This city stinks; literately. The air in any city is positively revolting. This comes as no surprise to anyone. After all, a city is high on man-made structures and low on vegetation. All the stinky molecules float around, contaminating our air with nowhere to go.

I hear Tehran in Iran is very bad with pollution, especially since they have no wind. If you lived somewhere where the visibility on the street is less than a blizzard on Mt. Washington, you would eventually get used to it. That is why Bostonians might not realize how bad the air is, and they can always argue that it must be better than Mexico City.

As a native of “Cow Hampshire,” where the towns seem to be carved out of forest and the major source of pollution is bovine, I can distinctly smell a loss in the quality of air. So far, the more populated the city I visit, the more tainted is the lung food.

I did some intense, in-depth research for five minutes and dug up these startling facts:

Boston and other cities in America have greatly decreased the number of air pollutants, especially in the 1990’s. These pollutants include carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter (dust, soot, and smoke).

Compared to other places this city is doing well: about 90 million Americans live in more unhealthy air than in Boston, and worldwide, who knows how many billions live in severe toxicity. The EPA Air Quality Index in Massachusetts is usually in the “good” range (less than AQI 51).

Yet over 50 percent of residents in the Greater Boston area believe that the air quality is the same or worse than it was ten years ago. The truth is that for the past nine years, Boston’s only violation of EPA standards has been in ozone levels, with no “unhealthful” levels of carbon monoxide.

Ozone, a colorless gas, may be good in the stratosphere, but in the troposphere down where humans breathe it is bad. Ozone is a strong oxidant that damages lungs. The fact that Boston and other metros are below various EPA “primary” standards does not mean that the air still won’t reduce the function of your lungs or cause delayed effects such as cancer, respiratory irritation, nervous system problems, and birth defects.

Most scientific studies of air toxin effects were done on rats, which is what the standards for health risks are based on.

So we may have less air pollution than in the 70s, but is it really healthy? How many years will it take off your life? Remember, too, that growing youngsters and the elderly are more susceptible to the toxins in the air, as are very sensitive people. The fight for clean air continues, though.

President George W. Bush, despite his corporate oil roots, proclaimed earlier this year a two-part goal for 2010 and 2018 to lower sulfur dioxide emissions by 73 percent, nitrogen oxide emissions by 67 percent, and mercury emissions by 69 percent.

Some day far in the future, with all our advanced technology, we will have a city that does not stink.