Aside from monetary losses, air pollution eats at beloved cultural treasures. In Athens I sat on a stone and contemplated what has been called the most beautiful building in the world. Acid deposition has caused more erosion on the marble Parthenon in the past 24 years than had occurred in 24 centuries.
The Roman Colosseum, Westminster Abbey, and the Taj Mahal are suffering similar damage. At Chartres, as with other cathedrals, stained-glass windows dating from the 12th and 13th centuries have corroded to barely recognizable images. Is combustion our contribution to the arts?
The sources of damage are not easily removed. Legislation lags because fumes come from industries badly needed for national economies, from automobiles prized for private transportation, and from high-sulfur heating oils. Besieged by budget-conscious citizens and profit-conscious industries, politicians fiddle with regulations while their Romes burn.
The problem goes far beyond buildings and cities. Our entire troposphere is a blue balloon from which there is little escape. Some pollutants degrade or change form, but others may drift for years.

For a portrait of our atmosphere, U. S. scientists sample the air at four "clean" locations in a federal program called Geophysical Monitoring for Climatic Change.
What sweeter air than atop one of Hawaii' 5 volcanoes, 13,680-foot Mauna Loa? Meteorologist Elmer Robinson drove me up its bare shoulders through lava fields sometimes jagged as cinders, sometimes smooth as swirled chocolate. In bright sunlight we looked down at clouds raining on the town of Hilo, far below.
On Mauna Loa's dry, primordial landscape nothing sprouts but technological wizardry. The air is tasted with tongue-twisting nephelometers, transmissometers, and spectrometers to better understand the aerial porridge that now surrounds us. The heavens are probed with laser light to see what particles are drifting. Dust from China reaches here, and a mystery cloud once appeared whose source was never identified, the stuff of science fiction.
For a view more mesmerizing than any fantasy, I mounted a ladder to a telescope aimed at the morning sky. A large, black obscuring disk loomed in the eyepiece to protect my retina, but at its edges flickered the light of hidden energy -- the burning sun. Here, seemingly within arm's reach, was the engine that drives this planet, hurling gases thousands of miles into space. Is that life-giving heat now perilously altered on earth?
"One of the longest continuous records of CO2 content of the air is kept here," said Mr. Robinson, director of the Mauna Loa Observatory. "We find an increase of 27 percent since the mid-l9th century. CO2 holds heat close to the earth, so the greenhouse effect is not a wild idea, it's pretty basic physics."
The greenhouse effect, with potential for altering climate, melting the polar ice caps, and raising ocean levels, has been called one of the most serious long-range environmental issues. Suddenly, it's short-range.
"The most significant thing we've seen in the past few years has been the increase in other greenhouse gases-methane and the chlorofluorocarbons," said Mr. Robinson.
"With the addition of these gases we may begin to see the effects around the turn of the century," says climatologist J. Murray Mitchell, Jr., of McLean, Virginia, who analyzes data sent from Mauna Loa.
All gases thickening the greenhouse are believed due to human activities. Combustion gives off CO2. Methane, escalating by 2 percent a year, is attributed to gases from livestock manure, additional rice fields, and digestion of termites proliferating on dead wood left by worldwide clearing of forests.
The chlorofluorocarbons are a two-edged sword. Used as refrigerants and, in some places, still used as spray-can propellants, they add to the greenhouse as they drift upward. When they reach the stratosphere, they are believed to react destructively with the gauze of ozone that protects us from excessive ultraviolet rays. A sharp rise in ultraviolet rays would increase melanomas and other malignant skin cancers and reduce crops. Melanomas have doubled worldwide in recent years, but scientists are unable to connect that fact directly to ozone depletion. It may be simply that people are spending more time outdoors.
A warmer, wetter earth, or one more seared by sun? We are not just polluting, as bad as that may be, we are tampering with basic weather-making components of our atmosphere without knowing the outcome.

THERE IS mounting evidence that our whole planet is involved. The South Pole seems fairly clean because 90 percent of earth's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere. Yet in late 1985 scientists monitoring the stratosphere detected a major hole in the protective ozone screen over Antarctica.