Climate Change and Air Pollution: An Introduction

Abstract

Concern about air pollution has been known for thousands of years. Complaints about its effects on human health and the built environment were first voiced by the citizens of ancient Athens and Rome. Urban air quality, however, worsened during the Industrial Revolution, as the widespread use of coal in factories in Britain, Germany, the United States and other nations ushered in an “age of smoke” (Mosley, 2014). As urban areas developed, pollution sources, such as chimneys and industrial processes, were concentrated, leading to visible and damaging pollution dominated by smoke. This introductory chapter discusses about the impact of climate change on the level air pollution, and at same time highlights that Weather and climate play important roles in determining patterns of air quality over multiple scales in time and space, owing to the fact that emissions, transport, dilution, chemical transformation, and eventual deposition of air pollutants all can be influenced by meteorological variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and mixing height.The chapter quoted empirical studies on air pollution and impact on human health in both from developed and developing countries.