Instant Genius - Air pollution is killing us, here’s how you can stop it – Gary Fuller

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

Pollution scientist Gary Fuller explains how bad our air is, what causes it, and how we can stop this invisible killer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home.

Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. At the time, they thought around 4,000 people died over the course of around a week, which is just catastrophic. It was worse than the worst periods of the blitz that had just been before, and it was worse than even times. of cholera epidemics in London. And that was a real wake-up call. That was the first time that people have really hard evidence that air pollution was really harming our health

because manifestly it was. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Helen Glennie, editorial assistant at BBC Focus magazine.

If the London water supply directly contributed to the deaths of 9,000 residents every year, there would quite rightly be rioting in the streets. People would leave the city in droves, civil society would break down, and nobody would ever visit this once great city again. Of course, this isn't the case. The water in London is perfectly safe to drink. The air, on the other hand, now that is a country. completely different story. Gone are the pea super smogs that once choke the city, but that

does not mean the air is not thick with particle pollution, noxious gases and dangerous chemicals that cause heart failure, stroke and breathing issues, which leads to the death of thousands. And London is not alone. Countless cities across the world are experiencing levels of air pollution that go well beyond World Health Organization recommendations. And as a result, around 4.5 million people fall victim to an early death every year. In this episode of the Science Focus podcast, online editor Alexander McNamara has an in-depth conversation with King's University Pollution Scientist and author of the book The Invisible Killer Gary Fuller, who explains how bad our air is, what causes it, and how we can stop this invisible

killer. And remember, if you like what you're here, then please rate, review and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. Also, if there's anybody you'd like us to speak to or a topic you want us to cover, then let us know on Twitter at at Science Focus. Could you just describe to us what is air pollution and what are the different varieties and types of air pollution that there are? We all learn from school.

The air around us is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, but at very small concentrations, there are chemicals, there are gases, there are particles, in the air that can be quite harmful to us. And they're the things that we consider as air pollution. So things that really shouldn't be there that have been put into the air largely by our activities. So some of them you'll hear about debated in the media. For instance, the government has lost several court cases

on nitrogen dioxide. And that's a pollutant that in urban areas comes mainly from diesel traffic. We also hear a lot about the health impacts of tiny particles in the air that we breathe. And these are often called things like PM10, PM2.5 according to their size. But they're thought to be responsible for the main health impacts. So globally, air pollution and mainly particle pollution is thought to be responsible for around four and a half million deaths per year.

and there's some big numbers for the UK as well and they're the things we're mostly concerned about there's some other gases such as ozone I mean we think mainly of ozone in terms of the ozone layer but that's high above our heads but ozone when it forms close to the ground is a really aggressive chemical it rots rubber for instance and it also doesn't do us any good

that's weird so I've always thought of ozone as being so high up in the air, but actually it's something that's surrounding us, is it? Same chemical, but it does different things in different places. What we mostly hear about ozone is, yeah, high up in the atmosphere, and ozone absorbs ultraviolet there, so therefore it's protecting us from some of the sun's harmful radiation. In fact, that's the way we measure it at a ground level, actually. The machines that we use suck in the atmosphere, and we measure how much UV it absorbs as to tell us about the amount of ozone in it.

But ozone's interesting. I mean, it really came to the fore in Los Angeles. It's the chemical of the Los Angeles smog, really. It came to the four just around the Second World War when the ozone pollution in Los Angeles got so bad. There was one incident where the people of L.A. thought they were under chemical attack because the air became so aggressive.

It's making people's eyes, water, and people are struggling to breathe and so forth. And so how did that happen? How is the ozone surrounding these people in LA so much? It forms in the atmosphere. So a lot of the air pollution that surround us, it's not just the things that come directly from our factories, from our chimneys, from our homes.

But it also comes from chemical reactions in the atmosphere. So many of these pollutants also react together. especially in sunlight to form new and different pollutants. And ozone is one of those. So, for instance, LA's ozone problems were caused a lot by the petrochemical industry and by the exhausts from cars traveling around the city. And they then reacted in the warm sunlight to form new pollutants that were causing people's eyes to run and giving them breathing difficulties and things.

So it's not just a case of we're spitting something out and that's the pollution. It's we're creating something that's reacting naturally in a way that's creating a different problem at the side. Yeah, it's quite hard to control these things, if you like, because from a policy perspective, we can pull the levers on the emissions, if you like, or take steps. But because the final product that does us harm is forming in the atmosphere, it's kind of an indirect effect. So it's quite hard to sort of steer and control these things by pulling the leaves. levers that we have. So it sounds like there's a number of different types of pollutants that are in the air at one time. Are these all causing different problems, like health problems to us and to the

environment? Yeah, they certainly affect us in different ways, but the way in which air pollution affects us. I mean, I'm not a medic and the book I've written isn't really about, isn't from a medical perspective, but we know from studies where you look at big populations and follow people over a long time that if people live in more polluted places, then they have shorter lives because of this once you've, you know, sorted out whether they smoke compared to other people. So people that live in more polluted cities because of the air pollution, live shorter lives compared to people that live in less polluted cities. So it's having air pollution affects us in so many different ways.

I mean, if you look in the news recently, you'd have heard things that there's been news stories about air pollution affecting the placenta of unborn children all the way up to dementia in, you know, at the end of our lives. So air pollution affects us in so many ways. God, that just seems so broad that it's having all these effects. And I guess this must have been going on for some time. How long has air pollution been a problem? I suppose you could say it's almost been a problem since we've, you know,

humanity first sat around a campfire. There's a very good account from London in 1661 by the Darius John Evelyn, who wrote a letter to the king about the state of London's air at the time. And he paints just a horrendous picture of a smoke-filled city where steelwork and ironwork is being corroded, where plants don't grow, and where people, compared to the countryside, are dying with all these sorts of diseases

that you just don't see in rural areas. So diseases are the lungs and so forth. So it has been a problem for a long time, but I don't think it's been fully recognised up until we had sort of the big smogs in the 1950s. So that's 400 years ago. That description of London is nearly 400 years old. Now, I think of, when I'm thinking of pollution

and that sort of stuff, I'm thinking about the Industrial Revolution when we're really starting to kick things off. But that 400 years is before the Industrial Revolution. What sort of things was happening then? causing such problems? Well, London at that time had just undergone an energy revolution. Previously, people had burnt a lot of wood in the city, but we'd largely deforested the areas around it. So for the first time, really, coal was being imported into London, mainly by sea

from the northwest of England, and people were burning large quantities of coal in the city, and it was having these real issues. smoke from burning coal is really a lot more unpleasant than the wood and charcoal that they'd have burnt before. And I guess that continued because we've been burning coal for quite a long time. Did that get worse during the Industrial Revolution and beyond? Yeah. I mean, there's a progression really from that point onwards where our air pollution probably

deteriorated, but we don't have really measurements to be able to track that over time. And the first measurements we really have of air pollution in the sort of late Victorian times. And there people didn't really go out and make, you know, systematic measurements. There's a number of scientists like John Aitken who went out. And they went out rather in the way that plant collectors would go out and taking specimens. So they'd make some measurements in one location and measurements in another. one other person at the time was Angus Smith who found what's now our environment agency and he went out with little glass vials collecting tiny samples of air from all sorts of places.

He went to the theatre. He went in the early underground trains, down mines, you know, up mountains and so forth. And that gives us some early perspective of air pollution, but not really a way of systematically looking at it. So that sort of gave us a feel for what the different places had and what they were like. So was air better at the top of a mountain as compared to the bottom of a mine shaft? Yeah, precisely. So they told us things that, you know, if you were downwind of a city, then there was certainly air pollution there.

Or if you were in a centre of a city, there was certainly air pollution there. But we didn't really get a real perspective on what locations were bad and how air pollution changed day to day. until the early parts of the 20th century, really. And in those days, did people understand what effect air pollution was having or indeed what even was? No, not at all, not at all.

I mean, despite John Evelyn with his warnings in the 1600s, he really feared and wrote this in his letter to the King. He really feared that he would be ostracized by the medical community who actually thought that air pollution, or particularly smoke was a good thing for us. If you think about, you know, how people would have been living at that time without things like refrigeration,

one of the ways of preserving your food, be it like fish or meat, would have been to smoke it, wouldn't it? And therefore, because smoke preserved meats and things like that against rotting, it was also seen as being healthy for us. I mean, some of the people writing in Victorian times when they talked about some of the really sort of obnoxious acid gases you get from burning coal were saying things like, well, thank goodness we have the smoke in our air to protect us from this. It seems ironic, it seems incredible.

But, you know, the people thought it was actually good for us. So at what point did we start going, hang about, maybe this isn't so good for us? Interestingly, the real sea change point was the smog, the Great London smog of 1952. And at the end of December that year, you know, really dense smog descended on the city. And Londoners had smogs before, like since, you know, Victorian times. But there was a number of differences with that smog. The first was its severity. And the second was that we had measurements of everything.

pollution at the time. So over the course of four or five days, many people just began to die. And the health people at the time actually chased around thinking they were dealing with things like infectious disease. But they found that, you know, it was just one isolated person in a house rather than a whole family in a house or a number of people in a district. It's just more and more people were dying all around the place. I mean, it must have been incredible at the time to have been working in hospitals or in the overloaded ambulance service. And if you look, there's this emergency bed service in London. So if you can't fit in one hospital, they're trying to locate you in another.

And this just become utterly overloaded. Coroner's offices as well when they opened again, because this happened at a weekend, when they opened again on the Monday morning, we're just overwhelmed by the number of dead bodies. They couldn't do post-mortems, autopsies. they could only just look at people just in the very overview sense. They were just completely overwhelmed. And so what was it about this? I have a couple of questions about this smog.

What was it about the smog that was actually killing them? And how did the smog appear? Why was it so bad? If you look at the inquiry into the smog, I don't think they really decided what the actual sort of dangerous agent was, but they knew that the air was full of smoke from fires. And they knew it was full of sulfur dioxide. And so they set out to control those.

And there's the Clean Air Act that followed mainly to tackle the smoke. And is that what, did that stop the smogs happening again after that? Yeah, but why was that smog? Why was the 52 smog so bad? London had had smogs before. And one of the things that's put forward is around the quality of the coals that were being used. I mean, in 1952, London was, and the whole UK was still trying to recover from the effects of the war. And most of our good quality coal was being put for export.

And people were burning things. There's a product that was sold at the time called Nutty Slack, which is more or less the sort of waste from the top of the mining process. So it's all little bits of dust and nuts, so tiny bits of coal that were left over. and it's thought that burning that really contributed to just how bad that pollution episode was. But a total of, at the time, they thought around 4,000 people died over the course of around a week, which is just catastrophic. It was worse than the worst periods of the blitz that had just been before,

and it was worse than even times of cholera epidemics in London. And that was a real wake-up call. That was the first time that people have really hard evidence that air pollution was really harming our health because manifestly it was. So it sounds like that's a huge amount of people to die basically over the course of a weekend. You would think after... It's actually worse than that because if you look at the deal... This was reanalyzed the game for the 50th anniversary of the smog. And we know to of the scientists that looked at it at that time,

notice that even stretching into January and February in the following year, there were more people dying than you would expect. So the death toll was revised upwards to about 12,000. And that's just, you know, as I say, like 4,000 is huge, but 12,000 is massive. You'd think that after that there would be something that would say, you know, this can never happen again. We must make sure air pollution doesn't occur. I guess the fact that we're now saying, still talking about it is that we've not quite got there? No, we haven't. I suppose there's been lots.

It's not as though we haven't done anything. You know, government, industry, even the way, you know, we all lead our lives, has changed a lot in that time. But we've, throughout this, we've really just focused on managing one air pollutant at a time. So after 1952, we put in a lot of measures that effectively moved industry and power stations out of towns and built big chimneys, so the smoke blew away. And also we introduced smokeless fuels for people to burn at home. But the 1962 smog that happened 10 years later after 1952 still is thought to have been responsible for over 1,000 deaths in London. and sulfur dioxide, which is one of the other pollutants from coal, which we didn't really manage in the 62 smog,

was worse than it was in the 52 smog. So we've solved one problem, but we've missed another one. We have. And that, if you like, is kind of through our history of trying to manage air pollution. We focus on one source or one issue, and then we kind of don't notice other things that creep under the radar. So from 1962 and onwards, we didn't really control the sulfur that we were emitting, and that led to all of the acid rain problems that happened and the huge forest and ecosystem damage that occurred across Scandinavia. And there's analogies today, for instance, you know, if I ask you to think about air pollution, probably you would, you know, if you live in a city, you're going to point out of the window and point at the traffic and think, well, that's the big.

problem. And when we hear the debates around air pollution, we only really seem to talk about traffic. But there's so many other things like the wood burning we're doing in our homes is causing tremendous air pollution problems. But that one's kind of crept underneath the radar. Yeah, no, definitely. So what, you know, you say woodburning is one thing, the traffic's one thing, but what really are causing the biggest air pollution problems? What are the biggest emitters of it? globally, if you sit back and think it really is associated with the burning of coal, then you've also got to think next is probably the burning of oil. So the real problem areas depend on what you've got locally and where you are in the world.

For the UK, the issues are around transport. Yeah, of course, I'm not saying it's not a problem. things we do in our home, particularly the way we heat our homes. And another thing that's often overlooked is the role of agriculture and air pollution. And how is agriculture causing air pollution? Yeah, it's a strange one because if you go out for maybe a walk at the weekend or something like this, you're out there in the countryside and you think that's fine, clean air. but the fertilizers that are used to grow crops and the manure that comes from looking after animals

and spread on the land gives out ammonia and that reacts in the sort of chemical reactions that we talked about in the air before with some of the pollutants that we get from our cities and from vehicles especially from diesel cars and forms lots of particles in the air So for instance, if I ask you, what do you think is the most polluted time of the year in the UK? What do I think would be the most polluted? Well, I mean, probably a point where people are driving and burning fuels a lot. So I'd say probably wintertime. Wintertime.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did this the other day. I asked this question to a group of students in a lecture. And some of them said winter time. Some of them seem to associate air pollution with autumn because it's sort of, you know, a damp time of leaves falling. But the worst polluted time of the year in the UK is generally spring time. And everybody says, well, why is this? Surely spring is like new green growth and it's a time of renewal and flowers and things like that.

But what happens is at that time, of course, it's the time when agriculture gets going. So farmers are applying large amounts of fertilizer to their fields and also spreading a lot of the manure of muck that they store over winter. And you'd have heard, for instance, about the pollution problems they experience in Paris where they have to ban half the cars on alternate days. Those things happen in the springtime. It's a problem throughout Western Europe that agriculture means that springtime is their most polluted time of year.

That's incredible. Especially when, as you say, you think it's sort of like a fresh, breezy time that you're going to go out and after being cooped up a winter sort of breathe in the fresh air and it's actually quite bad. Yeah, it's a time of renewal. You know, we see plants going bulbs, daffodils, you know, leaves and so forth. But interestingly, it is because of the way it fits in with the agriculture and farming cycle. It's often the most of the polluted time of the year. Another effect from agriculture, not one that we see so much in the UK, is burning to clear fields and sometimes at the end of the agricultural season. So, for instance, Delhi at the moment has been in the news a great deal because of its air pollution.

And this, it happens that has happened for a few years now at exactly this time of year, October, November. and many people at first blamed it on Davali fireworks, which do play a role. But if you look into the area around Delhi, there's a huge amount of burning done in fields to clear the rice stubble because it's at the end of that agricultural cycle. And this just hangs around in the valleys and is responsible for that haze and awful air pollution that's been experienced at Delhi at the moment. So this agriculture is actually, it's kicking up all day. different kinds of, you know, essentially air pollutants and then that's forming to create new

ones as well. Yeah. With all these different types of pollutants in the air, how do we measure it and how do we measure it accurately? There were air, in London at King's College, we run a thing called the London Air Quality Network or London Air. and we work with local councils and with government. And we've got monitoring sites scattered all around London.

There's about a hundred of them. So they're little cabins by the roadside, often about the size of a shed or, you know, a small container. And inside them we're measuring air pollution constantly. So we're sucking samples of air into all sorts of machinery that's measuring just, you know, one pollutant at a time. or we're trying to look not just at the particles in the air, but at that chemical composition.

So if you look around Europe, North America, there's really quite sophisticated networks for measuring air pollution. But interestingly, there's almost no measurements that happen in some of the most polluted parts of the world. I mean, if you look at the whole continent of Africa, there are three times more monitoring sites in the single city of Paris than there are across the whole continent of Africa. Africa. So Africa is sort of like a space where do we just not know what the

air pollution is like there? Well, it's really difficult. There's been a lot of effort to try to measure air pollution from satellites. And that gives us our best clue in these areas where we don't have, you know, regulatory and government measurement networks. But that's actually quite difficult as well. If you imagine, you know, you're on a satellite. and you're looking down at the column of air below you. What you're really interested in is those bottom few hundred or, you know, thousand or so meters where the people are and where they're breathing. But what you can see above is only the whole column.

So satellite measurements are really very tricky and challenging. I was just thinking how on earth did they even test what the sort of pollution levels are in those clouds? Well, it's not so much in the clouds. What you can do from a satellite is you can try to look at the sun through the Earth's atmosphere. Ah, right, okay. Yeah, so you look at through this whole column or pathway of the sunlight through the Earth's atmosphere or perhaps where it bounces back off the ground, for instance. But what we're really interested in from, you know, you and I is the air pollution we're breathing,

and that's only the bit at the bottom of this column of air. So satellite measurements, they can be really useful. And in some places, they're all we have. But they do have their limitations as well. But they do give us some sort of atlas of the world. And you can see the worst air pollution isn't really even in Beijing, for instance. You know, that's been the news so much. The worst air pollution is spread out over many areas where we don't have that many measurements.

So there's Africa. But most particularly, there's this whole area. around, you know, of Southeast Asia. So China, India, and all of the countries around there are the most polluted parts of the world. And unfortunately, that's where most of the people live as well. So is that an impact? Like the population, is that causing more of the air pollution? Or is it just, that's just the way how it is?

Oh, yeah. I mean, the air pollution is caused by the people that live there, the industry that they have. and often the things they do as part of their simple everyday lives, such as cooking or trying to keep their homes warm in wintertime. And to stop air pollution, you can't say you can't do this. So we have to think about better ways to help people do things like improve their cooking, improve heating their homes, and control their factories.

You know, China's massive economic boom has been really at the expense of the health of their population. But China's getting it now. I don't think it's talked about perhaps quite enough in the media, but they really are getting it and understanding about these consequences in some Chinese cities over the space of like three or four years, air pollution's dropped by about a quarter, which is far faster than we're achieving here in Europe.

That's amazing. How are they doing that? Mainly they're doing two things. They're cleaning up the factories and industry that they've built over the last few decades. And also they're trying to clean up home heating. There's an interesting, China is a country of two halves when it comes to air pollution. And there's a line that follows the line of a river and mountain. And a policy was set in place in the 1950s and 60s on home heat. heating and north of that line is just a line of zero degrees in winter that's drawn on a map

they installed lots of the government installed lots of sort of district and local heating systems burning coal north of that line and in the south of that line these systems weren't in place and you can see when you look at the health of the population either side of this line that there's a real difference in the northern area where a lot of coal is burnt compared to the south so that's another area that they're tackling as well. So there's like a real marked difference that the effect of air pollution is actually having on people's mortality, essentially. Yes, yeah.

There's been a, you know, how do we know air pollution is having these health effects? Well, I talked before that you can compare people that live in one location compared to people that live in another and, you know, the diseases they get and simply how long they live. but one of the other ways we can learn about it is when we go in and make a change, yeah? And does this, does the health of the population get better? And that's one of the things, hopefully, that's going to come from the changes that they're making in China. Not only will we learn about how bad air pollution's been, but how much it can be, how much health can be improved when we take the pollution away. That's it just sounds incredible.

It makes me think of, it's not making me think, it's just, it brings me along to another question that I have, which is about making these changes, like whether they're forcing the government or not. I just want to know if I could talk to you a bit about Dieselgate and the problem was that the diesel emissions that we had over the last few years. Now obviously, they, that was a big scandal in the news and I would just love it. If you could just explain to me, A, what Dieselgate was and, B, how it started and how it became the problem thought it was, because it's a fascinating chapter in the book that I just didn't realize there was so much around it. Yeah. I mean, we think of the diesel problems that we have in Europe as being new. Firstly, they're not new. The whole issue with diesel cars extends way back before we started thinking about climate change, which is often used as the.

the reason why we have diesel cars. And in the late 60s, early 70s, natural gas was coming online in Europe. And the oil companies rapidly realized that they were going to lose an important market for some of their products. Because oil at that time was used to heat buildings. It was used to heat power stations. And if you cross Dartford Bridge on the M25, Littlebrook Power Station next to you is a massive oil fire power station, which isn't really used now. But a lot of oil was burnt like that.

And they rapidly realized that gas would be displacing oil from these uses. And so they began to say, well, what are we going to do with all of these middle-range distillates that we're getting from crude oil? So the oil companies got together with the vehicle manufacturers. And also, to some extent, it was part of government policy and encouraged, not as a UK thing, but as a European-wide thing, and they started to find ways of using what would have been heating oil in our cars, and that's the reason why we have so many diesel vehicles.

If you go to the US, if you go to Japan, you won't find diesel cars on the road. You'll find diesel trucks and lorries, but you won't really find any diesel cars. Dieselgate, though, is something different, and we've been working in London, measuring air pollution for 25 years now. And around about 2000, we started to realize that things weren't quite on track.

Things weren't getting better. Certainly nitrogen dioxide and particles as well, weren't getting better in the way that they were. And the targets that we were set in at the time just might not be achieved. And we spent a long, long time investigating this. And we haven't really have answers until this Dieselgate scandal broke. Dieselgate is thought to be mainly about VW, but it's quite obvious when you look at the air pollution from all types of diesel cars, that the pollution you get from their exhaust when they're driven on the roads is very difficult.

different to what happens in the official tests. So vehicles were passing ever tighter official tests. But when they were driven on the roads outside our schools, outside our homes, the newer cars weren't really performing much better than the older ones. And that really is at the heart of the diesel gate scandal. So you'll know that we have pollution limits in the UK and throughout Europe that should have been met in 2010. They were set in 1998, 99, to be met in 2010.

And here we are in 2018. And there's places in London that still aren't even close. It's not as though we're talking that we're five or 10% out. We're out by a factor of two, nearly three in places. It's an extraordinary, I suppose, failure of a policy. And this is because we were in, correctly sort of, our measurement targets were off because we weren't going to get them because the cars just weren't making it.

Yeah, the cars weren't getting cleaner when they were used in the real world. It's interesting that we, in the air pollution community, we spent a long time debating whether it was a failure from, if you like, from our side or a failure from government. The tests that the vehicles were being subjected to just weren't. good enough, but it turns out that it's much more complicated than that. For instance, there was a European Parliament inquiry into this and also some tests that were done in several countries, including the UK. And they found strangely the vehicles, the clean-up on exhausts really only worked on many types of diesel vehicles when the weather was warm. And this just didn't seem

right. And when the weather was cold, the clean-up systems weren't working as well. And it's been suggested that the reason for this is that the tests that are done are done at 19 or 20 degrees, and therefore the clean-up systems are optimized to work under those types of conditions rather than, I don't know, the average winter conditions you get across Europe, which are a lot colder. And I guess it also changes from country to country. So, you know, northern Europe is a lot colder in general than southern Europe. Yeah, yeah. There were some early tests a couple of years before Dieselgate broke and people just, they were testing under Nordic driving conditions.

It was done by some Finnish and some Norwegian laboratories. and they were raising this question, they were saying, why are the vehicles emitting so much more air pollution in cold weather that they shouldn't be? But it turns out that their clean-up systems were optimized to work at warmer temperatures, which is the temperatures coincidentally that they're tested at.

So, you know, so Dieselgate, that was a big issue and everyone, it sort of captured the imagination a bit of emissions in general. But why is it, you know, you and I discussed earlier, like why is air pollution not seen by the public as such a threat as it really is? I think one of the issues with air pollution,

we think, I mean, if you look at London, the best estimates are that the air pollution, that London is a breathing, is causing around, or up to about 9,400 extra deaths in the city. every year. And I mean, if London's water supply, the water

came from the taps was killing that many people per year, there'd be outcry. You know, heads would roll, chief executives, ministers will be called to account. And to be honest, London will be shot. Who would want to visit London or

work or live there if you knew that the water supply was killing up to 9,500,000 people a year? But for air pollution somehow we seem to, it's much more invisible. You know, it's almost an invisible killer. We don't, no one has air pollution on their death certificate, for instance. And perhaps we just accept it around us.

If you talk to my parents' generation, they actually thought smogs were fun. You know, they would go out as kids. My mum and dad would, like, they would play games in the smog. you could play some wonderful hide and seat games in the smog just by walking away from someone and you know you could just disappear and so I think people take for granted the air pollution that's around them if you were to go back to Victoria in London yeah and you can see some of the pictures some of the photographs some of the paintings at the time

you would see all this smoke pouring out of the industry out of homes and things like that and you would point right away at that as being the problem But the people at the time took it for granted. Similarly, I think if you were to get one of the early Victorian scientists to pop them in a time machine and bring them to today, and they would straight away point to the pollution sources like the traffic and things like that that that we largely take for granted. So I think there's two factors. One, no one has air pollution on their death certificate. they die of things that people die of anyway so they die of heart disease they die of lung

disease they die of strokes yeah and so we just think that's part of the normal passage of life and also we get used to the things that are around us and it becomes sort of habitualized or normalized i i it's nine thousand nine thousand or death is as we were saying there were what was it between four and twelve for the the great smog and yet you know now there's nearly 9,000 people are dying because of just the air pollution in London. It seems like there should be something we could do more about this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, on the numbers of people that are affected,

it's part of the story, I suppose, of air pollution is we learned from the 1952 smogs that sudden smogs kill people. But it's only as our science has developed that we learn that it's the everyday exposure to air pollution that calls. is far more harm than smogs. So the 9,400 people that are dying early in London each year is not from sudden smogs or bad incidents. It's from the everyday pollution that they're exposed to. I think some of the most troubling evidence that's coming out is the way that air pollution

might be affecting our children. There's evidence from Southern California and some other. places and some studies being done actually in London that are suggesting the air pollute that children that live in polluted areas grow smaller lungs and though they might not really it might not be of clinical importance to the children as they grow up as they get older it could cause a maybe it could cause a lot of problems in you know five six decades time so I worry that when you hear about air pollution affecting children,

we're storing up a lot of problems for the decades to come. Yeah, that is a scary thought. Is it getting better? That's the thing. Like, you know, we say with these 9,000 or deaths, is that better than it was, say, 10 years ago or 20 years ago? We don't have the assessments, and we don't have the numbers in terms of the health impact

from times, you know, times before. There's only been one assessment done of London. And so that gives us a snapshot for the time, you know, around now. Air pollution definitely changes. You know, London is not the coal, smoke-filled city that it was in the 1950s and 1960s. But we have new problems from traffic. We have the re-emergence of woodburning in our homes. Is it getting better?

Yes, it is. Many things are moving in the right direction. but the question is, are they moving fast enough? So we've been doing a lot of studies about air pollution alongside roads in London and for nitrogen dioxide and many other pollutants. Some roads are really, really, the policies are working very well. They're improving very fast. But other roads, it's not the case.

And there's a few places where air pollution just isn't responding to policies. So I think there's a real need. The evidence tells us there's a real need. need to look at this again and to do something stronger. But it's also think about the way in which we tolerate air pollution. You know, we, government may tell us, an industry may tell us vehicle manufacturers that they're improving the situation. And if it was 9,400 or up to 9,400 people at the moment, maybe they would tell us that

in 10 years time it might be down to 8,000. but it shouldn't be seen as being, you know, being better than very bad, if you like. A benchmark should be zero. You know, for instance, I can't, if I was operating a factory, I couldn't say to the health and safety executives, well, I've done a good job this year. Only two people have lost limbs in my factory compared to three people last year and haven't I done well. No, zero is the benchmark we should be measuring ourselves against. And we should be doing the same thing with air pollution.

Yes, we should. We should be saying not just we'll improve it by 10%. We should be saying, well, we have to reach a burden of zero. Now, whether that's achievable or not, I don't know, but that's what we should be using as our benchmark. Are there any examples of really great success stories that we can sort of look at? You know, which are the greatest success stories and bringing down air pollution that we can use as a basis to, you know, bring, to achieve the goal of zero deaths? There aren't, I'm afraid, a huge number of success stories around the world that we can draw upon.

I think we will learn a lot from China. they're really reducing their air pollution at a colossal rate. There are some examples where fuels have been improved. So rather than thinking about improving, let's say, the cars or the way people heat their homes, improving the fuels that they use can be quite effective. For instance, Dublin in the 1980s experienced a lot of really severe air pollution problems much of the same type that London had experienced before. And the city authorities just overnight or just one winter, they just banned many types

of coal being burnt in people's homes. And the air pollution improved dramatically and they were also able to see it in the death rates in the city in the following winter. So that's a really good example. but let's just think about the future and think about what we'd like to see. And one of the areas where we can do most good for the whole of society

is in the transport arena. We talk about a future for transport and it seems to be framed in moving from streets that are congested with petrol and diesel power cars to streets that are congested with electric power vehicles. But in the UK, 40% of all journeys that are done by car are less than two miles and 60% of them are less than four miles. So if we can move some of these journeys away from cars into active travel, we can do so much. So if you did that, you could reduce air pollution, quite obviously, but we could also reduce the emissions that are contributing to climate change.

we could reduce urban noise because traffic is responsible for a lot of urban noise and at the same time if we could induce just a little bit more exercise into everyone's lives we could tackle many of the other chronic problems like diabetes the obesity which seem to be the modern the diseases of the modern age so I'd like to see a future whereby our cities aren't so dependent on you know the motorised transport that clogs our streets at the moment and one where by just moving ourselves around, there could be a lot more exercise and just a lot happier and better environment to live in. And would that also help with the problems that are exacerbated by air pollution? So, for instance, better lungs and better heart health.

Yes. I suppose it would not only reduce air pollution and directly the impacts, therefore, it's having on our health. but if people will do a lot more active travel, then they will be fitter anyway. That's great. I've just got one more thing that I'd just like to ask you. That's all right. Yes, go ahead. If you, so just for example,

if there were five things that we could do as individuals to help lessen our impact on air pollution, what would you suggest those five things would be? Okay. Number one, you could think about protecting yourself and your family. that would have to be the first one. So if you're walking around an urban area,

then just think about taking the back streets, walking through the park rather than walking through the roads. Some of the measurements we've done suggest that you can halve your air pollution exposure by thinking about the routes you take. The next one is you shouldn't really be part of, you know, reduce how much you, you shouldn't be part of the problem. So you can think about the, way in which you travel around, do you really need to drive your kids to school when the school

is just a kilometer down the road? And think about the way you heat your home as well. We think that somewhere between about 25 and 30 percent of the particle pollution that's being created in London is coming from people burning wood at home. And mainly that's just really for, you know, decorative reasons because it looks good because it's nice. It makes their homes comfortable. So don't be part of the problem in that way. Then also we need to be applying pressure to government to take action. And so this needs to be debated a lot more in the media and people need to be communicating

it to their politicians. Because we can't lay the responsibility for this really at the door of each of us as individuals I have a couple that write to me each year from they live in southeast London and the husband has COPD so he has breathing difficulties and his wife who cares for him they moved into a flat so they could all be on one level and all of the windows in their flat open out onto a road. So when they open up the windows in the summer to keep it cool the husband's COPD is exacerbated and he has breathing problems.

And so they're there with their windows closed all summer to try to, you know, not cause him breathing troubles and they're there in their hot flat. And there's nothing that they can do really themselves by their own actions to improve the air pollution on the road outside. So a lot of the answers have to come from politicians. They have to come from government, I'm afraid. There's another one about choosing what you buy as well. People are already voting with their feet on diesel cars.

If you look back a couple of years ago before the Dieselgate scandal, around half the cars that were being bought in the UK and more in many European countries were diesel powered. And we're now down to about 30%. So people are voting with their feet there. They're voting with their pockets. They're voting with their purses. And that's another important thing.

because you know, you as an individual can exert pressure through the system according to the things that you buy and the choices that you make. That was pollution scientist Gary Fuller, whose new book The Invisible Killer, The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution and How We Can Fight Back is out now. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our Christmas issue, we explore seven radical ideas that will expand your mind, look back at the greatest moments in the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, and find out if party drug MDMA can help treat alcoholism.

The magazine is available in newsagents and supermarkets now, where you can also find our latest special edition, The Science of True Crime. In it, we find out how psychological profiling changed the FBI, where the maths can help predict terrorist attacks and how brain injuries can create criminals, along with much more. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com. We'll look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameaudio.com. In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are. Writers, thinkers, creators, people with stories still unfolding. That spirit lives on at Kingsley Manor,

a community shaped by individuality, creativity, and lives well-lived. So when the conversation turns to what's next, it isn't about stepping away. It's about continuing the story. Explore your options at kingsley manor.org, a nonprofit month-to-month senior community within the Front Porch family.