Concerns over man’s impact on the environment, especially the atmosphere, started long before global warming became front-page news. Evidence from Greece suggests that problems due to outdoor polluted air were recognized at least 2400 years ago. Successive written accounts of air pollution occurred in different countries through the following two millennia until measurements, from the eighteenth century onwards, showed the growing scale of poor air quality in urban centers and close to industry.
Urban Air Pollution
As automobile use grew in the 20th century and minimally regulated industrial facilities continued to pollute the nation’s air, the health risk of urban air pollution increased. A brown haze, increasingly common in metropolitan areas, and medical facilities filled with sufferers of respiratory illnesses was hard to ignore. By the 1960s, air pollution was a proven health hazard that killed. This contributed to the birth of the environmental movement and observation of the first Earth Day in 1970. In that same year, US President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
With an abundance of competent representatives in government, Congress passed groundbreaking legislation that would eventually accomplish the goal of dramatically improving air quality in cities across the US, starting with the first major Clean Air Act in 1970. It required a 90 percent emissions reduction from new automobiles by 1975.
As an asthma sufferer since childhood living in the Chicago area, the improvement in air quality from 1970 to the time I left home in 1978 was a welcome relief. A short-lived relief since I would soon face the worst air pollution of my life living in a small city in Colorado suffering the environmental scourge of wood smoke.
While Increasingly stringent emission requirements dramatically improved air quality across the US, two more atmospheric issues appeared. Destruction of the ozone layer and manmade induced global warming.
Ozone Hole
The next major atmospheric concern was the growth of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Ozone (O3) shields Earth from ultraviolet (UV) radiation harmful to life. While manmade compounds, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), were identified for their ability to destroy O3 molecules in the 1970s, it took a junior British Researcher’s review of data showing a dramatic loss in atmospheric ozone in 1985 to raise awareness of this issue. The response to a future potential serious health and economic crisis, if left unchecked, is legendary for its speed and effectiveness, as explained in Ozone Hole.
Climate Change
Today climate change (global warming) has replaced the ozone layer destruction as the top worldwide environmental threat. The reporting and response to an ecological issue requiring the same math-based facts and data type of response implemented when the growing hole in the ozone layer was discovered could not have been more different.
A greater warming trend, (partially driven by human activities) which followed a cooling trend that brought fears of a potential return of the ice age, was labeled an existential risk to mankind’s survival by voices amplified by a media looking for sensationalism. With healthy scientific debate replaced by censorship (similar to the COVID response) some questioned manmade caused climate change. Since censorship is the first sign of insufficient data to support a belief, skepticism to the media blitz of doomsday climate scenarios, is a reasonable response for critical thinkers.
Climate Change addresses skepticism with basic physics, logic, and measured data to address the validity of manmade global warming.