Professors claim worldwide health may be improved by reducing greenhouse gases

Friday, November 27, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: greenhouse gases, air pollution, health news

(NaturalNews) Two professors from the University of California, Berkeley, have published a series of six papers outlining the health benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They claim the risk of developing health problems, especially among those in third-world countries, can be greatly reduced by a reducing environmental pollutants.

Professors Kirk R. Smith and Michael Jarrett presented their findings at a press conference which included representatives from the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the National Toxicology Program.

Four major areas of emissions that were examined in the papers included household energy use, food and agriculture production, transportation, and electricity generation. Pollution from fossil fuel energy production, for instance, was cited as a primary contributor to high ground-level ozone levels and harmful concentrations of fine particulate matter in the atmosphere.

The idea with the biggest potential impact is the "150-million-stove" program that aims to replace Indian solid-fuel household stoves with low-emission stoves. According to the study, the 10-year program could potentially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the hundreds of millions of tons as well as prevent the premature deaths of two million Indian people.

Another issue addressed was "black carbon", a greenhouse gas pollutant that results from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Though implicated in causing potential health problems, black carbon has a life-span of roughly a week. For this reason, climate change experts emphasize that a reduction in black carbon emissions would have a considerable impact with immediate positive results.

Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

Even when dismissing the entire argument about global warming and climate change being caused by CO2 emissions, there's no debate about the fact that burning fossil fuels causes atrocious local air quality. As this report rightly points out, many millions of lives could be saved each year by finding cleaner alternatives to household stoves and combustion engines.

Electric cars, for example, may be one pathway toward cleaning up air in our world's cities, but transitioning from combustion engines to electric motors will likely take decades -- and that's after major breakthroughs in power storage technologies are accomplished.

While the entire debate about global warming has shifted recently due to the discovery of stolen emails from climate change scientists, there's no questioning that we could all breathe a little better if our local air quality was improved, and that can only be accomplished through programs that help replace dirty heat (and combustion) sources with cleaner technologies.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-...