That page is from 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greenhouse_gas&ol...
Society uses labels to group things together so that we can treat similar things similarly for various purposes. For example, when we talk about “education” we usually mean teaching kids in schools or colleges. Of course, there’s lots of other things you can call “education.” But if the Department of Education comes in and says it’s going to regulate technical presentations at software conferences because that’s also “education,” then you’d say: “that’s not what people mean by the word education in this context.” That is, we have a consensus about what “education” encompasses and what it doesn’t for purposes of government regulation, and seminars at conferences falls outside that understanding.
Because society uses labels to delineate the boundaries between different legal regimes and sources of authority, and adhering to those boundaries is important. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) can't point to the traffic on a fiber cable within a data center and say it falls within their jurisdiction because that's also "communications."
It's especially important in this context, because the half-century-old laws and regulations designed to control soot emissions from factory smokestacks is ill-suited to managing CO2 emissions. The fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act is that pollution can be controlled at the source with control technologies (RACT, BACT, etc.).
This focus on control technologies puts well-defined guardrails on the EPA. The EPA can't go around making big decisions about how factories work or what people produce. They can simply tell you to put the best reasonably available scrubbers on your factory. That approach completely breaks down when it comes to CO2, because there is no such thing as a "CO2 scrubber." Treating CO2 as a pollutant puts the EPA into a role of supervising the energy sector that the agency simply was never designed to do.
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
Don't be so sure about "obviously" when they start talking about "water vapor emissions"...
A completely useful (and consistent with the modern usage of the word) definition of "pollution" can be worded as:
"anthropogenic alteration of the open environment with negative consequences on ecosystems or society".
Have you heard about noise pollution? Match it with the definition above.
CO2 emitted by combustion from human activities is orders of magnitude more than what any natural biological process emits.
Now you can see why CO2 emitted by fossil fuels combustion is, by any logic, pollution.
The problem with your definition is that it encompasses basically all of society. Everything humans do alters the environment, mostly for the worse. By embracing such an expansive definition of “pollution,” you’d turn the EPA into a super-regulator of vast swaths of the economy.
Software people should be able to understand the importance of separation of modules. You don’t put logic for process scheduling inside a file system module. It’s the same problem with treating CO2 as an air pollutant. Power generation is 1/6 of the economy. The mix of power generation sources the country should have isn’t just an environmental question. It cuts across society—it implicates the economy, national security, industrial policy, etc. Consider, for example, how Germany’s over-reliance on Russian gas turned into a national security problem for them after Russia invaded Ukraine. An environmental regulator isn’t at the right level to be making that decision.
No, there is no issue to have that definition encompassing all of what in society causes damage to the open environment[1].
Note that your wording, "encompasses [...] all of society", does not correspond to my stance. It only encompasses what causes negative externalities in the way I defined.
It is crucial that there exist such an agency (EPA) that examines these environmental negative externalities (let's just call it pollution now, as it is so defined), and considers ways to limit it.
Each agency has its own axis, and it is the combination of them that is effective: if you only leave the energy sector to e.g. the USEA (US Energy Association), they won't have the incentive, definition, or analysis axis in the direction of looking at human health or forests decline, purely because it is not in their definition or their statuses.
Similarly, if you are left with just the EPA, they won't provide the expertise to evaluate if this or that type of electricity generation is feasible and with which kind of technology.
It just the division of expertise, the division of labor, and that's why scientists and engineers work together across domains!
[1]: damage should be defined relative to a severely detrimental impact to the biosphere or to human society. The environment is understood to be open as defined by not having clear boundaries that may, for example, keep the impact strictly contained within the limits of a volume property of the agent of this impact. Air is typically not contained in such a delimited volume, and is thus open environment. Water also flows freely and is connected to e.g. big bodies of water. And so on.
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About "modules":
"Software people should be able to understand the importance of separation of modules."
The "energy" module cares about the watt-hours produced but doesn't care about the cancer caused by the smoke!! (or, for CO2, about the planet-scale extinction event caused by raising temperatures, or the multiplying forest fires)
Thus you need the "pollution assessment and mitigation" module!
There. Proved to you that I am a SE :))
Source?
The thing that is also known as "air pollution"?
I want to tell you to stop being a moron, but its against this site's TOS.
Is the IPCC also “morons?”
CO2 can be pollution while still allowing plants to grow, plants use CO2 in their growth cycle, if you didn't know, they don't use other greenhouse gases to grow.
Page 9 lists CO2 as the first item in a list of greenhouse gases. I don't want to spend all day read this 37 year old report.
In what world are greenhouse gases not air pollutants?
It is only in the post-truth society of right wing anti-climate influencers that apparently someone tries to redefine the terms to exclude it.
But yeah, more familiar pollutants are dirty or caustic or radioactive, and chew holes in things or give you lung diseases or poison the wildlife, things like that, so it was a little jarring. Though I suppose we had CFCs, they didn't do anything directly harmful either.
> 2.2.4 Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g. by air pollution).
Help me parse this according to your understanding that "CO2 was an air pollutant 30 years ago." If CO2 is a subcategory of "air pollution," then it makes no sense to list "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors." It wouldn't be grammatical. The report uses this basic sentence structure, referring to "CO2 enrichment" as one thing in distinction to "other environmental factors" including "air pollution" several times. Explain to me how that's consistent with your position?
It has been a pollutant as soon as it has started to be emitted at large scale through combustion, in particular of fossil fuels.
People who deny it are usually very brain-washed by far-right/alt-right propaganda, which tries to hammers into their brains that "it's just the same stuff that you exhale when you breathe".
They don't understand (or rather, they haven't been told!) that the scales are incommensurate.
This GHG is emitted (alongside methane, by the way), by humans, in such quantities that it severely impacts the thermal balance of the planet, and threatens an extinction-event comparable to what only large asteroids are usually capable of.
For example, on p. 55.
> "Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g. by air pollution)"
That clearly refers to "air pollution" as an example of "other environmental factors"--something different from "CO2 enrichment" (rising CO2 levels). The report uses the same terminology on pp. 88 and 97. Throughout the report, it treats "greenhouse gasses" as it's own category that can interact with "air pollution"--but is different from air pollution.
Greenhouse gas refers to any type of gas that makes up our atmosphere. Air pollution are substances entering the atmosphere that degrade air quality and human health.
Therefore air pollution is always going to be a greenhouse gas, but not every greenhouse gas is going to be air pollution.
CO2 is the principle man-made GHG that all the others are compared against. CO2 is what the IPCC refers to as long-lived climate forcer, which are gases that have a warming effect on the scale of decades, fitting the definition of air pollution.
CO2 is a pollutant and has been for as long as humans have been pumping out tons of it into the atmosphere.