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Posts Tagged ‘pollution’



Soil Contamination

Published by Artemis Mindrinou on July 17th, 2008 in Travel & Nature.

Blocky soil structure typical in the subsoil of southeastern US soils.Soil covers most of the surface of the Earth’s land. It occurred after the erosion of rocks, due to strong winds, water, ice and due to the activity of living organisms. Soil is usually suitable for plants and small organisms to grow and live. However, human activities have altered the natural soil environment of many areas, making it hostile to organisms.

Humanity deposits many toxic substances under the ground. Most of those are radioactive materials, pesticides, heavy metals and other kind of poisonous wastes. Even if they are first deposited in lakes, rivers or the sea, waters transfer most of them in the soil, when the latter absorbs water. It happens the other way round as well, as chemicals within soil are transferred with the rain into marine ecosystems.

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Pollutants from coal-based electricity generation kill 170,000 people annually

Published by Dr Gideon Polya on June 14th, 2008 in Energy.

Pollutants from coal-based electricity generation kill 170,000 people annually

The image shows the old Cahokia Power Plant in Sauget, IL which has been decommissioned for 31 years. Photo: Jay Dugger

Top British climate scientist Professor James Lovelock FRS has warned that over 6 billion people will die this century due to unaddressed climate change. Already 16 million people die avoidably in the world each year due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see: “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007). It is already clear from declining agricultural production due to drought and massive storm surge disasters in India, Bangladesh, Burma and the US that global warming is already impacting on global avoidable mortality.

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Are you sure you know all the reasons why shopping destroys the environment?

Published by Artemis Mindrinou on June 2nd, 2008 in Business & Politics.

Knabbel went shopping by \"jpockele\" from Flickr.comShopping can be a really refreshing habit that has been proved to make the purchasers feel happier. It also satisfies basic human needs. Thus, it would be a pie in the sky to say that shopping should be stopped. But it can’t continue with the pace it has now either.

Visiting the shops means using means of transport, which burn fossil fuels and produce carbon dioxide,( sometimes monoxide which is worse), and other gases. These gases are the main factors that causes breathing problems, the greenhouse effect, and of course, global warming. Even if you shop online, transportations do take place, as the products come to you. It is an eco way of shopping only when done wisely.

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Pollution causes baldness

Published by Simon Leufstedt on May 6th, 2008 in Fashion & Beauty.

Pollution causes baldnessNow we can count in baldness as another nasty side effect of pollution. According to a new research, by academics at the University of London, baldness has been linked with environmental factors, such as air pollution and smoking.

“The scientists believe toxins and carcinogens found in polluted air can stop hair growing by blocking mechanisms that produce the protein from which hair is made. Baldness is known to be hereditary, but the new research suggests that environmental factors could exacerbate hair loss.”

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Solar power from Africa could power all of Europe

Sahara desert in Morocco

The image shows the sun shining through the clouds on the Sahara desert in Morocco. Photo by: GETA.80.

The French President Nicolas Sarkozy earlier this summer launched, with the support of EU, a new Mediterranean union with the aim to “tackle issues such as regional unrest, immigration to pollution.”

The new international body will include 16 non-EU states from around the Mediterranean and all 27 EU member states. The union will focus on dealing with energy, security, counter-terrorism, immigration and trade. The union will include 756 million people from Western Europe to the Jordanian desert.

Some say that the Union was launched mainly because Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to “exchange” nuclear power expertise with North African gas reserves. Nicolas Sarkozy on the other hand says the union is supposed “to ensure the region’s people could love each other instead of making war.”

But some people are more positive and hope the union is the first steps towards large scale solar plants in northern Africa with focus of generating green and renewable electricity to Europe.

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Possibly the most graphic treatment of global warming that has yet been published, Six Degrees is what readers of Al Gore's best-selling An Inconvenient Truth or Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point will turn to next. Written by the acclaimed author of High Tide, this highly relevant and compelling book uses accessible journalistic prose to distill what environmental scientists portend about the consequences of human pollution for the next hundred years.

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