Global Warming Issues

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has issued a code orange air-quality advisory for today from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. in the Richmond area.

Code orange means air pollution may become unhealthy for certain sensitive groups, including children, the elderly and people suffering from asthma, heart diseases or lung diseases. Those groups can minimize the effects of air pollution by avoiding strenuous activities or outdoor exercise.

The National Weather Service is calling for sunny skies and a high of about 92 degrees in the Richmond area today.

The Red Sea Jazz Festival, held in Eilat every August, has just ended. It offered dozens of wonderful performances and hundreds of gifted musicians to tens of thousands of listeners - and not one single recycling bin.

Over the four days of the festival, Neviot sold hundreds of thousands of half-liter bottles of water at NIS 8 apiece. Yet it did not bother setting up one recycling bin. Apparently, no one conditioned its license on protecting the environment.

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“Some have argued that tree-ring data is unacceptable for this type of study,” says Michael Mann, associate professor of meteorology and geosciences and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center. “Now we can eliminate tree rings and still have enough data from other so-called ‘proxies’ to derive a long-term Northern Hemisphere temperature record.”

The proxies used by the researchers included information from marine and lake sediment cores, ice cores, coral cores and tree rings.

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On August 30, only one week after the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, there was a mass demonstration in Beijing’s Chaoyang District protesting environmental pollution. Traffic in some areas was blocked for more than three hours. Many policemen were sent to the scene and protesters were beaten up.

Many bloggers on Boxun.com were complaining of the large garbage disposal plant in the Changying and Guangzhuang areas of the Chaoyang District of Beijing. The plant employs a rubbish incinerator to burn garbage, resulting in a foul smell in these areas. Fumes from the plant contain large quantities of dioxin—a carcinogen believed to raise the risk of cancer by as much as 40 times.

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A new way to look at pollution could help assess how decades of acid rain have damaged the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park.

Historically, air pollution has been measured in terms of its source — what came out of the smokestack or the tailpipe — with emissions from each required to be less than a maximum set by the government.

But under a concept called “critical load,” pollution is measured based on where and how much falls on land or water. Critical load reflects the accumulated amount of pollution that a specific ecosytem — a mountain range, lake or river — can handle before long-term damage occurs.

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The new work uses data collected by Cluster from 2001 to 2003. During this time, Cluster amassed information about beams of electrically charged oxygen atoms, known as ions, flowing outwards from the polar regions into space. Cluster also measured the strength and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field whenever the beams were present.

Hans Nilsson, Swedish Institute of Space Physics, headed a team of space scientists who analysed the data. They discovered that the oxygen ions were being accelerated by changes in the direction of the magnetic field. “It is a bit like a sling-shot effect,” says Nilsson.

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Envisat observations from mid-August depict that a new record of low sea-ice coverage could be reached in a matter of weeks. The animation above is a series of mosaics of the Arctic Ocean created from images acquired between early June and mid-August 2008 from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument aboard Envisat. The dark grey colour represents ice-free areas while blue represents areas covered with sea ice.

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The thousands of recently planted green and purple shrublike sedum lining the roof of Con Edison’s training center in Long Island City look a bit out of place in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyline.

But the tiny absorbent leaves and modest but hardy roots of the sedum — typically found in desert climates — are at the center of a growing effort to reduce greenhouse gases, rainwater runoff and electricity demand in New York.

This month, Gov. David A. Paterson approved tax abatements to developers and building owners who install green roofs, or a layer of vegetation and rock that absorbs rainwater, insulates buildings and extends the lives of roofs. Sedum, which soaks up water quickly and releases it slowly, is an ideal plant for the job.

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When Tabithia Engle moved to Fort Mill this summer from Portland, Ore., she left behind soggy weather, Pacific salmon and arguably the best mass transit system in the United States.

But Engle is certain she brought at least one thing with her to South Carolina: the right to breathe clean air — free of the harmful effects of secondhand cigarette smoke.

“Let me tell you, today kind of feels like home,” Engle told about 40 listeners at a forum Tuesday night on a possible countywide ban on smoking in public places.

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The Zurich Office of Waste, Water, Energy and Air (Awel) routinely analyses surface waters for pesticides, and excessive pesticide concentrations are regularly found in individual watercourses. Recent measurements carried out on the Furtbach stream (at Würenlos) and on the Glatt river identified 26 active substances. In the case of 22 compounds, the quality standard specified in the Federal Water Protection Ordinance (maximum level of 0.1 µg/l) was exceeded, with concentrations in some cases being several times higher than permitted. Not all of these substances can be of agricultural origin: certain agents are prohibited for agricultural applications, or their concentrations do not exhibit the seasonal pattern typical of products used in the fields, so they must come from a different source. These findings are confirmed by studies performed by Eawag on effluents from wastewater treatment plants and on rainwater runoff in the catchment of Lake Greifen, which clearly indicate that non-agricultural sources also contribute significantly to water pollution via urban drainage.

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