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Organic Pollutants Poison the Roof of the World
ananyo writes "Toxic chemicals are accumulating in the ecosystems of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, researchers warn in the first comprehensive study to assess levels of organic pollutants in that part of the world. Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are carbon-based compounds that are resistant to break-down. Some originate from the burning of fuel or the processing of electronic waste, and others are widely used as pesticides or herbicides or in the manufacture of solvents, plastics and pharmaceuticals. Some POPs, such as the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and the herbicide Agent Orange, can cause diseases such as cancers, neurological disorders, reproductive dysfunction and birth defects. The researchers found large amounts of POPs (including DDT) in various components of the ecosystems such as soil, grass, trees and fish in the Himalayas and in the Tibetan plateau, especially at the highest elevations."
... that will say that it's actually the cows causing this!
Curiously yours, crip.
burning of fuel or the processing of electronic waste? Everything is "organic". Nothing is man made besides god.
Organic Pollutants Poison the Roof of the World
Damn it! I always bought my pollutants in the Organic aisle at the supermarket. I might as well stick with the regular pollutants and save a few bucks.
How long until Monsanto or other evil company sues the sherpas for patent infrigement?
TFA says "large amounts of...".
How many parts per trillion is "large"?
POOP = Persistent Olfactory Organic Pollutants"
Sometime.
Whatever humans pump out, we aren't going to beat the big volcanic episodes of past history. Or the big ones yet to come.
Life is a tenacious process, and has survived much worse before.
But if you want to panic, or blame your preferred 'enemie du jour', don't let me stop you. Humans seem to like panicking. Perhaps it's the adrenaline rush you get with self-induced anger....
When I read "Organic Pollutants", I initially thought the article was referring to humanity.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
No need for government regulation of these chemicals, the farmer in Iowa will adjust his activities to save the mentioned lands.
If you drink them, you can be immortal.
looking at origins of these pollutants in the article, neither from China nor USA. w00t, we can keep pumping out the stank
Well, as most involved with roof-based issues are well aware, the effects of such poisons could be deferred by moving the roof further away from humankind. In other words, we could raise the roof, dawg.
Unless, of course, the toxic elements have set the roof, the roof, the roof on fire. In that case, most scientists would strongly urge that such a situation does not require water, and it is generally safest to let it burn.
You'd think life here is based on carbon..............
problems will be solved by taxing the h*ll out of the common citizen.
Once all the h*ll is gone it'll be the rapture and we won't have to worry anymore...
which is melting away all those glaciers where the POP's are lodging, then the load of carcinogens is washing into the Ganges...no matter what the folks down stream do or don't do about their own sources of pollution. Now the poor of India can have equal access to the cancer rates of the first-world economies.
If we can't spread the wealth around, what good are we anyway?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
How would you try solving the problem then?
what in the actual fuck is "the roof of the world"
Good people go to bed earlier.
you mean aside from what we do today by actively ignoring it or denying its existence altogether? (we being the U.S.A)
If plants are taking in these POPs, then pretty soon Monsanto will take care of the problem by suing to stop basic biology from happening.
DDT is villianized far out of proportion these days. Although admittedly they are both POPs, setting it rhetorically alongside Agent Orange as though they are the same is absurd.
DDT's carcinogenic properties are not really all that serious. We expose ourselves to more carcinogenic substances all the time, such as gasoline fumes. These minor effects were played up by DDT's opponents back in the day to scare people into accepting a DDT ban. Similarly, the acute toxicity is minor. To my knowledge, there's only one case where someone died from consuming DDT, and in that case the DDT may have contained other harmful chemicals.
On the other side of the coin, DDT saved millions of lives by eliminating malarial mosquitoes and other harmful insects. It easily saved more lives than it took.
Agent Orange on the other hand has caused awful damage in the areas where it was used extensively. If DDT was even close to as dangerous as it was made out to be by its opponents, then the present day impacts would be like a worldwide version of the Agent Orange boondoggle...times 1000.
Because the world is humanities's toilet now.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Oh give me a break, for the past few decades the dominant thing the government says about taxes is they have to be cut, no matter what the consequences.
Ugly Bags of Mostly Water are the real problem.
Bacteria in a petri dish will eventually die from living in their own "filth."
Ugly Bags of Mostly Water are no different, and will continue to reproduce as long as there is a food source, until waste management becomes impossible and they die off from being poisoned by their own excrement.
For each year that these chemicals take, they give you five in return.
You're a republican, aren't you.
I dunno. At the level of carcinogens in the study, washing all of that into the Ganges may actually make that cesspool cleaner.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Sadly, for a people who live in relative isolation, they are getting poisoned by the rest of us.
Even though they ignore our ways of life for their simple one, they end up not being able to trust the air and the water they are surrounded with as it delivers them poisons.
This world is too fractured to come up with viable options for actually cleaning up and reversing the damages we've done.
Yet we must, because eventually, we will cause damages which will be hard to revert from.
We need to normalize our social and political landscape across the entire globe and we need to figure out a true viable global economy which factors in, the proper way of doing business which enforces keeping our environment clean and pollutant free.
We have the technology, but we don't have the maturity. This planet is being exploited to the bones by a few very greedy bastards and the flock of sheeps who won't do nothing about it.
Better grow up folks, because this is the only planet we have.
Profit at the cost of our environment is wrong.
Unless you don't care about the legacy you leave your children and their future progeny.
You don't understand carbon trading do you? have you looked into at all, of just repeat what you hear on the Tee Vee?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So what are "we" doing today that we think is absolutely fine, but in a year will become the new reviled buzzword of the EcoMovement?
For instance, you get rid of your SUV for an electric car, you have hidden you carbon footprint until you get you first electric bill of recharging your car. Unless you have a private hydro source of electric.
I read the title and said "hmm", then I read what they claimed caused the "organic" pollution and said "What the F&*K!?". If the pollutants are caused by burning fuel, then it's not "organic" pollution. By their definition, absolutely everything should be considered organic. All computers must be 100% organic since they are made of Silicone, Copper, Gold, etc... Nuclear weapons are "organic" too, and the heat they give off is just energy which must be "organic" also.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I am sure this is a valuable piece of work, as it is claimed as the first of it's type and will be very useful as a benchmark. Analytic chemistry has progressed tremendously over the 40 years I was a practicing chemist, to the point where concentrations of particularly dangerous materials are possible to measure at femtograms per liter. At those concentrations you are detecting a very small number of molecules in a sample,
But since it's the first it really doesn't say much in terms of the progression of the state of affairs in these ecologies. It will be very interesting to see what the results are in a decade or two; whether the measures we are taking now to reduce the presence of these various very bad actors in the environment are being effected by environmental controls or not.
People greatly underestimate the versatility of Nature as a chemist. Some of the worst chemicals found in these studies are formed not only by man, but by Nature as well. For example DDT like chemicals have been found to exist in every evolutionary epoch.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Naturally_Occurring_Organohalogen_Compou.html?id=u45Z-kh61ngC
http://books.google.com/books?id=S2fvZsZwgQ4C&pg=PA185&dq=naturally+produced+ddt&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p0FoUe69C6nD4APzwoGYBA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=naturally%20produced%20ddt&f=false
Lets link to a vague report based on a paywalled paper. There is no way to look at the actual numbers to verify the article's assertions.
More alarmingly, the researchers also detected large amounts of POPs in various components of the ecosystems such as soil, grass, trees and fish in the Himalayas ...
Terms like "large amounts" are meaningless as it is a relative subjective term. My "large amount" may be different than their "large amount". Show me the numbers. It looks to me like they want people to buy their report.
Arsenic is forever!
It worked for CFCs...
...and is harmless to humans and other life forms.
I worked for many years in vector borne disease surveillance. Most of what you have said is wrong or misleading.
DDT based mosquito "eradication" programs never eradicated any mosquito populations, because a single surviving gravid Anopheles mosquito can lay over two hundred eggs at a time. But malaria has a weakness that mosquito borne encephalitis does not have: most strains of Plasmodium have no significant enzootic reservoirs -- that is to say most strains that infect humans, infect humans exclusively. This means if you can eradicate human-to-human transmission, you eradicate the underlying infectious agent.
In the late 40s DDT *was* instrumental in eradicating endemic malaria in the US, but that was through over four million "domestic" treatments -- applications. These are treatments of the *interiors* of homes. In domestic applications, the DDT does not enter the food chain and does not bio-accumulate.
DDT is not magic pixie dust. It's not the only pesticide that works, and it is neither necessary nor sufficient for malaria eradication. It is, however, valuable. It is cheap, effective, and relatively long-lasting, which is a huge boon in domestic applications because it reduces the number of re-treatments you have to do. That same property of longevity makes it a very poor choice for agricultural use.
I attended a number of meetings where the prospect of using DDT for malaria eradication in the third world was discussed. The key problem is that many places where it is needed are desperately poor, and theft is rife. I knew plenty of researchers who had their field equipment stolen; some of them took to putting their computers and backups in a backpack and slept with it to keep from losing their data. There is a high risk of DDT being stolen and diverted to agricultural use, where its drawbacks come into play: under certain conditions it can persist in the soil for years, and it has a high potential to bio-accumulate, so even small concentrations can have effects on predatory animals. Furthermore runoff into water sources in sub-lethal concentrations has a high potential to create DDT resistance in target species including Anopheles, the vector of malaria. That could undermine attempts to eradicate a number of mosquito borne diseases other than malaria. This could have significant effects on attempts to control many mosquito borne diseases, malaria included.
Well, this is kind of a strawman argument. I've worked with people in the pesticide industry, in public health, and with environmental groups, and as far as I can see the images you mention here are entirely a figment of your own imagination. Everybody who studied this problem understand there are risks and benefits to using DDT, mainly they differ on how they weigh the risks.
In any case, if we knew that domestic DDT applications could eradicate malaria in an area back in 1950, why wasn't it eradicated worldwide? Because there's never been the political will to do that. There has never been a worldwide ban on DDT (which is why they're seeing way up in Tibet), so why hasn't it been eradicated in more places? Because there was never the political will to do it. If the will existed, we could do it, with or without DDT, just with somewhat less initial cash outlay for DDT.
Let me reiterate: DDT is not magic pixie dust. It *does* have potential to reduce the initial *cost* of eradicating malaria (except in SE Asia, where zoonotic forms of Plasmodium exist). But wherever malaria could be eradicated *with* DDT, it could also be eradicated with something else, say with synthetic pyrethrins. Pyrethrins have a very short half-life outdoors, reducing problems of pesticide resistance and bio-accumulation. The main drawback is that they also have a somewhat shorter half-life indoors, requiring more repeat treatments in the eradication phase. That'd still be a bargain in terms of human life.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some POPs, such as the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and the herbicide Agent Orange [emphasis added], can cause diseases such as cancers, neurological disorders, reproductive dysfunction and birth defect [sic]
As a non-expert, I caught this.
Agent Orange isn't a single chemical compound; it's a 50/50 mix of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, the former of which is contaminated with trace amounts of very carcinogenic dioxin POPs because of how it's manufactured. From Wikipedia:
2,4,5-T itself has low toxicity, with oral LD50 of 389 mg/kg in mice and 500 mg/kg in rats. However, the manufacturing process for 2,4,5-T contaminates this chemical with trace amounts of 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). TCDD is a carcinogenic persistent organic pollutant with long-term effects on the environment. With proper temperature control during production of 2,4,5-T, TCDD levels can be held to about .005 ppm. Before the TCDD risk was well-understood, early production facilities lacked proper temperature controls and individual batches tested later were found to have as much as 60 ppm of TCDD.
Though it's possible 2,4-D is somewhat carcinogenic, it doesn't persist in the environment and isn't a POP--nor is 2,4,5-T without the added dioxins.
I'm just trying to keep the information technically correct. Maybe "chemicals such as Agent Orange" is enough for the MSNBC demo (sorry), but I'd like to think Slashdot tries to keep a more exacting conversation.