Global Warming Issues

The Antarctic ozone hole reached its annual maximum on Sept. 12, 2008, stretching over 27 million kilometers, or 10.5 square miles. The area of the ozone hole is calculated as an average of the daily areas for Sept. 21-30 from observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite.

NOAA scientists, who have monitored the ozone layer since 1962, have determined that this year’s ozone hole has passed its seasonal peak for 2008. Data is available at online.

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The current ordinance that Springfield has regarding smoking in restaurants is too weak. The Springfield City Council and the next governor of Missouri should work to ban smoking in all public places. Secondhand smoke is a public health issue. It is also a personal one: I have a right to breathe clean air.

In July 2003, Springfield passed a law prohibiting smoking in restaurants, with the exception of eateries with annual alcohol sales exceeding $200,000 or when 50 percent or more of sales come from alcohol. There is also an exception for restaurants with 50 seats or less that may allow smoking, and a restaurant that sells liquor can allow smoking in a separate, ventilated area. If you ask me, way too many “exceptions.”

Many states have placed a ban on smoking in public establishments. For example, the Clean Indoor Air Act became effective in New York in July 2003 and the Freedom to Breathe Act became effective in Minnesota in October 2007. It is now time for the state of Missouri to follow their lead and enact legislation that will ban smoking in all public establishments: restaurants, stores, bowling alleys, bars, etc.

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LIKE his uncle, his grandfather and many of their neighbors, Arie Versendaal spent decades working at the Maytag factory here, turning coils of steel into washing machines.

When the plant closed last year, taking 1,800 jobs out of this town of 16,000 people, it seemed a familiar story of American industrial decline: another company town brought to its knees by the vagaries of global trade.

Except that Mr. Versendaal has a new factory job, at a plant here that makes blades for turbines that turn wind into electricity. Across the road, in the old Maytag factory, another company is building concrete towers to support the massive turbines. Together, the two plants are expected to employ nearly 700 people by early next year.

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To Save the planet we have approximately 2,580 days or 97 months. Climate experts argue that it is precisely then will be the critical threshold, and it will be impossible to stop the temperature that it will not exceed 2 degrees Celsius. 
Meeting begins tomorrow in Brussels on climate change issues. Hardly the first time participants understand that the power and the other clock, not only to the hook on the office wall. It does not count minutes before the Apocalypse, but recalls that all we do from now on, is extremely important. 

Or climate change will beat us, or we have it. Climate change will force us to change, but change and the unknown is always afraid of, though we have the necessary knowledge, tools and technologies that change the sušvelnintume and veiktume responsibly. 

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In a recent study of 48 Boston-area patients, all of whom had coronary artery disease, 24-hour Holter monitors were used to examine electrocardiograms for the conductivity change called an ST-segment depression, which may indicate inadequate blood flow to the heart or inflamed heart muscle.

The average 24-hour levels for all pollutants included in the analysis were below accepted or proposed National Air Quality Standard thresholds, meaning patients were breathing air considered healthy.

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If an indoor smoking ban set to go into effect this Thursday is to clear the air, smokers and the establishments that welcome them should know about it.
Apparently, they don’t.

“The state is very, very poor — communication-wise,” said Mike McCloskey, who owns Railroad Street Bar & Grill in Linfield.

The statewide smoking ban has been touted as landmark legislation for Pennsylvania’s public health. The law would ban smoking in most public places, but among exceptions are bars and taverns that generate less than 20 percent of total sales from food.

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Lavish parties tend to leave a hangover as the problems of daily life, put aside for the celebrations, come crowding back. China’s Olympic party is not likely to prove an exception. The full legacy of the extraordinary events of 2008 in the People’s Republic of China will take many years to emerge, but in the short term, a number of pressing problems are clear.

The Olympics, with its political project of displaying China’s power as much to its own population as to the rest of the world, has been the prime focus of domestic propaganda for several years, rallying people behind the nationalist theme with the promise to situate China as a restored power. It worked: recent opinion polls have reported a strong feelgood effect, with high levels of satisfaction with the government and the direction of the country.

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The MILAGRO Campaign (Megacity Initiative: Local and Global Research Observations) monitored air quality in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area throughout the month of March, 2006. Headed by the Molina Center for Energy and the Environment in La Jolla, California, MILAGRO – the acronym means “miracle” in Spanish – is an international scientific collaboration supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and other agencies in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe. Five DOE labs contributed to the study, including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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The Giant Mine in Canada is in the sub-arctic. It contains over 230,000 tonnes of arsenic-containing dust, making it one of the most polluted places on Earth as well as one of the most inhospitable.

“Water seeps through the mine cracks carrying the arsenic with it as it drips down the walls,” said Thomas Osborne from University College London, UK. “We discovered new types of bacteria living in biofilms on the walls of Giant Mine that consume arsenic compounds contained in the polluted water seeping through.”

Arsenic is toxic to all living cells, and in people causes fatal cancers of the lung, liver, kidney and bladder. It also causes cirrhosis and gangrene, and on a wider scale seriously damages wildlife in fragile environments. Arsenic contamination is a global problem, with some countries including Vietnam, West Bengal, Mexico, Canada, Argentina, Bangladesh and USA all severely affected.

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The increase in atmospheric concentrations of man-made aerosols—tiny particles suspended in the air—from such sources as transportation, industry, agriculture, and urban land use not only poses serious problems to human health, but also has an effect on weather and climate.

Recent studies suggest that increased aerosol loading may have changed the energy balance in the atmosphere and at the Earth’s surface, and altered the global water cycle in ways that make the climate system more prone to precipitation extremes.

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