Sunday, May 19, 2013

Public Priorities: Climate Change, Heavy Metals and Radiation


Majia here: A friend wrote this comment in an online class concerning public health and the environment. She was questioning the disproportionate emphasis on greenhouse gasses and climate change as the most concerning atmospheric issues:

1) I am curious as to why the scientific community has adopted a seemingly myopic focus on greenhouse gases, when surely other anthropogenic causes should be factored in as well? 

For example, we never seem to hear about the "R" word: Radiation, not simply the dangers of UV from the sun, but from the manmade deadly radioisotopes which we have consistently spewed into out atmosphere since the advent of the Atomic Age from thousands of above-ground tests of atomic weapons to the daily ongoing releases of radioactive noble gases and tritium or H3O (which cannot be filtered out) from the thousands of aging nuclear power plants operating worldwide. 

Surely this deadly and highly mutagenic type of "pollution" (Google: "Children of Chernobyl" for a disturbing, heart-wrenching example) deserves our careful scrutiny, as many radioisotopes we've unleashed into our environment have half-lives of tens of thousands and millions of years= FOREVER). 

These isotopes are distributed across the planet via ocean and air currents such as the Jet Stream and bioaccumulate in animals, including humans, when ingested in our food and water, and build up in our organs and bones, irradiating us for the rest of our lives. (No wonder there is a growing incidence of thyroid problems, diabetes, cancers and stroke, nervous system disorders and dementia, all long-known to be potential health effects from radiation exposure. What have we done to our sacred life support, our planet???)

2) Why the international deafening silence on the unprecedented, ongoing natural catastrophe in Fukushima which is still dumping millions of gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific as we speak, with NO KNOWN WAY of stopping it?  

The "reassurances" that 80% of the tons of deadly isotopes released in multiple explosions and spent fuel pool fires went into the Pacific are not reassuring to those who are awake to this issue. Remember the water cycle??? I would like to see this issue addressed openly in this course.  Plankton is one of THE major producers of oxygen on the planet. Our continued pollution of our oceans is surely part of this problem.

In sum, by taking all potential causes of Climate Change into account, we will have a clearer understanding of the myriad of causes and can then look systemically at the problem, in order to identify important changes we all need to make in our daily lives to stem the tide of climate change.

I look forward to your responses.

3 comments:

  1. Your friend isn't wrong, but s/he should be more careful. There were fewer than 600 above-ground nuclear tests, and the number of operating nuclear reactors is likewise not in the thousands. There are 437 currently operating.

    Gotta get the facts straight....

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  2. The greenhouse gas thing is about creating a corrupt licensing scheme to enslave the West while profiting at the same time. You would eventually need a license to do anything, and the prices would be manipulated the way most things in the financial markets are. As the funders of universities want this type of a scheme, that is what students are supposed to promote.

    The environmental movement has been corrupted. Look at the Greens in Europe supporting the horrible wars the West has been pushing, Syria being the latest. This is a proxy war against Russia and China, and threatens to bring the world to a terrible disaster. For what purpose? To destroy the best multi-ethnic, multi-religious society in that part of the world and put in al-Qaeda?

    The scientific community is owned by money these days. You are in a university environment, so you may have seen some of this corporate takeover. The problem in the West today is that you cannot state the obvious. It makes you a "conspiracy theorist" or otherwise leads to not being allowed into the rooms where important meetings are held. If you want another example, consider the topic of geoengineering or weather modification.

    Paul

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  3. Response from my friend:

    Watch this video "2053", for an excellent, but disturbing visual representation of the man-made abomination of nuclear weapons testing we have wrought upon our planet:
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAnqRQg-W0k

    2053 is the number of "official" nuclear explosions conducted from 1945-1998. While not all were "atmospheric" in the sense they were done "above ground," the thousands of ocean-based explosions and their release of a huge amount of radiation into the Earth's oceans has had, and will continue to have, equally damaging effects on the Earth's ecosystem and its atmosphere.

    The water cycle ensures that not all of that radiation remains in the ocean, sinking to the bottom, but some of it gets recirculated into the atmosphere time and time again, in perpetuity, or at least until the half-lives of its radioisotopes have been exhausted.

    The figure for the total number of nuclear reactors should include not only commercial reactors, but military and research; due to the classified nature of some of this information, a complete figure for all of the world's existing reactors as well as all of the "secret" tests and lab experiments, combined with the count of all of the "official" as well as unofficial dump sites of highly radioactive nuclear waste threatening our ecosystem, is not an easy figure for anyone to come by...

    While accurate information is certainly important, the main point that is hard to miss is that our planet has been egregiously and irreversibly polluted by man-made radiation.

    That this sad reality is threatening our very survival as a species should be easy enough to grasp, given the evidence of a continued, epidemic rise of a whole host of diseases in a younger and younger population demographic as Majia so brilliantly documents in her blog---give or take a few hundred nukes...

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