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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
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ApocaDocuments (3) matching "airborne pollutants" from this week [see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "airborne pollutants"]
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Fri, Dec 4, 2009 from Der Spiegel:
How Europe's Discarded Computers Are Poisoning Africa's Kids
People in the West throw away millions of old computers every year. Hundreds of thousands of them end up in Africa, where children try to eke out a living by selling the scrap. But the toxic elements in the waste are slowly poisoning them.... Acrid, black smoke drifts over the huts of the slum. The river, too, is black and thick like used oil, as it carries empty computer cases toward the ocean. Fires are blazing on the bank across the way, fueled by foam and slivers of plastic. Their flames consume the plastic material from cables, plugs and motherboards, leaving behind only metal.
There's a wind today, blowing the smoke from these infernal fires low across the ground. Breathing in too deeply is painful to the lungs, and the people tending the fires are sometimes nothing more than vague, foggy silhouettes.... Fourteen years old but small for his age, Bismarck scours the ground for anything the older boys might have left behind after burning a batch of computers. It might be bits of copper cable, the motor from a hard drive, or leftover pieces of aluminum. The magnets in his speaker also pick up screws or steel plugs.
Bismarck drops everything he finds into his bag. Once the bag is half full, he can sell the metal and buy some rice, maybe a tomato too, or even a chicken drumstick grilled over a refurbished car wheel rim. But today, the boy says, he still hasn't found enough, and he disappears again into the smoke. ...
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I'm posting this important story on my new computer!
ApocaDoc permalink
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Thu, Dec 3, 2009 from FECYT, via EurekAlert:
CO2 levels rising in troposphere over rural areas
Spanish researchers have measured CO2 levels for the past three years in the troposphere (lower atmosphere) over a sparsely inhabited rural area near Valladolid. The results, which are the first of their kind in the Iberian Peninsula, show that the levels rose "significantly" between 2002 and 2005.
Over recent years, physicists and meteorologists have been trying to find out about carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and how these have evolved in the troposphere over various urban and rural areas around the planet. Now a scientific team from the University of Valladolid (UVA) has published the first -- and to date the only -- measurements for the Iberian Peninsula.... The study... shows that CO2 levels increased by 8 ppm (parts per million) between 2002 and 2005. A broader study has led the researchers to predict "an annual increase of 3 ppm" in the study area. ...
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Rural tropospheres -- they're just a theory, right?
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Mon, Nov 30, 2009 from San Diego Union Tribune:
Carbon dioxide not the only climate enemy
By quickly arresting soot, methane, low-level ozone and hydrofluorocarbons, the researchers said the world can delay climate change by roughly 40 years -- enough time to significantly trim emissions of carbon dioxide.
So-called fast-action strategies generally rely on available technologies so that they can be launched in two or three years with relatively little cost, according to advocates for that approach.
They said trimming potent lesser-known pollutants will produce results in a matter of decades while carbon-dioxide remain in the atmosphere for centuries even after emissions stop. Many scientists say it's important to avoid raising the world temperature by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, a "tipping point" at which they predict major irreversible problems such as disappearing ice sheets.
"As important as the CO2 side is, it's not enough to save us from irreversible and catastrophic changes," said Durwood Zaelke, a sustainable development expert at UC Santa Barbara. "We need these fast-action strategies to put the brakes on." ...
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Don't just arrest them -- throw 'em in jail!
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