Move from lots of pollution to a beautiful clean sky. Very ugly way to get there, but the earth is getting a breather from the humans torturing the land and sky.
Here is an article in ARS Technica about an article in Nature Geoscience (2019) that talks about microplastics in the French The Pyrenees Mountains, a pristine place, except for, well, plastic!
The researchers made extremely controlled efforts to assure that they were not contaminating the samples gathered. But the plastics are coming in on the wind, and coming down (mainly, it seems) in perpetration.
If microplastics are everywhere, then our impacts on the planet are far more, and far more prevasive than anyone has predicted. The ARS Technica article by Cathleen O’Grady
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original article, remember the whole biomagnification thing. That’s where fish each plants and plankton with plastics, Bigger fish eat those fish, and BIGGER animals like sharks, bears and humans, eat the biggest fish. The heavy metals, plastics and more will build up and up as they go up the food chain. And they tend to be retained at the highest order.
Sources: Nature Geoscience, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0335-5 (About DOIs).
Okay, we all know how biomagnification works. Pollutants including heavy metals such as mercury are absorbed at the bottom of the food chain, and then they are amplified all the way to the top of the food chain. at the top of the chain are such animals as sharks at sea and lions on land.
In terms of mercury biomagnification (wikipedia) works like this. Organisms absorb mercury very efficiently, but it takes far longer to excrete. Algae absorb mercury from seawater readily, so even small amounts in the water are absorbed and retained. Fish eat the algae, bigger fish eat the smaller fish, and so on. At all levels the mercury is retained (in fatty tissues) at a far better rate then it is excreted. Ultimately it accumulates and amplifies in predator fish like swordfish and sharks as well as birds of prey like eagles and osprey. And, of course, at the apex of the food chain is humans. A mother breast feeding would, of course, pass it on in concentration to her baby.
See fish you should avoid eating (very much of) here.
It turns out that we are building up pollutants at the bottom of the ocean at an ugly and alarming rate. This is emphatically demonstrated by a recent study in Nature. An easier short read is in the WSJ by Kincaid. Animals at the bottom of the ocean (4 miles deep) had amazingly high concentrations of pollutants, 50 times more than one of the worst polluted rivers in the world (in China). The pollutants included chemicals that don’t naturally decay but have not been produced (much) in decades. These POPs should mostly be in landfills; they were largely used in electronics. But they will continue to reek havoc to the environment for centuries to come.
With about 65% of POPs in landfills, there’s a huge amount out sloshing around in the environment, all the way from the North Pole to the Mariana Trench. Plus, as the landfills fail, as they always do, eventually, … That’s ugly… so very ugly…
Sorry, no positive spin for this. Not enough lipstick to cover this ugly pig.
Reference
High Court Strikes Down EPA Limits on Mercury Emissions http://www.wsj.com/articles/high-court-strikes-down-epa-limits-on-mercury-emissions-1435590069
The EPA must consider the cost of compliance when coming up with rules. That’s what the Supreme Court ruled.
Of course it is hard to estimate the cost of the pollutants, that have been going on for a couple centuries now.
With natural gas being so cheap, and most of the conversions already complete, the whole issue is rather mute point.
But it does set back EPA action on CO2 emissions, where is the coal lobby would like to consider the cost of externalities nonexistent.
Still in the absence of Congress and its inability to do anything, you have the problem of the Fed and the EPA trying to do the heavy lifting.
Sixth mass extinction is here, researcher declares:
Ouch. It looks like we need to clean up our collective acts. With 41% of amphibians and 26% of mammals on a course for extinction if we don’t change our ways.
“To history’s steady drumbeat, a human population growing in numbers, per capita consumption and economic inequity has altered or destroyed natural habitats. The long list of impacts includes:
*Land clearing for farming, logging and settlement
*Introduction of invasive species
*Carbon emissions that drive climate change and ocean acidification
*Toxins that alter and poison ecosystems
Now, the specter of extinction hangs over about 41 percent of all amphibian species and 26 percent of all mammals, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains an authoritative list of threatened and extinct species.
“There are examples of species all over the world that are essentially the walking dead,” Ehrlich said.”