Pollution Change Over Time Research Paper Example

Today, one of the global issues people face to is different types of pollution. With human development, pollution is becoming worse, and as a result, other issues appear. Among them are global warming, new diseases, deforestation and many others. But, it was not like this all the time, as at the beginning the level of pollution was not so high. Otherwise, it would have been an apocalypse already. That was the industry development that caused global pollution.
Even in the late 13th century, people knew about air pollution. For instance, King of England Edward I punished every Londoner, who did not stop burning sea-coal. However, these penalties had little effect.
Four years earlier, there was created a deadly smog by severe industrial air pollution, which asphyxiated 20 people in Donora, Pennsylvania, and made more than 7,000 people sick.
Acid rain is not new in the human’s history. It was mentioned in the article Water and Air Pollution, that such rain was first discovered in the 1850s. That was a new increasing issue resulting in coal-powered plants. Not only humans were suffered, but also plants, fish, soil, forests and some building materials.
The main cause of air pollution in the 20th century was noticed to be motor vehicles, firstly produced by Henry Ford in the USA. Then, with massive usage of cars, the amount of greenhouse gases increased in the atmosphere, which became a cause of the global warming. Auto emissions also increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which in turn contribute to global warming.
Speaking about pollution, people usually use it in the term of air pollution only. However, Katharine Gammon describes a wide range of pollutions.
Noise pollution is a big problem, especially for metropolitans. Although it is impossible to see or smell noise pollution, it still has impacts on the environment. Source of this pollution is the sound produced by planes and industry. The author claims that there is a connection between noise and health problems, for instance, speech interference, deafness, high blood pressure and others.
Scientists also use a term of underwater noise pollution, meaning sounds from ships. There is no influence on people, but, these sounds disorientate whales and other underwater species with sensory systems. Thus, they need to communicate louder, and this can shorten their lifespan.
Next type is light pollution. The majority of people do not imagine their lives without electricity-powered lights, thinking about them as modern convenience. However, this influences not only the human’s way of living, but also animals’ one, for example, in the presence of artificial light birds can sing more hours than they do it under ordinary conditions.
In Pollution Facts, it was said about scientists, who discovered that longer artificial days affect birds’ migration schedules, as birds think they have longer feeding times. Even newly hatched sea turtles can be confused by streetlights, as they use starlight reflecting off the waves to find where a sea is. As a result, turtles often go in the wrong direction. Besides, it is difficult for astronomers to see the stars properly, because the sky becomes very light.
In addition, the world’s leading conservation organization, WWF, named other types of pollution. For instance, radioactive pollution is highly dangerous when it happens. It occurs when ‘radioactive’ metals disintegrate and release beta rays, causing cancer and other mutative diseases. There was an accident during the Second World War, when the US attacked Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the atomic bomb. As a result, many people, who survived after the atomic bombing, died from cancers and mutations. Thermal pollution, or heat pollution, means a temperature rise in the ecosystem, because of heat energy release into the environment by human performance or natural disasters. This increase can cause great climatic changes and extinction of wildlife.
Sources of thermal pollution are manufacturing industries that release much heat energy. The letter is transferred to the air and water. Also, vehicles with combustion engines, which require high temperatures to function, release large amount of heat energy. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide blocks heat from exiting the atmosphere and so the heat from the sun becomes trapped in the atmosphere. The consequence of this is another global issue, which is global warming.
In 2008, an organization Lenntech was created, whose main aim is to develop, design and manufacture eco-friendly purification systems of water and air for the industry. In their articles, one can find the following definition of the water pollution: it is any chemical, physical or biological change in the quality of water that affects everyone, who drinks or uses this water. Drinking polluted water can lead to serious problems with health. Highly polluted water can even make the water unsuited for the desired use.
There is a wide range of classes of water pollutants. The first one includes all bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms that cause diseases. The second class consists of oxygen-demanding wastes, meaning wastes decomposed by oxygen-requiring bacteria. As a result, oxygen level in the water declines. The third category involves different acids, salts and toxic metals that can be soluble. Large concentrations of such compounds will make water unfit to drink and will also cause the death of aquatic life.
Humans’ performance is the main cause of air pollutions. Furthermore, there are a lot of different types of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities, which were discovered and described by the group of Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (see fig.1).
Source: IPCC, 2007, cited in Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html
First of all, this is carbon dioxide (CO2) that pollutes the air the most. The source of it is fossil fuel usage. Also, the source of CO2 can be the way people use land, especially when it includes deforestation. Among all greenhouse gases, proportion of carbon dioxide in the air is the biggest with more than 55 percent. However, land can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere through reforestation, improvement of soils and others.
Another greenhouse gas is methane (CH4). This mixed gas is usually used in agricultural activities, waste management, and energy. The percentage of methane is much less than CO2 with its 14 percent. Next is nitrous oxide (N2O), which is also used in agricultural activities, particularly, as fertilizer. The concentration of N2O in air is nearly 7 times less than carbon dioxide.
The sources of fluorinated gases (F-gases) are different industrial processes, refrigeration, and products consumption, which contribute to emissions of F-gases, for instance, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). There is only 1 percent of such gas in the air.
There are other sources of global greenhouse gas emissions described in Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by Metz and O.R. Davidson (see fig.2).
Energy Supply had 26% of 2004 global greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that these gases were produced by burning of coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity and heat. It is considered that Energy Supply is the largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Industry is the second biggest pollutant with 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It includes emissions of gases from chemical, metallurgical, and mineral transformation processes, which are not associated with energy consumption.
Source: Source: IPCC, 2007, cited in Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html
Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry pollute air in 17 percent. Such performance includes deforestation, land clearing for agriculture, and fires or decay of peat soils. 14% of 2004 GHG emissions are made by Agriculture, particularly, from the management of agricultural soils, livestock, rice production, and biomass burning.
Regarding the transportation, it takes 13%. This sector includes fossil fuels burned for road, rail, air, and marine transportation. Interesting, that circa 95 percent of the world's transportation energy are received from petroleum-based fuels, gasoline and diesel.
As for Commercial and Residential Buildings, it is 8% in the air. The greenhouse gas emissions from this sector involve on-site energy generation and burning fuels for heat in buildings or cooking in homes.
The least damaged source of pollution is Waste and Wastewater, as it takes only 3%. Still, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions here is landfill methane (CH4), next is by wastewater methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O).
Boden, G. Marland, and R.J. Andres built a graph about past and future tendencies in air pollution (see fig. 3). They estimated that from 1751 more than 300 billion metric tonnes of CO2 had been released to the atmosphere by fossil fuels consumption and cement production. Approximately half was occurred since 1970. Globally, liquid and solid fuels accounted for 76.3% of the emissions from fossil-fuel burning and cement production in 2007.
As it can be seen from the graph, until 1950 global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were remaining more or less stable. However, there was a significant increase from 1950 till now, from approximately 25 000 teragrams to more than 33 000, respectively. In comparison with 1900, global carbon emissions grew by over 16 times till 2008.
Source: Boden, G. Marland, and R.J. Andres, “Global Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions”, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, 2010, http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html.
Bibliography
Boden, G. Marland and R.J. Andres. “Global Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions”, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, 2010. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.html.
“Causes of Pollution?”WWF, n.d. http://worldwildlife.org/threats/pollution.
Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” EPA: United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2010. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html.
Katharine Gammon. “Pollution Facts”, livescience. Last modified August 27, 2010. http://www.livescience.com/22728-pollution-facts.html.
Metz and Davidson. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/contents.html.
“Water and Air Pollution.” History.com, 2009. http://www.history.com/topics/water-and-air-pollution.
“Water Pollution,” Lenntech, n.d. http://www.lenntech.com/water-pollution-faq.htm.