If I said “ozone layer,” it would be perfectly normal if your reply were, “I thought that we fixed that in the 1980’s.” The fact is, repair work on the ozone layer high in the atmosphere is progressing at a tolerable pace because of the (mostly) global ban on nasty substances known as CFCs.
No, when I refer to the ozone layer now, I regard urban haze and its effects both on natural vistas, such as at Grand Canyon National Park, and the way in which plants (especially prairie grasses and trees) consume the byproducts of the carbon we exhale 72 times per minute and convert it to the oxygen which all animals need in order to survive.
I call this exchange process the carbon dioxide oxygen cycle. It is one of the building blocks of mammalian life on Earth, meaning human life. In short, without it, we become the dinosaurs of the Holocene Age.
Huh?
As it turns out, air pollution, particularly tailpipe emissions, causes ozone to gather near the planet’s surface. Ordinarily, this would not be possible because chemically, oxygen cannot exist in odd-numbered atoms at normal barometric pressure. O3, in its natural state, needs to be high in the atmosphere or it destabilizes as an isotope.
The soot which our cars, trucks and fossil-fueled power plants spew by the ton every second of every day makes it possible for ozone to exist near the surface, giving us not just smog but dangerous breathing conditions. If that weren’t enough, scientists in the United Kingdom have discovered that this same ozone which clings to the bronchi in our respiratory system causes a form of asthma in plants.
No, really! Ozone damages the ability of plants to metabolize carbon and produce oxygen efficiently and since the world’s surface ozone coverage is supposed to peak in the coming years, this does not bode well for our efforts to reverse global warming and its underlying cause, excessive atmospheric carbon.
As you will read in my next post, though, I neither concede defeat nor feel any less bullish about the importance of reforestation.
Sustainable Justice For All!
Corbett Kroehler
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