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NewsvineStanford scientist Mark Jacobson may have provided policy makers with the proof they need to push for more stringent carbon dioxide emission standards. The civil and environmental engineering professor produced the first evidence of a direct link between carbon emissions and increasing mortality rates in the United States.
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Carbon dioxide released into the environment causes air temperature to increase and adds to air pollution. According to Jacobson’s study, the additional air pollution caused by each degree Celsius increase in temperature leads directly to about 1,000 additional deaths in the United States and many more cases of respiratory illness, including asthma.
This is the first study that allows the scientific community to conclude with certainty that carbon dioxide emissions, exclusive of other global warming agents, are responsible for chemical and meteorological changes that increase human mortality rates.
The political reactions to climate change in recent years prompted Jacobson to isolate carbon dioxide emissions in a study.
“Two years ago, I decided to quantify [carbon dioxide] effect on health in urban areas because there was a regulatory and legal issue as to whether carbon dioxide could be regulated as an air pollutant,” Jacobson said, “and the answer to this required information on the health effects of [carbon dioxide].”
“No study had quantified the effects [of carbon dioxide alone], and to do so was not possible until the development of a computer model that treated air pollution and climate on both the global and urban scales simultaneously,” Jacobson continued. “The computer model that I developed at Stanford was the first worldwide to be able to do this.”
One of the important conclusions of the study showed that air pollution increases most drastically in places already affected by global warming. Jacobson noted that California is home to six of the 10 most polluted cities in the United States and suffers over 30 percent of the additional mortality caused by carbon dioxide emissions, although it contains only 12 percent of the U.S. population.
Jacobson believes that these facts justify the efforts California legislators have made in recent years to enforce more stringent carbon emission standards than the federal government currently mandates. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under the guidance of President George W. Bush, has denied California’s appeal to be exempt from the national standard.
“Since the EPA decision to deny California was based in part on the theory that California does not suffer more than other states due to global warming, and this contention is contradicted by the study,” Jacobson said, “I believe the EPA should correct its decision, as it was based on a lack of information that is now available.”
The eventual goal of the California proposal is to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by the year 2020. Jacobson’s discovery of a direct link between carbon dioxide emissions and human deaths may be instrumental in persuading the EPA to reconsider California’s proposal for carbon emission caps and even to expand the stringent standards to a national level.