Carbon Monoxide is produced by combustion of fossil fuels, gas engines, wood fires, coal power plants etc. When you breathe it in, it bonds with the hemoglobin in your blood, which prevents it from effectively bonding with oxygen to oxygenate your cells, essentially suffocating you no matter how much air you're breathing into your lungs.
I bring this up because according to the EPA we (the United States) pump roughly 214
billion pounds of the stuff into the air every year.
Is it just a coincidence that the number one complaint doctors hear is exhaustion and tiredness? Why shouldn't we be tired, we're being suffocated by carbon monoxide emissions.
Global warming, even if it's really happening, is a red herring against environmentalism. The fact of the matter is even if global warming were a hoax, it still would be a good idea to poison ourselves a little less by reducing carbon emissions.
In places like LA there are now smog alerts. Meaning they warn you on TV that it's better to recycle the air in your home than it is to go outside, because the air outside is too toxic.
Come on people!
Comments (51)
I agree. Those smog alerts in LA have been there for years. I grew up in California and smog alerts were common in the summer months in the LA area. You can actually see the effects of smog in the mountains around LA when it clears out.
Air inversions go on in Denver too thanks to the way the city lays between the mountains and the plains. Air pollution isn't going to get better either.
I like breathing...
I'm going to second Rain on this one; I rather enjoy inhaling oxygen.
I know that the cancer rates are higher in cities where the air is dirtier. L.A. being amongst the worst.
im moving to montana >_>;
You said it.
@musterion99 - Not to mention other chronic breathing conditions like asthma and worse.
Gross. And I agree that even if global warming is a hoax, which, I don't believe it is, (and I'm not saying that because the media is telling me to, I'm saying that because I've got a degree in environmental geology and it's not a made up thing here) we should still not be throwing up chemicals in the air that aren't supposed to be there. I KNOW based on my environmental chemistry course that there is too much CO2 in the air. Too much. Yeah, it's a naturally occurring material in our atmosphere, but too much of a good thing is bad. And there's too much. And it's letting keeping in the UV rays in the CO2 spectrum when it should be going out.
But don't get me ranting on whether global warming is real.
It should be enough of an alarm that there is that much CO in the atmosphere and it's causing us to stay out of the "fresh air" Not cool.
It's scary to know that my kids are going to grow up in this place... if it lasts that long.
Eek...that's nasty.
I don't really think the whole carbon emissions causing warming thing is real because the earth is getting cooler...but I do agree that yes, carbon monoxide is gross and we need cleaner air!
@x_Butterflies_and_Hurricanes_x - Yeah, even too much water is toxic, you can die of water toxicity. Your brain needs some form of sugar to function, but too much sugar will put you in a coma.
I assume you saw crazy congresswoman on the news saying in congress that CO2 isn't bad because it occurs naturally (like you know, cyanide and mercury and fire).
@XDaemonessX - It will. Worst case scenario something we do kills most people, then nature recovers and we rebuild.
@Charity_the_So_Called_Artist - My understanding is that global warming is manmade, but that it can be overridden by things like the cycles of the sun which have more impact. So if the sun is running cooler than usual now, maybe we should work on reconfiguring our atmosphere before it starts running hot again, no?
@agnophilo - no never saw that crazy congress woman. That is a sign that people are not at all educated on the subject of global warming. Way sad people like that are running our country... wth. It's almost as stupid as saying one chemical is only one atom away from another chemical... that doesn't mean ANYTHING! Na and Cl are both toxic by themselves, and put them together and you have... whoa... salt. Which we eat every day. Stupid argument.
And yes, too much of anything can pretty much be bad for you.
You are exaggerating the issue quite a bit. The mass of atmosphere around the Earth is roughly five quadrillion tons---5,000,000,000,000,000 tons---which makes those emissions less than 0.000002% of the atmosphere, or 0.02 ppm. A dangerous dose of CO per lungful of air is about 600 ppm, or 600 microliters per liter. These emissions represent only 20 nanoliters per liter, or 1/10,000 of that. (In other words, we could continue this emission rate for 10,000 years without reabsorption and we'd only barely face dangerous doses of CO). Anthropogenic climate change is the real issue here.
Nice, even if some people don't believe in global warming, all this crap we're sending into the environment can't be good anyway
I agree completely. That's why I think the "cap & trade" legislation being considered is ridiculous. It will basically allow companies to dump as much toxic pollution into our air as they want, so long as they have the money to buy the "credits" to allow them to do so. It would be far better, IMHO, to limit how much can be dumped - period.
@x_Butterflies_and_Hurricanes_x - Yeah I know. And pure sodium is explosive when it comes in contact with water. Pure potassium bursts into flames when hydrated, but in banana form it's all good : D
The crazy congresswoman chick that lectured congress that CO2 was good because it occurs naturally is the same one that said the media should do an expose' on which members of congress are pro-america and which ones are anti-america, and said that people need to be "armed and dangerous" against obama's policies because conservatives are "behind enemy lines".
She's a freak on wheels this chick.
@pnrj - The thing is when you have 10 million cars running every day in a local area, the emissions aren't instantaneously diluted and dispersed throughout the entire atmosphere of the earth. Thus smog alerts and the like. Not to mention that carbon monoxide is almost certainly heavier than the bulk of the atmosphere and thus would not dissipate into a great deal of it, but would instead stay mostly down here with us.
@radicalramblings - Actually it's a good thing, just not perfect. It creates a cash incentive for limiting carbon emission which means there's money in developing technologies to do this. Conservatives are actually right that the free market does things way more efficiently and better than government, the thing is creating free market incentives by tax rates and grants and such is how you actually get anything done with the free market.
And radicalramblings, you are yet another person who banned me from their blog, yet enjoys total freedom of expression on mine.
indeed its a shame, and the worst part is that in addition to us destroying the air, the average person has a lung/breathing capacity that is significantly lower than what it should be due the fact that that most people do not know how to correctly breathe (forgot the exact statistics of it but I just recently learned it in Human development, and being a martial artists who does know how to breathe, I can say that I've met about 10-20 people in my entire life who do breathe efficiently.) Moral of Story: GOOD GOING EARTHLINGS, YOU SUCK, STOP F'ING YOURSELF. maybe if we're lucky nuclear winter will hit before global warming? lol
Have more house plants. BTW my husband is currently reading Michael Crichton's State of Fear. It talks about global warming.
@Nine_Star_Lotus - Exactly how do you breathe properly? I thought it was fairly simple. In. Out. In.
Wait, don't tell me.
Out?
: D
@FalconBridge - Yeah good idea. I don't even have one. I vent the air but I live near a fairly busy street so big deal.
its kinda like sex ^^, in and out is good, but it goes so much deeper! lol
@Nine_Star_Lotus - Still gonna need an explanation. Got a link or something?