I have never been so happy to see rainy weather arrive. For over 6 weeks it do not rain once, during a time when many wildfires were burning out of control in the cascade mountains nearby. These wildfires were covering most of western Washington State with forest fire smoke that made many people ill with respiratory illness, acute onset from the continual smoke exposure; fine particles sucked into their vehicles HVAC system, into their workplaces air, into the air of their homes, making it unsafe to perform physical labor outdoors or to exercise outside, so many people had to refrain from walking, jogging, running, hiking, riding bicycles & other forms out outdoor activities.
I spoke with many people about the rain being a blessing, finally clearing the air of the toxic fine particles that are scientifically proven to be unhealthy to breathe. This is why smoking tobacco also increases the risk factors for asthma, bronchitis, COPD, emphysema, mouth-throat & lunch cancers, and other inflammatory breathing diseases & disorders caused by continual or chronic irritation of the fine membrane gas exchange sacks in human lungs where CO2 exits into outgoing breath as O2 intake extracted from freshly inhaled air.
Human respiratory function relies on today intake, such that only about 60% of the volume of inhaled air actually exchanged in the lungs. This means that any smoke that makes its way into the lungs is not immediate exhaled, the concentration of smoke slowly diminishes over the course of several minutes after the inhalation of smoke is discontinued. This makes air pollution a major hazard because unlike a cigar or cigarette, which tens to stop making smoke after a few minutes or hours, coal power emissions & other hydrocarbon emissions created by the combustion of carbon & hydrocarbon fuels, making air pollution 24/7/365- so everyone nearby to those combustion based power plants ends up breathing a continually produced stream of air pollution, kind of like second hand smoke exposure.
Some people are more sensitive to the toxic effects of inhaling smoke. For example, there exists a small minority of tobacco smokers who smoke heavily daily & live long lives into their 80's or 90's without any lung cancer or respiratory disorders or diseases. On the other hand, there are children who die of respiratory disease who have never smoked tobacco.
Clearly golf course herbicides & other pesticides, tail pipe emissions from gasoline & diesel passenger vehicles, aircraft emissions near airports & industrial emissions near factors & power plants, or indoor air pollutants in homes from the use of synthetic chemical sprays or similar artificially questionably toxic products, micro plastic exposure, hormone disrupting chemical exposure or similar toxin exposure or poison exposure might be the causal factor of these idiopathic early childhood onset respiratory disease. The same can be said for black mold sport exposure in homes with rotting materials that shed extra black mold because of damp water logged organic materials.
Mold exposure has many negative health consequences. A persons genetic & epigenetic risk factors probably also strongly influence that pathophysiology of common lung diseases & disorders that inexplicably harm some young people without other logical causal pathway or known cause. I believe that many factors overlapping are also at play, especially considering the variety of chemical, physical, psychological, social, societal, mental, environment, & other stresses imposed on children now, without any historical content or equivalent.
I am saying that its harder to be a child now, more stressful because of the internet, because they don't get to play outside as much anymore, because they are home in front of their smartphones, tablet, laptop, computer or TV playing mindless video games, making them more detached from reality & causing them social & mental harm by not having them engage with other children, peers, schoolmates or people in their home or community.
Meg & I notice many years ago, when we were first married, that often when we went out to a restaurant for dinner, we would look around and observe many groups of people, families, friends, people sitting together, were not interacting with one another, but instead all of them are starring at little black rectangles in their hands known as smartphones, with some irony I might, since I do not consider the ways that many people operate their smartphones intelligent.
We might even call smartphones "dumb-phones" when there are abused to the point of causing thumb joint disorders and text neck problems in the cervical spinal joints in the upper back & neck. People that obsessively make use of their smartphones often look down at their phones as if they were staring at their feet, such that their heavy liquid filled skull pulling down on their neck at extreme angles that cause spinal problems & neck pain, neck stiffness, arm & hand numbness & other problems related to spinal disc compression injuries caused in this way. I am associated with a doctor in Seattle who runs a sports inquiry & spinal clinic who told me a few years ago that he see's "People as young as 4 years old coming in with thumb joint pain & inflammation, because they play smartphone app games for 4+ hours at a time, daily, every day, sometimes even more!" He is also the first person to mention the word "Text Neck" with respect to the spinal problems caused by missing a smartphone with poor body posture.
The problem with smartphone health disorders stems from the fact that humans do not have a long history with smartphones. Our cultural patterns have not adapted to mobile internet since 2007 when Apple launched the first iPhone. Social change to adapt to a new technology can take decades to integrate widely into societies. It could take few generations of people before handheld internet devices become socially integrated to the point where common etiquette dictates when its socially appropriate to look up a smartphone, to hold it or use it, when & where & for how long. Another way of saying this is that its still the wild-west as people learn to adapt to persistent handheld internet access in their hands & pockets & even on their wrists.
I sometimes remark with awe at the ability to take & make calls on my wrist, with an Apple Watch for example. Smartwatches are even newer technology, there are even rings that people wear on the fingers that have nearly all the functional sensors of an Apple Watch, known as smart jewelry, there are emerging smart clothes, smart furniture, smart appliances, known as the Internet Of Things or IoT, this means that more digital computer being designed into everyday objects that people have been using all along, long before the internet became a widely diffused technology world wide, in the World Wide Web or online for example.
I want to talk about the sleep disorders that are caused by artificial lights, screen light, light pollution, such that even the light from a candle, about 5 lumens, is enough to suppress melatonin release in the brain, and such a low amount of light is also able to increase the release of cortisol the stimulating wakefulness promoting stress hormone that is on an axis with melatonin, such that if cortisol levels are elevated this prevent melatonin release from occurring. Similarly when Melatonin elevated, cortisol levels are reduced. This is know as the cortisol-melatonin axis in physiology & medicine, also in the science of circadian rhythm as elucidated by the brilliant genius professor studying chronobiology, and others who study neurology, and the SCN or superchiasmatic nucleus nerve ganglion in the human retina that detect light levels to regulate human sleep wake cycling.
This means that artificial light is stimulant & that exposure to artificial light causes sleep disorders that are preventable. Thus light light pollution increases healthcare costs by harming the general public & public health, just as other pollutants cause harm, like sound pollution waking people up, chemical pollutants causing mutagenic & carcinogenic effects leading to cancers that are preventable.
You might now see or understand that a lot of human activity executed with ignorance or thoughtlessness often unintentionally creates harm to other people. A lot of human activities creates harm on nature, damaging eco systems, making acid air from carbon combustion emissions that acidify lakes, rivers, streams, oceans & other bodies of waters- acidic water causing algae blooms that are toxic for fish, causing losses in the fishing industry.
Generally speaking & broadly so, all pollutants, chemical, sound, light or other emitted toxins like micro plastics, causing negative outcomes known as externalities in the social sciences. These externalities mean that industrial emission dumped into nature end up in people air, food & water, making those people sick with diseases that are costly & expensive to treat with medicine, especially complicated American high technology medicine. This also means that pollutants are directly increasing the costs of healthcare, driving up heal insurance premiums & making it less feasible for the US Government to give universal healthcare to the American general public, to the citizens of America! Pollution a problem worldwide, negatively affecting the entire biosphere of Earth & all people & animals & plants & insects, fish & fungi, everything alive impacted negatively by pollutants! We cannot continue treating Earth's natural systems like a toxic waste dump for vehicle emissions. Besides, using that much atmospheric oxygen to support combustion in 10 billion passenger vehicles would reduce the concentration of oxygen in air, reducing brain function & causing IQ loss that would negatively affect them memory & executive brain function of everyone worldwide.
This means that there is an urgent moral imperative to decarbonize energy, grid energy product & transportation energy right now, with more renewables + energy storage & vastly more fission reactors with the nuclear breeder fuel cycle that makes more fuel elements that it consumes, such that thousands of IFR power reactors can make abundant cheap electricity for 10 billions people for thousands of years, without burning carbon! Nuclear energy super important as a way too stop climate change caused by human activity carbon emissions, specifically gigaton of CO2 emitted by engines, & other combustion heat power & light processes using in most sectors, in most economies, in most countries worldwide.
Carbon emission pollutants are major problem making storm systems more powerful. Carbon pollution makes droughts last longer. Carbon emissions are making flooding more intense. Carbon emissions are responsible for air pollution that is sickening the public with preventable diseases, causing pain, suffering & premature death. That's makes pollutants immoral & unethical & it makes the greedy responsible for pollutant emissions responsible for hurting, harming, killing & destroying people, nature, ecosystems; for making climate change worse faster & worse!
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