Climate change is driving more intense and more frequent heatwaves, which in turn generate a “witch’s brew” of pollutants, threatening the health of humans and all living things, the UN warned Wednesday.
The wildfire smoke that recently suffocated cities from Athens to Latest York would be the most visible sign of air pollution brought on by heatwaves.
But extreme heat also can induce a number of other chemical processes which can be hazardous for human health, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its annual Air Quality and Climate Bulletin.
“Heatwaves worsen air quality, with knock-on effects on human health, ecosystems, agriculture and indeed our each day lives,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a press release.
A latest study by the Energy Policy Institute on the University of Chicago suggested that effective particulate pollution from sources corresponding to vehicle and industrial emissions, sand and wildfires is “the best external threat to public health” worldwide.
“Climate change and air quality can’t be treated individually,” Taalas stressed.
“They go hand-in-hand and have to be tackled together to interrupt this vicious cycle.”
While Wednesday’s report was based on 2022 data, Taalas cautioned that by way of temperatures, “what we’re witnessing in 2023 is much more extreme”.
On Wednesday, the European Union’s Copernicus climate monitor said 2023 was prone to be the most well liked 12 months in human history, after the last three months were the warmest ever recorded.
That, in turn, is potentially bad news for air quality.
“Air quality and climate are interconnected since the chemical species that affect each are linked,” the WMO said.
“The substances answerable for climate change and for the degradation of air quality are sometimes emitted by the identical sources, and… changes in a single inevitably cause changes in the opposite.”
It pointed as an illustration to how the combustion of fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere.
These will not be only heat-trapping greenhouse gases but potential precursors of pollutants corresponding to ozone and nitrate aerosols.
Researchers meanwhile widely agree that climate change is causing more intense and more frequent heatwaves, and that this in turn is resulting in a growing risk of more severe wildfires, WMO said.
“Heatwaves and wildfires are closely linked,” said Lorenzo Labrador, a WMO researcher on the Global Atmosphere Watch network which compiled Wednesday’s Bulletin.
“Smoke from wildfires incorporates a witch’s brew of chemicals that affects not only air quality and health, but in addition damages plants, ecosystems and crops — and results in more carbon emissions and so more greenhouse gases within the atmosphere,” he said within the statement.
He stressed though that “it’s yet too early to say” if 2023 would prove worse by way of atmospheric pollution than last 12 months.
“Though this has been a record-breaking wildfire season, particularly in Europe and western Canada, … the relationships and interactions and chemical processes that link climate change to atmospheric pollution will not be linear,” he told reporters in Geneva.
The 2022 data detailed within the report showed how heatwaves last 12 months triggered wildfires within the Northwestern United States, resulting in unhealthy air.
Soaring temperatures in Europe, accompanied by unusually high amounts of desert dust reaching the continent, meanwhile led to increased concentrations of each particulate matter and ground-level ozone, it said.
Stratospheric ozone helps to shield humans and vegetation from harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.
But at ground level, where it’s generated by a response between traffic fumes and sunlight, the gas attacks lung tissue, causing chest pain, coughing and shortness of breath.
It also reduces crop yield, with ozone-induced losses averaging 4.4-12.4 percent globally for staple food crops, and wheat and soybean losses as high as 15-30 percent in parts of India and China.