In what apparently is first-of-its-kind research, scientists say air pollution can be the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes - and if you already smoke, it is the equivalent of another packs. The study is important enough that it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. JAMA has long been an arbiter of what is important in health research.
Man covers his eyes as he looks out across the water.
Taken on Sunday August 29, 2010 at Big Pond.Until recently we didn’t know how much plastic was piling up around us. When we found out, the picture wasn’t pretty.
A bleak new federal report found that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to levels the world has not seen in at least 800,000 years, highlighting the irreversible and mounting deleterious effects of human activity on the planet, as ABC News reported.
Global carbon dioxide concentrations reached a record of 407.4 parts per million during 2018, the study found. That is 2.4 ppm greater than 2017 and "the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800,000 years," the report said, according to CNN.
It wasn't just the amount of carbon dioxide that set record levels. Other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide also continued a rapid rise into the atmosphere. Together, the global warming power of greenhouse gases was 43 percent stronger than in 1990, according to the State of the Climate report released Monday by the American Meteorological Society, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information.