Warning: The Air You Breathe is Hazardous to Your Health!

A few years ago, the United Nations sounded a worldwide alarm over the dangerous pace that the earth’s climate is deteriorating into. It pinpointed the culprit as carbon emissions from humans and man-made structures and machines. It warned that if nothing was done about the situation, it would lead to catastrophic proportions by 2050.

Stark evidence of this dangerous emission level is in the air you breathe. If you live in the city, you are an unwilling sufferer. While the air’s composition in terms of the atomic elements does not change with pollution, the air consistency or the weight of air per unit volume is heavily diluted with pollutants identified as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and dust particles that are causing tremendous damage to people’s health.

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In most cities nowadays, incidence of pollution is visible in the horizon. If you wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning, you would see a cloud of toxic dust-like smog hanging just about a few centimeters above your head. If this cloud disappears as morning progresses, you can be sure it’s either you and the rest of the inhabitants and other living things have inhaled it into the depths of their systems, or the cloud has settled on the surface of the earth after the moisture has evaporated into the air.

In most recent cases, tests on air quality would show alarming increases in the quantity of almost invisible solid or liquid particles suspended in the air and seen as smog at a distance. These suspended particles would come mostly from vehicle emissions and consist of carbon monoxide and sulphur molecules mixed with dusts.

The World Bank 2007 reports that air pollution accounts for much of the deterioration of the environment. It points to carbon from vehicles, from machines that emit carbons through usage, from factories through the air and through the liquid and solid wastes that they release.

Air pollution has also been identified as responsible for alarming increases in the incidence of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in population centers all over the world. In most of these places, ailments commonly contracted are asthma, lung diseases, heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

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World environmentalists and health advocates have been campaigning vigorously for the adoption of carbon-lessening or carbon-eradicating measures such as energy-operated vehicles and other pollution-free technologies to mitigate the effects of pollution on people and the environment.

Climate change and environmental pollution should be priority concerns of every person on this planet. You can make a difference in this grand effort to make the air we breathe as fresh as we want it to be. It may not be instantly fresh, but we can begin making it so. Here are two suggestions. One, make a personal effort to reduce the carbon in the air by engaging in such activities as planting something green, or reducing or stopping smoke emissions; and two, be an active member of an advocacy group promoting green living.