Julian Warriger

The videos of the blackened skies of Tehran were pretty horrific.

It did remind me of the end of the first Gulf War back in 1991.

You may remember that as they were retreating, the Iraqi army from Kuwait, they sabotaged 800 oil wells in Kuwait, and the whole skies back then looked apocalyptic.

And I did see that there were reports of black rain in that occasion as well, which reached as far as Afghanistan.

In subsequent reports, they described the black rain as unburned oil.

So what was happening was the ferocity of the fires was moving the air so much that it was carrying up everything around it, including unburned hydrocarbons, which then drifted around.

And I think that's what some of the unburned oil then was just condensing and raiding out the descriptions of puddles of oil and pools in the desert from that fire.

Though it could also be that their soot dissolved in ordinary rainwater.

The soot particles can trigger rain.

So that's another possible explanation.

Within those plumes, there's going to be so-called polyaromatic hydrocarbons.

These are forms of benzene, which are very bad for health.

There could be dioxins, which are well-known toxins.

I saw descriptions of burning sensations, which could come from there's a lot of sulfur in this kind of oil.

There's also nitrogen burning in there and that dissolves and that makes acid rain.

So pretty nasty stuff.

Absolutely.

I did see that the Iranian health ministry reported 170,000 people seeking emergency health care in just one week.

Relating to this, the heart and respiratory problems, they did add that that's a 20 to 25 percent rise above normal level.

Tehran is already actually one of the most polluted cities in the world, partly its geography, partly because of the aging lorries that are driving around.