Word: smog
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...Take a Deep Breath." Such warnings, added to the widely publicized New York and Los Angeles air-pollution alerts and open bickering between politicians and industry over pollution controls, have made the U.S. suddenly aware that smog is a real and present danger. The belching smokestacks that long symbolized prosperity have now become a source of irritation; the foul air that had come to be accepted as an inevitable part of city living has suddenly become intolerable. "Tomorrow morning when you get up," reads a recent magazine ad placed by New York's Citizens for Clean Air, Inc., "take...
...miles southwest of Tokyo, for example, school yards in the port city of Yokkaichi are filled with children running and playing games. But their shouts and laughter are muffled by yellow masks impregnated with chemicals to protect them against air polluted by nearby petrochemical plants. In Tokyo, where smog warnings were issued on 154 days last year, policemen in ten heavily polluted districts return to the station house to breathe pure oxygen after each half-hour stint on traffic duty in order to counteract the effects of breathing excessive amounts of carbon monoxide...
...combustion were not unpleasant or dangerous enough by themselves, some also undergo complicated chemical changes in the atmosphere that make them even less attractive. In the presence of sunlight, the hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides emitted largely by automobile exhausts react to produce the sort of brownish and irritating photochemical smog that blankets Los Angeles for most of the year. "Los Angeles smog" is a highly complex soup containing, among other things, nitrogen dioxide, hydrocarbons, ozone (a highly active and poisonous form of oxygen) and peroxyacyl nitrate (commonly called PAN). "London smog," on the other hand, usually contains high quantities...
...health and safety. Because of fly ash and soot from smokestacks, the main façade of Manhattan's New York Hilton was so badly discolored that it had to be replaced last year, only 31 years after the hotel was completed. Ozone, a principal component of photochemical smog, discolors and disintegrates clothing and causes rubber to become brittle and crack...
Scientists are certain that the ozone and PAN in Los Angeles smogs have caused the serious decline in the citrus and salad crops in the area. In one of the many smog experiments they are conducting, they have planted lemon trees in small greenhouses in a grove near Upland. Pure, filtered air is pumped into some of the greenhouses, air containing measured amounts of pollutants into others. When the fruit is finally picked, the scientists will compare the quality and yield of lemons from trees in different greenhouses, hoping to learn more about how each component of smog affects...