pollution self correcting in the long run ??
pollution self correcting in the long run ??
(OP)
Sorry
I know the forum title is engineering in the next 5 years but i have noticed a lot of enviromental concern posted here that definately exceeds 5 year timeline so I ask this question.
The earth has evolved from interstellar chaos and its components have settled down into their natural high entropy state. This makes life here possible. Poisons are dispersed and weak, radioactivity is spread thinly.
Now mans principle crime on the enviroment is the concentration of compounds, or the tranformation of molecules into more unstable, but usefull and dangerous forms.
This is the essence of polution. We are making dangerous things from thing that are not dangerous.
Question
In the long run do mans activities eventually revert to the simpler forms that were present on earth before industrial activity??
Do the toxic chemicals eventually break down to the simple ones we pulled from the ground in the first place??
Radio active materials eventually spread out and loose their
potency??
If so, I feel much better about the enviromental thing because if we cause our own extinction, but the life possibilities of this planet continue it not really all that important how much we polute. Lets just let the party rage on and know that one day balence will return without us.
I know the forum title is engineering in the next 5 years but i have noticed a lot of enviromental concern posted here that definately exceeds 5 year timeline so I ask this question.
The earth has evolved from interstellar chaos and its components have settled down into their natural high entropy state. This makes life here possible. Poisons are dispersed and weak, radioactivity is spread thinly.
Now mans principle crime on the enviroment is the concentration of compounds, or the tranformation of molecules into more unstable, but usefull and dangerous forms.
This is the essence of polution. We are making dangerous things from thing that are not dangerous.
Question
In the long run do mans activities eventually revert to the simpler forms that were present on earth before industrial activity??
Do the toxic chemicals eventually break down to the simple ones we pulled from the ground in the first place??
Radio active materials eventually spread out and loose their
potency??
If so, I feel much better about the enviromental thing because if we cause our own extinction, but the life possibilities of this planet continue it not really all that important how much we polute. Lets just let the party rage on and know that one day balence will return without us.





RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
We do have to safeguard that we don't make our habitat too toxic for us to survive.
We breath air, we need water to drink. It would be foolish for us to dump too toxic levels of waste material in the reservoirs that preserve us.
I lived in Florida USA for about 15 years. Sooner or later after every major hurricane there would be stories the press describing the environmental damage caused by those hurricanes.
As far as I’m concerned, hurricanes are the environment! As are volcanoes, forest fires, earthquakes, tsunamis and arguably asteroids!
Its taken a lot of work for mankind to survival. The environment can kill you.
I assume a lot of the confusion has to do with keeping all the news writers and academics busy on those "no news" days.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
An evolutionist would say that life has evolved in the environment given. Of course poisons (that typicalEarth life doesn't like) are dispersed and weak. Could a life form allergic to salt oxygen or ever have evolved on Earth? Similarly, high radioactivity could be key for development on other worlds.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
How true.
Toxins abound in nature.
Plants are engaged in a continual state of chemical warfare where one species will put toxins in the ground that prevent other competitor plants growing too close.
"Silent Spring" (Rachel Carson) proposed that Agent Orange was being taken up and adapted by insects as a new form of venom.
Deep in the ocean at the fumicols or whatever they are called is a whole different eco-system.
Nature abhors a vacuum is another saying but it could equally be said that nature abhors the absence of life. Whatever wipes out one species is usually good news for another.
Whatever state we leave the planet in there will be some species and some new species that would love to say "thank you" to us if we hadn't, in the process, managed to wipe ourselves out.
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Rising CO2 levels have for years lead to dire predictions of global warming. But, the projected global temperature rise has never fit the climate models. Recently, it was discovered that an increase in microscopic dust and particles suspended in the air are highly effective in blocking sunlight and re-radiating infrared radiation back into space. These particles are pollution from coal burning power plants and other sources. One type of pollution is largely offsetting the effects of the other.
Nature has it's own forms of pollution. A single medium volcanic eruption can put a third of the sulfur dioxide high in the atmosphere that man does in a year. The Mount Pinatubo erutpion in 1991 put as much sulfu in the athmosphere as man does in several years. This single eruption cause worldwide temperatures to drop for three years far more than global warming had risen temperatures.
Mt St.Helens eruption (a very small one) destroyed hundreds of square mile of forest and put several cubic miles of ash into the air. Scientist predicted the area around St.Helens would be sterile for decades and the ash would reduce crops for hundreds of miles downwind. But, if was found that seeds quickly germinated even close to the mountain, small borrowing rodents were alive, and many plant species thrived in the stricken area without competition. Today, 16 years after the eruption, the area flourishes with young trees. Additionally, the downwind ash provided trace nutrients that cause bumper crops for the region in subsequent years.
Note - I'm not saying global warming isn't a serious threat, or that pollution is not a problem. We need to be concerned and take action. It's just that nature has a 4 billion year history of operating on this planet and modern civilization has been around 1/1000000 that long. Nature can take a lickin and keep on ticking. I think mankind only has to be sure that our actions don't put us back into a second dark age that will take 1000 years for us to rebound.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Now we understand that some compounds' toxic effects are a result of the tendency of these compounds to mimic hormones, such that their effects can be experienced at much lower concentrations than would be necessary to cause acute poisoning etc.
On the geological timescale, UV light, ozone, cosmic radiation, extracellular enzymes and photolysis-generated hydroxyl radicals will take care of most of these compounds, provided that we don't make any more. But can we wait that long?
The fact of the matter is, human population is still climbing. The negative health effects to humans reprsented by these compounds are dramatically offset by the massive positive health effects of the rest of our technological development. There's hope that the slow spread of prosperity to the developing world will eventually cause human population to self-regulate, but it'll get a lot higher before it peaks and hopefully starts declining. The question is: can the planet's climate and ecosystems hang in there until then?
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
That is not the question at all. There will be climate, and there will be eco systems of some kind. The question is weather or not they will be conducive to human habitation. I know it is nit picky, but words mean things, and I get tired of the arrogant attitude that we humans can some how destroy the earth. We haven’t developed that technology yet. We can mess it up pretty bad, and we can certainly make it inhospitable for human life, but so can a comet or a large asteroid. There have been such environment changing events in the past, and both the climate and ecosystems of the earth have survived, and repaired.
The question is what is the cost? Good stewardship of the earth saves money, resources, and misery. Does it really matter much from an environmental standpoint if the global temperature goes up a few degrees? Not really, but the side effects are human misery and major money. Sea level rise that results in London being under water would cause human misery, although some in the UK might see that as an improvement. Relocating the population of Florida as well as most coastal cities in the US would be human misery, but it will not be the end of mankind. I wonder if we really can pollute our selves into oblivion? I am not so sure that the process isn’t self-limiting to the point that it can’t happen. Plague, drought, or famine reduces the population to the point that pollution reverses itself and a new stability point is achieved. The cost is human misery.
It is theorized that both the Anasazai Indians in the American southwest as well as some Mayan settlements in South America were deserted due to the population growing beyond the capacity of the local land to support. That did not spell the end of ancient man in the Americas, it just was a matter of relocation and rebuilding, but I bet the process resulted in human misery.
-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Though man's technology does not have a great deal of power when compared with planetary procesees it does have enough power and effect to potentially push our biosphere into a runaway greenhouse state. A state where all living things, the oceans and the biosphere would be consumed in a multi hundred degree celsius steam pressure cooker.
If you think it arrogant to consider that human intervention could create such a fate, take these facts in:
#1: The sun has been slowly growing brighter as it evolbes through its main sequence. Thought its brightness might have only increased a few percentage points since it left its T-tauri phase, never-the-less it is safe to affirm that it is brigher today than it has ever been in the history of the solar system (~4.6 billion years).
#2: Geological proceses in earth have been storing carbon in the crust, and accumulating it near its surface, unlike other elements such as water that are more readily recycled in its crust through hydrates being dragged back in the mantle through plate subduction. Such accumulation of carbon near the surface renders it subceptible to it being released through non linear proceses (continental shelf methane hydrates)
#3: Data seems to support that the highest known CO2 concentration on earhts atmosphere was 53 million years ago, when it reached about 2000 ppm or about 2%. Today that percentage hovers just bellow 400 ppm. What it is not known and unlikely to have happened at the same time is a huge increase in methane and worse yet HCFC's. HCFC's are over 10000 times more potent green house gas than CO2 and it is though to be the cause of almost 30% of the anthropogenic radiative forcing ~.36 W/m2 that the plannet is experincing today.
So consider that if we as a species push the system in the wrong way, we may be the last generation of living things in the planet. If you consider me an alarmist i will reply to you to consider the consequences of my concerns being true.
I expect that when this potential ramification becomes more apparent, engineering in all phacets of human endavours will have a moon-shot like crash program to lower fossil fuel use and be less environmentally damaging.
Xenos
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
The reason Venus has such a high temperature at the surface is because its atmosphere is so thick. People who are concerned about a runaway greenhouse effect don't have the education to understand how joules move.
In Earth's history, warm has always been good. It has led to a more vibrant biosphere (e.g. incubator) and thriving civilizations. Cooling has been what leads to strife and war, fighting over decreased flora (food).
Alarmists don't get that. We need a moon-shot program, true. However, like that one, what we need is research - in this case to discover how the environment is going to respond regionally. Higher CO2 is making plants grow more strongly near the Arctic, decreasing albedo up there and making global warming stronger near the pole. In other places we call that reclamation (the south pole has been frozen for over 30 million years - and there is no solid indication it is now warming).
What we don't need is to hamstring society so we can't afford the research we need to do, for the benefit of a few carbon traders.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Want to reduce pollution? Make sure everybody has enough wealth to live decently.
Regards,
Mike
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Once there's nobody around to call it pollution, it won't be pollution any more.
-b
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Who says so?
Keynes wasn't always right and ironically it is statistics that makes the point.
Today we have reached a better than 50/50 chance of not dying.
How did we do that?
Well, much though I'm sure they'd like the credit, the Methuselah Foundation can't claim it, and while we may award some credit to modern medicine, the real answer lies in population growth.
Population growth is such that at this time there are said to be more people alive than have ever lived. That is, in the history of mankind, fewer people have died than are alive today. Hence, when looked at in this light we have, statistically, turned the corner.
Of course, the Methuselah Foundation (and others)is/was intending to turn this into a reality, not just a statistical oddity. (http://www.fightaging.org/ and http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/)
This means we can forget about "leaving the planet fit for our kids" and go back to being selfish... we'll still be around.
JMW
www.ViscoAnalyser.com
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Every petri dish of bacteria have turned the exact same corner... usually right before consuming the remains of their resources and expiring. Our only hope for salvation is that we either find a much bigger petri dish, or that we are able to control our population to live in equilibrium with our environment. Historically we've relied on the former rather than the latter, but we seem to be running out of unoccupied planet to colonize.
I would suggest reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse", both by Jared Diamond. The first explains how primitive man continually grew to the limits of his environment, and how technology (agriculture, political/trade organizations, weapons) incremetally expanded those limits. The second gives a series of examples of past societies that exceeded the limits of their environment, leading to collape, and questions whether we can keep our own global society from collapsing.
-b
P.S. I fear the future where the rich never have to die. It sounds like the start of a bad sci-fi book.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Luis
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Would you rather work in a city in the 1850s or 2007? the reason we don't all have coughs all the time is because we can afford to put expensive pollution controls in place, rather than breathing smog all the time.
The Thames has salmon in it - that is only recent, after 400 years of being used as a sewer and industrial drain.
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
I agree that the wealthy don't want to breath car exhaust, but most of the world isn't rich. We in the first world have improved our environments by pushing polluting industries to third world countries. Congrats on getting the Thames to run clean. Unfortunately it's unlikely that the Ganges will be doing so any time soon.
We've raised our standard of living by standing on their backs. Whose back will they stand on when they want to raise theirs?
-b
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
How good that will be for all is the question...
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
I realise that sounds a bit harsh. Oh well. Their other option is not to play the game at all. Oddly enough, no one seems to take that path, with the exception of Bhutan.
The problem with the world's poor is not that they are /so/ exploited, the problem is that they are outside the economic system, thus are unable to be exploited. To paraphrase an economist.
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
luis
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Cheers
Greg Locock
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Nippon was already strongly hit by really giant radioactive "dinosaurs". Even nowadays, they are suffering the effects of those hits. I also don’t base my future decisions on films viewing. The film I saw just makes me think that maybe we are not far from a world where the money would be small cans of water. Actually in some points of the world you can feed your car oil tank for the price of a bottle of water.
Cheers
Luis
RE: pollution self correcting in the long run ??
Pollution= Job Security