This is the conclusion of Israeli scientists studying storm formation in the Amazon basin. While some particulates (ashes, aerosols) do promote rain formation, a well known fact for several decades now, their excess actually does the opposite: preventing rain and restricting the formation of clouds. This may affect the ongoing process of global warming in several ways: restricting rain in wildfire and highly polluted areas and reducing the overall cloud cover of Earth and hence its albedo, allowing for more solar radiation to reach the surface. More details at Science Daily.Ref. O. Almaratz et al., Lightning response to smoke from Amazonian fires. Geophysical Research Letters, 2010. Pay per view.
The Iraqi government has issued a much worrying report on the radioactive and dioxin pollution generated by the two wars the country has suffered in the last decades. The use of low grade nuclear weapons (depleted uranium bombs) and the destruction of oil facilities are apparently the main causes of this horrifying landscape but the report fails to mention the dropping of a 5 kiloton nuke near Basra, as reported by Desert Storm veteran Jim Brown.The generalized radioactive pollution is causing a major increase of birth defects. Another environmental problem of Iraq today is the drought and the low quality of the water that Turkey and Syria, which use the Euphrates for their own purposes, allow to flow.
Full story at The Guardian.
Source: BBC Science & Enviroment.Researchers from the Univeristiy of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, discarded other possible factors such as smoking, race or socioeconomic background to determine that pollution, specfically pollution caused by road traffic, is a major cause of abdnormally low weight in newborns.The risk of a small birth weight baby rose significantly with each increase in particulate matter of four micrograms per metres squared, during the first and third trimesters of pregnancy. Similarly, the risk of a very small birth weight baby rose significantly with each 10 parts per billion increase in nitrogen dioxide.
These two pollutants are emitted by motor vehicles.
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Persistent free radicals have been detected in the air in ammounts that are very dangerous. So far it was believed that free radicals in the air were soon transformed in other more stable and less harmful materials but a new study reveals that many of them actually persist for long, reaching our body systematically. The result is that everybody seems to be "smoking" all the time as we breath:In the five minutes it takes a typical smoker to finish a cigarette, he or she will breathe in an equal number of PFRs from the air and the smoke itself.
Better late than never. But it's really late anyhow and it's a shame this had to be dug in hidden corner of the mainstream media, the BBC in this case (link to original article).
Ducth researchers have reproduced the kind of fume inhalation a traffic ward or any other urbanite, can suffer in any 30 minutes in any busy city. The result is stressed brains and a stress that does not go away until a lot after the toxic influence has been supressed (one hour for the 30 mins. experimental toxic session).
This in itself may not look too dangerous to the optimistic car-addict (i.e. almost everybody) and the study of brain diseases in humans is problematic. But another research on Mexican dogs found that those animals living in highly polluted Mexico City had large brain damage upon death, resembling the type of lesions found in humans with Alzheimer syndrome. Instead those living in rural areas had little or no such damage.
Have we finally found the source of such an epydemics of mental diseases?
When are we going to act and forbid or severely limit traffic in urban areas?
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