No Air Pollution Just As Bad As Heavy Pollution

Like many people growing up in the 50s and 60s I can clearly remember having to walk home from school many times in what were known as “pea soup” fog conditions.

These blankets of incredibly heavy smog would often cover the U.K.’s and Europe’s major cities.

These days school kids can walk home without ever encountering conditions where you can see no more than two or three yards while walking, and without having a scarf wrapped tightly across your nose and mouth, which was covered in black soot by the time you got home.

In the so-called ‘Great Smog’ of 1952, 4000 people died in London from the effects of the choking pollution.

In an odd side effect, scientists are saying that this much clearer air, free of the heavy pollution mostly caused by burning coal, is in fact adding to the speed with which the climate of Europe is changing.

One effect of the clouds of coal soot billowing into the air was to reflect the solar radiation back into space keeping the surface of the earth much cooler.

Scientists have been checking through records produced by nearly 350 meteorological stations spread across continental Europe and discovered that “horizontal visibility” has increased, meaning that the incidence of all kinds of fog and other haze has halved since the beginning of the 80’s.

What this means, according to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), is that the lack of pollution is allowing more sunlight to get through to the ground, heating up the average temperature and contributing to global warming.

Dr Vautard, a scientist at the AEC, says that somewhere between 10 to 20% of the warming over the continent has been caused by more sunlight getting through because of this lack of heavy pollution.

According to these findings we have a no win situation where heavy pollution is causing greenhouse gases to increase, while removing the pollution is allowing the sun’s heat to more easily breach the thinner ozone layer.