pollution (Page 23)

It’s been predicted that the world will experience a severe oil shortage, starting ten years from now. One way to handle this would be to develop alternate fuels. What’s more likely to happen is that countries will burn coal instead, because there’s plenty of that left. However, scientists say that high pollution levels, of the kind caused by burning coal, make people more likely to have a stroke.

Scientists in Taiwan found there are higher hospital admission rates when pollution is high, especially in host weather. Particulates and nitrogen dioxide seem to be the main causes. Previous research shows a link between air pollution and death rates from respiratory and heart disease.
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Amanda Onion writes in abcnews.com that due to falling cargo and illegal dumping, a lot of junk ends up in the ocean. Beachcomber Curt Ebbesmeyer says a lot of loot has recently blown in due to strong southwesterly winds. He’s looking forward to finding some of the thousands of rubber duckies that fell from a Chinese cargo ship 11 years ago.

“The winds started last June and kept up through the winter,” he says. “That only happens about once every 10-20 years and things that have floated around and around the ocean for decades are turning up.”
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The smoke in the atmosphere is protecting the Earth from the effects of global warming. This means that as we send out less pollution in the future, we may find that global warming is two or even three times more than we predicted.

Top atmospheric scientists got together recently in Berlin for a meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These scientists have suspected for a long time that smoke and other particles from burning rainforests, crops and fossil fuels are blocking the sunlight and protecting us from the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions. They used to think pollution was reducing greenhouse warming by a quarter, but at the Berlin meeting, they decided it’s really reducing warming by as much as three-quarters. read more

Scientists have invented fake trees that can clean up carbon dioxide emissions. Now Brazilian botanist Marcos Buckeridge has found a living tree that’s a CO2 gas gobbler. The Jatoba is a rainforest tree that grows much faster in atmospheres with high levels of carbon dioxide.

“We took seeds and grew them in normal air, which has 360 carbon dioxide parts per million, and in parallel grew plantlets at 720 parts per million, which is the concentration expected for 2075,” Buckeridge says. “The first thing we saw was that photosynthesis doubled in the plants that were growing at the higher CO2 concentration.”
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