Can displaying wrong images justify a right cause? Today, we discuss pollution.
It is no longer a matter of debate that pollutants cause massive health hazards. As per the World Health Organisation (WHO), air pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019. Most of it is manifested via cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and cancer.
The following are the five main entities that cause air pollution. Those are
Particulate matter (PM)
Carbon monoxide (CO)
Ozone (O3)
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2)
Sulfur dioxide (SO2)
You may have noticed the conspicuous absence of carbon dioxide in this list. This is because CO2 is not a pollutant but a greenhouse gas that causes global warming. So, it is a bad actor, though not exactly the way one would imagine.
Now, the fallacy: below is a photo I got when I typed ‘pollution’ in the image search column, followed by another picture that came up for ‘carbon dioxide’.
The sorry thing is that neither of these shows pollutants nor CO2. These are images of cooling towers emitting water vapour; journalists have been using such images from power plants and other industries for ages to represent pollution and global warming. The reason? They make excellent visuals of dense plumes, captivating the readers. According to a 2007 Royal Society of Chemistry survey report, more than two-thirds of people in the UK believe these images are of carbon dioxide emissions and accelerating climate change.
Myth of cooling towers is ..: RSC
Ambient (outdoor) air pollution: WHO
