This latter question is currently a driving force behind the growing need for atmospheric chemists in Canada. There are a number of critical environmental issues associated with a changing atmosphere, including photochemical smog, global climate change, toxic air pollutants, acidic deposition, and stratospheric ozone depletion. All of these issues affect Canadians, and a great deal of research and development activity aimed at understanding and hopefully solving some of these problems is underway. The importance of Atmospheric Chemistry has been acknowledged by awarding the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 to the Atmospheric Scientists P. Crutzen, M. Molina and F. S. Rowland. NO2 is a brown gas and at sufficiently high levels can contribute to urban haze.
Ozone is a powerful oxidizing agent, and a toxic gas.
A principal activity of atmospheric chemists is to study and determine how we might reverse this trend. The Chemistry of Atmospheric Pollutants Global Warming Fossil fuels are composed mostly of carbon. When they are burned this carbon is released into the atmosphere, mainly in the form of carbon dioxide, CO2. We currently emit roughly 5 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year. As a result, there has been a steady increase in global atmospheric levels of CO2.