By JOSEPH MYLER

mog is a word coined centuries ago

in Britain to describe the ugly

mixture of smoke and fog that sooted the

countryside for miles beyond the environs
of coal-burning London.

As the word is used today, smog
means something much more complex
than a mere mixture of smoke and fog.
It is the photochemical variety that
plagues Los Angeles, for example, on 200
or more days a year. Los Angeles is hem-
med by a bowl of mountains which inter-
feres with air circulation and helps to
maintain stagnant inversions. Ss

One result has been that Los Angeles
leads the nation in pioneering efforts to do
something about air pollution. It has at
least kept the problem ,from getting
worse for the time being. =~

What troubles Los Angeles and prac-
tically every other large city in the world
is a chronic condition which, however
unhealthy it may be, still lies somewhat
this side of disaster.

It was the acute “episodes” that
forced upon.the world some awareness of
what industrial man can to to the atmos-
phere and himself.

As the National Tuberculosis and Res-
piratory Disease Association said in a
tecent publication:

“It was proably the shock of the notor-
ious air pollution disasters. ..that first
stripped the- smokestack of its glory. ..
and turned what was a monument to
progress into a gravestone for the dead.” ©

The chief victims in each disaster
were the elderly with ailments of the
heart and lungs. Weather conditions help-
ed the polluted air to do its deadly work.

Then, as the National Tuberculosis
Association points out, there have been
the ‘‘industrial accidents.” One foggy
morning in November, 1950, in Poza
Rica, Mexico, an accident at a sulfur fac-
tery resulted in a spill of hydrogen sul-
fide. In half an hour enough of this poi-
son, which gives rotten eggs their loath-
some stench, had been spewed into the
air to sicken 320 persons and kill 22.

But there is more to air pollution than
acute, sudden disaster. There is chronic
daily pollution and the chronic daily dam-
age.

The major pollutants are carbon mon-
oxide, sulfur oxides, hydrocarbons, nitro-
gen oxides, particulate matter of every-
thing from aerosols to soot, and what
the official tables call ‘miscellaneous
other.”’

This last category includes lead from
auto fuel, fluorides, beryllium, arsenic,
asbestos, many other chemicals, and a
host of pesticides, herbicides and fung-
icides.

- The major polluters are autos and
trucks and jet airplanes, power plants,
space heating, refuse disposal dumps and
incinerators, and various industries —
pulp and paper mills, iron and steel mills,
oil refineries, smelters, and chemical
plants.

Togéther in the United States they
throw 143 million tons a year of ‘‘waste’’
into the air and, say the experts, the auto-
mobile is the greatest villain of all.

According to a recent Senate report

the auto accounts for at least 50 percent -

of total U.S. air pollution, 85 percent of
Pollution in the big urban areas, 90 per-
cent of all carbon monoxide pollution. ©

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—APRIL 3, 1970—Page 4

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In all, the auto exhausts more than 90
million tons of pollutants into the air
each year — twice as much as any other
fouler of the atmosphere. — .

If none of the fuel burned’ by man con-
tained impurities, such as sulfur in coal
and oil, and if all of it underwent com-
plete combusion, the byproducts would be
simply water and carbon dioxide, neither
of them harmful within limits and neither
listed as contaminants.

According to Dr. LaMont C. Cole of
Cornell University, half of all the fuel
ever burned by man has been burned in
the past 50 years. Since such fuels as
coal and petroleum are ‘‘a non-renewable
resource,”’, this means that man is opera-
ting an exploitive economy that ‘‘will
destroy itself if continued long enough.”

Moreover, ‘his dumping of carbon di-

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SMOG
THE KILLER

oxide into the air, 6 billion tons a year,
threatens to change the climate and may
indeed already have changed it.

It also endangers the atmospheric
oxygen balance which has_ sustained

. life on earth since nature invented photo-

synthesis, the process by which, with the
help of sunlight, plants take up carbon
dioxide and liberate oxygen.

Carbon dioxide is transparent to sun-
light but tends to absorb heat radiated
back toward space from earth. This is
what meteorologists call the ‘‘green-
house effect.”’ It has been estimated that

‘the planet’s average temperature would

be 20 degrees cooler if there were no
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It also has been estimated that man
with his burning has increased the air’s
carbon dioxide content 10 to 15 per-

71395

cent in the past century and will have

increased it 25 percent by the year 2,000.
A worldwide warming trend was
noted from 1900 to 1950. Among the ef-
fects was to move the crop line 50 to 100
miles north on the Canadian prairies.

-. Mocking birds, once common only in the

South, extended their range and _ their
sleep-shattering song to New York.
But .this trend apparently has been

halted and even reversed by the other. |

things human beings are doing to the air.
Dust, smoke, and ‘other particulates,
particularly over the world’s cities, are
cooling the planet by reflecting sunlight
away from the ground.

Doubling atmospheric. carbon di-
oxide could increase the earth’s average
surface temperature nearly seven
degrees. But only a 25 percent increase
in dust, smoke, liquid particles_ could
lower it by the same amount.

Dr. Reid A. Bryson, University of
Wisconsin climatologist, believes the
veil of pollution hanging over the world
already has changed its climate.

DDT dust from farm fields has been
carried by winds to all corners of the
earth. Soviet cities have increased smoki-

pr
te

ness over the Caucasus 19-fold since’1930." *

Turbidity of the air over Washington,-
D.C. has gone up 57 percent in recent

‘years. :

Over Switzrland, Bryson says, it has
jumped 88 percent. In the decade betweén
1957 and 1967 there was a 30 percent in-
crease of dustiness over the Pacific
Ocean. Smoky days in Chicago rose from
20 a year before 1930 to 320 in 1948.

A blue haze, probably from agricul-

tural burning, hangs over Brazil, South- —

east ‘Asia, and Central Africa. A brown
haze of dust from soils made barren by
man broods. over much of Africa, Ara-
bia, India, Pakistan and China. : 5
The sometimes not so nebulous veil
is global in extent. The jet airplane is

. helping to thicken it. According to Prof.

W. Frank Blair of the Wniversity of
Texas at Austin, the city of Dallas is vis-
ible from transport planes many miles
away ‘because, in part, of: the exhausts
of jet aircraft. . aS

Jets discharge tons of particulate mat-
ter into the air every day. Their contrails,
says Bryson of Wisconsin, trigger form-
ation of high altitude cirrus clouds which
tend to alter. climate by reflecting sun-
light back to space.

At a time when much is being said
about intentional modification of the;
weather, which is a long way off, clim-:
atologists are worried most by inadver-
tent changes. This is because they can’t
really guess the ultimate results.

Suppose the greenhouse effect kept
piling up. The ice caps would melt and the
sea level would rise, perhaps as much as
400 feet. This would drown not only
coastal communities but vast low lying
inland areas. It also might-have the ef-

‘fect, since the increase in;water vapor

would make snowfall more abundant,
of starting a new ice age. 2k

Suppose, on the other hand, that rising
turbidity produced an offsetting world-
wide drop in temperature. This, too,
might start the glaciers crawling south-
ward again.

Whichever way inadvertent weather

modification goes, Bryson says, “‘it is
inconceivalbe that the change would be
beneficial.” lury gst
— United Press International

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