#black-carbon

#black-carbon

In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be as many as 2,000 launches per year, which her modeling shows could result in about 3 percent ozone loss, equal to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. She said most of the damage comes from chlorine-rich solid rocket fuels and black carbon in the plumes. The black carbon could also warm parts of the stratosphere by about half-a-degree Celsius as it absorbs sunlight.

As a child, Marcel Mazur had to hold his breath in parts of Krakow thick with so much smoke you could see and smell it. Now, as an allergy specialist at Jagiellonian University Medical College who treats patients struggling to breathe, he knows all too well the damage those toxic gases do inside the human body. It's not that we have this feeling that nothing can be done. But it's difficult, Mazur said.

Ultrafine particles are impossible to see and are often missed by conventional monitoring techniques, and therefore they are not covered by air pollution laws. In 2021, the Dutch Health Council and the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted the growing evidence that ultrafine particles are damaging our health. This includes 75 studies, mostly relating to lung inflammation, blood pressure and heart problems, along with risks to foetal growth. Technical differences between the studies, however, meant that the WHO was unable to set a standard.