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Global Air Pollution, From Above
neutron_p writes "Based on satellite observations, the high-resolution global atmospheric map of nitrogen dioxide pollution makes clear just how human activities impact air quality. I'm a bit surprised not to see that many red blobs above US and the strange one is on the east of Russia."
It's here. Sorry for the bad link, should have checked it in the preview.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
you are exactly right
_ coalfire.html
but, not to take away from any of your statements at all, there is a gigantic underground coal fire in china that emits enough CO2 in one year to equal and surpass all exhaust from all cars in the US.
and that's just the coal fire burning coal, not counting all of the industrial development in china. it's no wonder things must be insane over there.
here's the first site i could find with info, there are better:
http://www.itc.nl/personal/coalfire/problem/china
i had to repost, my first post was to the wrong place.. woops.
I can't get to the link due to what appears to be the slashdot effect, but the synopsis says NO2 only.
No CO2, sulpher dioxide, methane, ozone, light hydrocarbons or other pollutants.
So to say the US is blameless is premature, you need to see all the pollutnats and how they interact.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I have a Coral cache of the pollution image map.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
National Geographic had an article recently about pollution in China and it was just down-right frightening.
Excerpts from the March 2004 issue are available here: http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0403/featu re4/index.html
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/onlcourse/chm110/outl ines/topic9.html
Global Pollution and Climate Change http://www.jri.org.uk/brief/climatechange.htm
this is a great write up with good information
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
China has prohibitted the burning of wood by anybody, and has undertaken a massive reforestation project across the nation. Wood fires produce incredible amounts of pollutants, especially open cooking fires. By reforesting wherever they can, various types of pollution will be reduced. Of course, all this takes time, but it is a good step.
The US contains 5% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources.
Which is of course, not only completely wrong, even if it was correct, it would be comparing the wrong things.
It is true that the US consumes roughly 25% of the industrially supplied energy on the planet ... but that is a far cry from concluding that the US consumes 25% of ALL world resources. In this type of energy to population comparison, Western Europe also fairs poorly by consuming a far larger share of the world's industrial energy production than its population entitles it to consume.
Of course, more relevant comparisons would be to industrially produced energy consumed per unit of economic output, or some such similar metric. In this type of comparison, the industrialized world fairs much better, than most third world nations. The amount of energy required to produce a bushel of grain in the US or France compared to sub-saharan Africa is much, much lower, and a kilo of sheep's wool in Australia is less energy intensive to produce than a kilo from South America. The US just happens to produce vastly more grain than sub-saharan Africa, so overall, so overall its grain production efforts will consume much more energy.
I don't mean to excuse wasteful or inefficient consumption of energy in the industrialized world, because there certainly is a lot of that going on, just to point out that you are not considering a realistic metric for comparison.
"Read my lips. The US contains 5% of the world's population but consumes 25% of the world's resources."
I had to respond to this, with the fact the poster conveniently left out:
The U.S. produces 31% of the worlds output.
Thus, we use the energy more efficiently than the rest of the world.
There's an even better, yet much more cynical, reason why NOx and SOx are so heavily regulated; they're the polutants which you can see and smell. SOx isn't even that bad for you, but it smells like shi^H^Hsulfur. There are other polutants which are much, much worse for you, much more deadly, but aren't as readily visible or nasally detectable.
It's sad to say, but politicians go after the obvious, not the bad. If you can't smell it, they seem to be doing their job, even if the crap you can't smell or see is killing you and little is being done to stop the use/spread/contamination.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Notice that NO2 leads to the production of ozone in the TROPOSPHERE.
The ozone layer is in the stratosphere.
Ozone in the troposphere is not all that great, since it causes a lot of problems in respiration. Ozone in the stratosphere is good since it cannot be inhaled (too far away from us) and keeps that UV radiation from hurting us.
With ozone, it's all about where it is.
-Jellisky
Breakfast Pants, Thank you for your completely incorrect post. :-)
Now go sit in the corner and get educated
In your car's engine, Nitrogen in the air combines with Oxygen in air to create oxides of nitrogen, commonly called NOx for brevity.
How does it combine? The heat of combustion of the fuel in the engine is sufficient to do it. Lean-running engines that run hotter (well, have a longer burning flame front), while more fuel efficient, also have the unfortunate problem of creating more oxides of nitrogen.
It doesn't matter what you burn in there, any combustion temperatures over a thousand degrees C or so has sufficient energy to drive the NOx chemical reaction. Petrol, Diesel, Hydrogen... all of those fuels indirectly produce NOx.
The goal in modern cars is to lower the combustion chamber temperatures, which is why most cars have some form of exhaust gas recirculation to deliberately "posion" the incoming air/fuel mix to make it burn cooler. Fuel economy suffers as a result of reducing NOx emissons.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.