Why Dyson has just published a Pollution Atlas of global NO2…
This eerie map of the world’s air quality shows just how big our planet’s Nitrogen Dioxide problem has gotten. Now Dyson have made an Atlas to show people just how widespread the problem is…
Last year, between August and September you contributed to all the pollution recorded. If you were in a car, bus or train with a combustion engine — in fact, if you did virtually anything using electricity you produced nitrogen dioxide, a nasty-smelling, gaseous pollutant. In cities, almost all of it comes from vehicle exhausts. But it can also be produced by power plants, factories and anything else that burns things.
With people increasingly worried about the impact of burning fossil fuels, the scientific community is investing more money into studying its effects. One experiment is the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 5P environmental monitoring satellite. Using state-of-the-art photo-optic equipment it can create images of real-time NO2 pollution anywhere on the planet. These eerie black and white images are a ghostly echo of all the NO2 we produce.
