New Scientist: Hold your breath. Air pollution kills more than 2 million people worldwide every year.
By using climate models to simulate what air pollution was like in 1850 and 2000, Jason West at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his colleagues have estimated its effect on current death rates. The team links ozone to about 470,000 deaths per year from respiratory disease; increases in particulates - fine particles that penetrate the lungs - are behind 2.1 million deaths from heart and lung...