NPR – The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to tighten the ozone standard for smog will have an unfortunate side effect: Because of a quirk of atmospheric chemistry, those measures will hasten global warming.There’s no question that smog is a hazard that deserves attention. Lydia Wegman of the EPA says the new ozone limits would have significant health benefits.Less smog means fewer asthma attacks, fewer kids in the hospital, fewer days of lost school, “and we also believe that we can reduce the risk of early death in people with heart and lung disease,” she says.Here’s the tough part: The way many states and localities will reduce smog is by cracking down on the chemicals that produce ozone. And those include nitrogen oxides, or NOx. Read Article
Ed – Put it this way – would you rather have vastly increased risk of heart disease, lung disease, infant mortality, cancer and asthma OR a theoretical possibility that global temperatures could be fractionally increased, but still well within the range that the Earth’s temperature has been within the last 10,000 years?
