pollution self correcting in the long run ?? 3

[2dye4]

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.

 

[sms]

Just a matter of time!!

-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

 

[kontiki99]

2dye4, I think you're onto something on a philosophical level.

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.

 

[MadMango]

George Carlin said it best.

[green]"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."[/green]

Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[SomptingGuy]

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.

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.

 

[jmw]

"One man's poison is another man's meat"
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

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[MRM]

So when the earth evolved, it completely forgot about the laws of Thermodynamics?

 

[LCruiser]

The "dilution is the solution" concept can't be invoked in terms of manufactured toxins, nor in terms of less than geological time scale.

 

[Comcokid]

No doubt, some pollution is self correcting.

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.

 

[moltenmetal]

The trouble with man-made toxicants is their long degradation lifecycles (some compounds with environmental half-lives of thousands of years) and their tendency to bioaccumulate as they move up the food chain.

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?

 

[sms]

"The question is: can the planet's climate and ecosystems hang in there until then?"

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!

 

[xenos55]

There is something that we must keep in mind here. Venus has probably been in a state of runaway greenhouse for billions of years. That potential biosphere was pushed into an equilibrium that does not support any form of life that is likely in earth.
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

 

[LCruiser]

The lapse rate of the atmosphere is close to the moist adiabat, and that's not a coincidence. Ghg's store heat near the surface and convection then moves it up (hot air rises) and it then escapes as long wave radiation, balancing the incoming short wave radiation. More ghg's mean more convection which moves more air vertically in the troposphere, also creating more clouds.

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.

 

[fradycat]

Very well said LCruiser! I think the scare tactics and fear-mongering of the enviromental movement are strangling the scientific process and warping the results of the studies being done. If the findings don't fit the popular theory, (read "global warming"), then they get shoved in the round file and forgotten, or cherry-picked for tidbits that support the politically correct view while the rest is ignored. The whole issue needs to be researched and engaged by scientist who are actually objective, if any such creature still exists. If we cripple ourselves with fear, we will not move forward, and moving forward is the only viable option. One of my favorite sayings which I heard years ago but don't know who said it goes like this: "Knowledge is an inexhaustible resource." Sure, we have issues, and I would love to see fewer SUV's on the roads, and more efficient auto's with new alternative fuels, but that will take time and a shift of paradigms. In the meanwhile, study, think, learn, and then do something real.

 

[SomptingGuy]

I'd say this whole debate is one of those "correlation or causation?" debates. Past data cannot prove causation, only correlation. The only way to prove causation is to do blind forward-looking tests and that's not really possible with only one planet Earth.

 

[CajunCenturion]

I thought the earth WAS a three-blind forward-looking test, until is was destroyed for a highway?

Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[SnTMan]

For a little different slant on theis discussion, concern for pollution and the environment is a luxury enjoyed by affluent societies. So, in the sense that as a society becomes more able to expend the resources, pollution is corrected in the long or even medium run, though perhaps not "self" correcting.

Want to reduce pollution? Make sure everybody has enough wealth to live decently.

Regards,

Mike

 

[bvanhiel]

Of couse pollution is self correcting in the long run, because, to quote Keynes, "In the long run, we're all dead".

Once there's nobody around to call it pollution, it won't be pollution any more.

-b

 

[ewh]

But are we all dead at the same time? Pretty bleak outlook.

 

[jmw]

In the long run we'll all be dead

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

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com