Everyone is freaking out about air pollution at the moment. Particulates, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, ammonia. Diesel fumes. Buses on Oxford Street. Schools in London apparently handing out backpacks that measure air pollution, like Geiger counters on recovery workers after a nuclear disaster. Is it giving you cancer, is it giving you cardiovascular problems, are women producing fewer eggs, is it making you lose your memory?
And it’s getting worse, apparently. The “death risk from London’s toxic air” – steady on, now – “sees ‘utterly horrifying’ rise for second year running”, shrieked the Evening Standard a week or two ago. According to the paper, the “rate of fatalities linked to breathing in killer particles went up from 6.4 per cent to 6.5 per cent in 2017”, having gone up from 5.6% to 6.4% in the previous year.
Which sounded very strange to me. Because, firstly, that figure seemed very high. If one person in every 15 died from air pollution, I think we’d know about it. Second, I thought that the air was, in general, getting cleaner.
Luckily for me, a new paper is out in the journal Environmental Research Letters which helps make sense of it all. I popped along to a briefing on it on this week.
The paper looked at the health impacts of air pollution with a snapshot every 10 years, starting in 1970 and ending in 2010. It found that for the main pollutants – sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) – things are a lot better.
Emissions have consistently dropped for SO2 and PM2.5, while emissions of NO2 rose slightly until 1990 and have dropped to well below 1970 levels since. Only about 55% of UK air pollution is directly linked to UK emissions (the rest is mainly from nearby countries), but still, the same pattern is visible. This pattern is not true for ozone, which got worse until 2000 and has declined a bit since, but that’s a smaller contributor.
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