Not Quite Off the Hook But Getting Closer.

Okay, so we in the industrialized nations of the northern hemisphere, are the heavy emitters of bad stuff that gets pumped into the atmosphere - CO2, methane, ozone and such. Most of what's already up there has come from us.

Until now it's been a story of the wealthy bad guys versus the impoverished good guys,  the David and Goliath story of the developed world and the vulnerable and relatively blameless Third World.

Now, however, when those Third Worlders start pointing their self-righteous fingers at us we can point ours right back at them.

When it comes to air pollution, a new study has found countries close to the equator do more damage than their northern neighbours, even when those in the tropics produce fewer emissions.

...That means where we pollute matters more than how much we pollute, at least when it comes to ozone-producing chemicals from car exhaust fumes, power plants, biomass burning and more. 

So while China's emissions have increased more than India's and Southeast Asia's from 1980 to 2010, the last two have contributed more to the total global ozone increase, the researchers say.

The intense, heat-producing sunlight near the equator speeds up the chemical reactions that form ozone. The higher temperatures also push the air up faster, transporting more pollutants higher into the troposphere, where they stick around longer and produce more ozone.

There you have it. We're off the hook in a way, sort of, maybe. When it comes to ozone at least.

In a related story, the sky is actually falling.

Cooling in the stratosphere is causing it to shrink, lowering that layer by "a number of kilometres", NASA noted recently.

Our burning of fossil fuels and emissions of other greenhouse gases mean more of the earth's heat that would have been radiated back to space – warming the stratosphere on the way – is being trapped at lower levels of the atmosphere.

"It's like when you insulate your roof – your house warms but your attic will get a bit cooler," says Steven Sherwood, a climate scientist at the University of NSW. Those "attic" temperatures have cooled 2-3 degrees since the 1960s.

Steve Sends China Our Oil, They Send Us Their - Ozone?

As much as 20% of ground level ozone in the western US is arriving from China.

Scientists have been documenting the phenomenon of pollution crossing the Pacific Ocean since the 1990s. Most research so far has focused on how imported emissions affect average pollution levels, but the latest analysis goes further, says Meiyun Lin, an atmospheric chemist at Princeton University in New Jersey, who is the lead author of the study. "We show that Asian emissions directly contribute to ground-level pollution in the United States."

Using chemical modeling, Lin and her colleagues distinguished between locally generated pollution and that arriving from thousands of miles away. They analzsed air-quality data from satellites and ground measurements to track the passage of ozone from Asia's churning factories to the western United States over the course of a few days in mid-2010.

They found that the majority of US ground pollution came from local sources, but as much as 20 percent was attributable to Asian emissions.

So the Chinese get our bitumen, refine it into petroleum products, burn those for energy needed to flood Wal-Mart shelves with their wares, and send us ozone as a free bonus.