A post on Streetsblog references research suggesting that children living within 500 meters of highways have impaired lung function.
A post on Streetsblog references research suggesting that children living within 500 meters of highways have impaired lung function.
5 responses to “Breathing”
[Personally directed comment removed – sorry, Nate we don’t need that.]
I can imagine that. As with a comment I made in a previous post, even in a small town one gets stifled with stinky cars, bad lung reducing waste product, etc.
They barely needed to do a study to tell me that, I already knew for simple observation.
Of course, the good news is that air quality has been getting better for years and pollution from cars will continue to decline for many years to come, as older cars retire.
Soon even buses will get cleaner from their current state of being dirtier than over a hundred cars (see: ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/big_rig_cleanup/rolling-smokestacks-cleaning-up-americas-trucks-and-buses.html
Thanks
JK
JK –
You may have missed this in the other discussion thread, but I noted that it is great that you are now quoting the Union of Concerned Scientists as an authority. Does that mean you are also no longer denying human-caused global warming?
– Bob R.
Bob R. Says: You may have missed this in the other discussion thread, but I noted that it is great that you are now quoting the Union of Concerned Scientists as an authority. Does that mean you are also no longer denying human-caused global warming?
JK: I find myself in agreement with the first half of an article on CO2’s effect on warming found on the pre-eminent PRO MAN- CAUSED global warming web site run in conjunction with Dr. Mann, the climate “scientist” that created the “hockey stick”: (You see, there is this little problem that, in the past, CO2 has risen only AFTER 800 years of warming, making CO2 NOT the cause of warming. Check out this explanation):
At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations. These terminations are pronounced warming periods that mark the ends of the ice ages that happen every 100,000 years or so.
Does this prove that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming? The answer is no.
The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.
The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.
It comes as no surprise that other factors besides CO2 affect climate. Changes in the amount of summer sunshine, due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun that happen every 21,000 years, have long been known to affect the comings and goings of ice ages. Atlantic ocean circulation slowdowns are thought to warm Antarctica, also.
From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a “feedback”, much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.
In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.
from: realclimate.org/index.php?p=13
Of course, another possibility is that CO2 comes out of the oceans as the oceans warm due to something unknown (maybe the sun?)- just like the fizz comes out of a carbonated drink when it gets warm. Occam’s razor anyone?
Thanks
JK