Air Pollution Problems with respect to atmosphere

It would not be incorrect to acknowledge the coverage of air pollution that ubiquitously involves all sorts of impurities like smoke, mist, dust, corrosive gases, and toxic compounds. Air pollution never emerged into a serious problem until the last 200 years which sufficiently let us admit the reasons for the growing population and industrialization producing vast quantities of contaminants. According to statistics every year in the United States 150 million metric tons of air pollutants are released into the atmosphere by various human activities. The report by WHO (World Health Organization) conforms to the statistics by revealing a figure of 5, 00,000 people that die every year due to exposure to airborne particles. That does not include carbon dioxide wastes.

Most of the problems arise in industrial and traffic-congested urban areas, with local and urban air pollution that does not even remain the indoor air pollution behind. The reasons behind such pollution are those pollutants like nitrogen and sulphur compounds, ozone and oxidants that are easily transported and spread by winds over larger regions. Different types of air pollution problems are categorized among which the basic three types range in between various levels and extents of air pollution.

Type I problems of air pollution targets at the lowest level i.e., it takes into account all the indoor air pollution that takes place in houses, buildings, in and around factories, at the local level or inside urban cities. Type II problems occur at some larger level - the regional level i.e., all the wastes, ozone and pollutants that flow or washed out from industrial areas to other regions are referred to as Type II problems. Type II problems caters all the catastrophic problems that record global and hemispheric air pollution along with their possible consequences of climate changes record over periods of decades and centuries. So far the best example of Type III is the global warming problem that is increasing its capacity by highly concentrated CO 2 and other greenhouse gases.

Each of the three types of problems has three components or characteristics that measure their intensity. (1) Sources that generate air pollutants (2) The atmosphere that supports all sorts of chemical and physical processing (3) Those elements on the ground which upon reaching air pollutants reacts. These characteristics are the estimators that measure the emissions of pollutant class with respect to analyzing from a variety of sources with the help of chemical combustion techniques and air pollution control technology.

We have learned from the coordination of Mother Nature and history that the problems of environmental pollution are not that easy to solve, even if we aim at fixing it. This can be seen from the historical example when the first wave of air pollution problem arise due to stationary combustion of fossil fuels, and we fixed that in the developed nations with tall chimneys, desulphurisation and natural gas. However it is useless even to concern about the problem as the developing nations are still in the process of raising their standards of living rather than environmental protection. The second time it was realized that the problem was mainly due to motor vehicles in urban areas, at least it could be compensated while fixing with better engines, quality fuels and catalytic converters. There is still work going on in the field of air pollution in developing nations. Now, the foremost threat with no precise solution is climate change, which we have seen is due to cultural aspects which are much more fundamental than the pollutants that we have dealt with previously. For this purpose, the only measure to reduce the environmental threat is to infuse a less energy intensive society along with the mutual coordination of developed and developing nations.