pollution (Page 27)

We?re accustomed to seeing the faces of pitiful, starving African children staring out at us from advertisements. They?re emaciated, standing on parched and cracked earth, and appealing to us for aid. Now it turns out we may be the cause of their problem.

Emissions spewed out by power stations and factories in North America and Europe may have started the severe droughts that have afflicted regions of Africa. These droughts have been among the worst the world has ever seen, and led to the famines that killed thousands in countries such as Ethiopia in the 1980s.
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Black smog is reversing the effects of global warming in India, according to Veerabhadi Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Pollution across the Indian subcontinent is shielding the sun and lowering the winter temperature several degrees.

Scientists say the smog particles are cooling the land by absorbing solar radiation before it reaches the surface. But the bad news is that the particles could be redistributing that heat to other parts of the earth, warming nearby regions of Asia and beyond.
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More than half of all Americans breathe polluted air that can damage their health because the government doesn’t fully enforce clean air laws, according to the American Lung Association. Standards are in place to cut back pollution, but since they are not being enforced, nearly 400 counties in the United States have smog levels above the legal limits.
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Uncontrolled growth and lack of access to technology are driving the cities of the southern half of the Earth to the verge of environmental collapse. At the recent conference of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS), with delegates from universities in Tokyo, Sweden, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Federal Swiss Institute of Technology, experts discussed how to end this negative trend in the developing world?s urban areas.

In the northeastern Chinese province of Shandong, home to 87 million people, pollution from coal-burning electrical plants causes hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. The capital of the province, Jinan, with 5 million inhabitants, is one of the seven most contaminated cities in China, according to the World Bank. read more