very short compared with other gaseous components. Provided that we do not anywhere produce concentrations of it that it might do harm, we can think of sulphur dioxide in the same way as carbon dioxide and water vapour. All we have done is to feed more of each of these substances into the natural cycle which already had a very large turnover. No harm is done until we increase the turnover so much that we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Need for Air Pollution
• 2 Cleansing the Air
• 3 The Further Evolution of Industrial Man
• 4 Local Air Pollution
• 5 A Theory of Anti-pollution Law
• 6 The Cultivation of the World
• 7 Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch…
• Index