Let’s have a fundamental look at our atmosphere. What is it good for? You could say: „That we can breathe!“ But why do we need to breathe? Well, we are metabolizing: We need oxy-gen to burn carbon and hydrogen in our body cells to obtain energy, which enables us to do things. In turn we exhale carbon dioxide and oxygen dihydrate – you could also say “water”. Plants take up this CO2 and H2O and convert it back into carbohydrates (CH2O)n and pure oxygen O2. We buy these carbohydrates (food) in the store and burn it with the O2, which luckily is still free. So actually our atmosphere primarily serves as an environment to ex-change substances. Unluckily it can also be used as a garbage dump for any gaseous waste. Sulfur oxides SOx, nitrogen oxides NOx, and halogens, to name a few. Actually CO2 and H2O are also waste, but plants keep the CO2 level low. And water …, well we love it. Unwanted amounts of garbage my harm us, but during the last centuries it turned out that the thermal control property of our atmosphere blanket suffers more from the garbage than we do. And unfortunately, some of the garbage, such as halogens and fluorocarbons, don’t get recycled in the atmosphere. They just stay there for a long time. Tune in again soon!