Environmental Hazards
Environmental Hazards

In January 2000, the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, shut down the city in protest against the privatization of their municipal water system, which had resulted in rate hikes that doubled or tripled their water bills. In February of that year, Pacific News Service correspondent Jim Shultz broke the story in the Western press with “A War Over Water,” his firsthand reports of clashes between riot police and protesters

Birth defects, premature births, endocrine disruption, cancer, Parkinson’s—why are we doing this to our kids? According to a new study published in the journal Endocrinology, oil and natural gas operations are contaminating surface and ground water with chemicals that wreak havoc on birth and growth hormones. Other recent reports show toxic levels of selenium contamination in the groundwater near fracking operations. This is leading to premature births.

When those who believe in global warming discuss this issue, the word “methane” does not always come up, but there are those who believe that this can have an even more substantial effect upon alleged global warming than man-made impacts, particularly in light of large stores of it places such as East Siberia.

A comprehensive pair of reports by dozens of researchers convened by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) offered “a damning critique of geoengineering,” according to Tim McDonnell of Mother Jones. Highly controversial, geoengineering refers to technological efforts to counteract global warming by altering the atmosphere’s chemical composition.

In February 2015, Tim Radford reported for the Climate News Network that atmospheric warming is capable of reaching thousands of meters below Greenland’s massive ice sheet, potentially increasing the glaciers’ rate of flow and creating pools of “meltwater” trapped below the ice. Two separate but related studies confirmed that surface melt can drain down to fill concealed lakes under the ice, ultimately contributing to rising sea levels.

The uptake of water by contrails in ice-supersaturated air and the release of water after ice particle advection and sedimentation dehydrates the atmosphere at flight levels and redistributes humidity mainly to lower levels. The contrails impact the entire hydrological cycle in the atmosphere by reducing the total water column and the cover by high- and low-level clouds.