Something in the air: connections between global warming, ozone depletion, POPs and particulates

Ian D. Rae

doi:10.1071/EN08012

FOREWORD

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Something in the air: connections between global warming, ozone depletion, POPs and particulates

Ian D. Rae

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

Royal Australian Chemical Institute Inc., 1/21 Vale Street, North Melbourne, Vic. 3051, Australia. Email: idrae@unimelb.edu.au

Environmental Chemistry 5(1) 1-4 https://doi.org/10.1071/EN08012
Submitted: 3 October 2007 Accepted: 25 January 2008 Published: 22 February 2008

Environmental context. The release of chemical substances to the environment was long seen simply as a way to get rid of them from the immediate vicinity of their generation. Until recently there was little consideration that regional or global problems might result. Further, the various releases were studied by specialists who lacked the breadth of knowledge to understand that many of their specialties were linked and that chemical identity, toxicity, bio-accumulation, regional and global weather patterns and some arcane physical chemistry would need to be involved in a comprehensive analysis of the impact of chemicals on the environment.

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^A This is an important, although seemingly semantic point. The US Supreme Court recently ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had the power to regulate emissions of CO₂ as a pollutant, and Australia has added greenhouse gases, including CO₂, to the National Pollutant Inventory, although there was a strong push from non-believers to name it, in consequence, the National Emissions Inventory.

^B The Dirty Dozen Campaign was launched in June 1985 although only eight persistent pesticides were targeted at that time. Frequent repetition of the ‘Dirty Dozen’ tag, notably by Greenpeace, has entrenched it in the lexicon of environmental taunts.

^C Fugacity is a measure of the chemical potential of a substance in a particular phase, so a difference in fugacity between two phases indicates the tendency of a substance to escape to the phase in which it has lower fugacity – in the case of a POP, escaping from water to air. The measure was first proposed by G.N. Lewis.^[¹⁰^] There is also a useful on-line guide to fugacity on Wikipedia. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugacity, accessed July 2007.

^D Up-to-date information on Antarctic stratospheric ozone concentrations, including graphics, is available at http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/, accessed July 2007.