Pollution

• Pollution is a degradation or an undesired change in air, water, or soil

that affects the health of living things.
• Waste products and artificial chemicals used in farms, industries, and
households.
• Biodegradable pollution will break down naturally over time.
• Non-degradable pollution does not break down.
 Air Pollution

• can be found both outdoors and indoors

• pollutants can be trapped inside buildings,
causing indoor pollution that lasts for a long
time
• the sources of air pollution are both natural
and human-based

Water pollution
• Oil spills
• Sewage, sludge, and garbage are
dumped into the world's oceans.
• Chemicals are dumped into bodies
of water without concern
• Hydraulic fracturing, or
“fracking”—a process used in
natural gas production that involves
injecting at high pressure a mixture
of water, sand, and chemicals into
deep underground wells to break
apart shale rock and release gas.
Land Pollution

• About 30 percent of the world’s surface is land, which provides soil

to grow the food we eat.
• Increasingly, humans are polluting the land with nuclear waste,
solid waste, and pesticides.
• Nuclear Waste: Nuclear waste, resulting from both nuclear
weapons production and nuclear reactors or power plants,
contains radioactive plutonium, a substance linked to cancer and
genetic defects.
• Radioactive plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning
that it takes 24,000 years for the radioactivity to be reduced by
half.
Light Pollution

• artificial lighting that is annoying, unnecessary, and/or

harmful to life forms on earth.
• Almost all people in developed societies use artificial light,
reducing the natural period of darkness at night.
• Pollution, whether in air or water, can move and affect ecosystems far
away from the source.

Real time air quality index. http://aqicn.org/map/world/

Waste Disposal
Resource Depletion
• A great deal of resources are needed to support the human
population (~7 billion).

• Renewable resources can be replenished within a human

lifetime.
• Timber, water.

• The supply of non-renewable resources is replenished extremely

slowly, if at all. These can be used up.

• Coal, oil, minerals.

 Natural resources

• Renewable resources like sunlight cannot be depleted.

• Nonrenewable resources like oil CAN be depleted.
• Resources like timber and clean water are renewable only if we do not
overuse them.

Figure 1.1
• The lives we live today are due to fossil fuels
• Machines
• Chemicals
• Transportation
• Products

We have used up ½ of the world’s oil supplies;

how will we handle this imminent fossil fuel
shortage?
 Climate Change
• Both “natural” and “anthropogenic” (human-induced) factors contribute to climate change.

• Climate change has always happened on Earth; it is the rapid rate and the magnitude of climate
change occurring now that is of great concern worldwide.

• Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere absorb heat radiation. Human activity has increased
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

• Atmospheric aerosols alter climate by scattering and absorbing solar and infrared radiation.

• Land-use changes, such as deforestation have led to changes in the amount of sunlight reflected
from the ground back into space
 Climate Change
• With increasing global surface temperatures the possibility of more droughts and
increased intensity of storms will likely occur.

• As more water vapor is evaporated into the atmosphere it becomes fuel for more
powerful storms to develop.

• More heat in the atmosphere and warmer ocean surface temperatures can lead
to increased wind speeds in tropical storms.

• Rising sea levels expose higher locations not usually subjected to the power of
the sea and to the erosive forces of waves and currents. Flash floods.

• Death rate from disease associated with floods and droughts expected to rise in
some regions
Global Warming And Climate Change
Rapid Human Population Growth

• More than 7 billion humans!!!

• Why so many humans?

• Agricultural revolution

• Industrial revolution
 Agriculture Revolution

•Expanded food production led to increased population and

consumption
•It’s one of humanity’s greatest achievements, but at an enormous
environmental cost
•Nearly half of the planet’s land surface is used for agriculture
• Chemical fertilizers
• Pesticides
• Changed natural systems
Loss of Biodiversity

• The number of species on the Earth is unknown, but estimated

to be in the tens of millions, with only 1.3 million of which have
been named and catalogued.
• This enormous diversity of life, known as biodiversity, provides
food, medicines, fibers, and fuel; purifies air and freshwater;
pollinates crops and vegetation; and makes soils fertile.

• Biodiversity is the number of different species present in one

specific ecosystem.

• Extinction, or the complete loss of a species, is a natural event

that can be accelerated by human actions.
 Loss of Biodiversity

• Assuming no catastrophic events occur, extinctions normally occur at a

pretty slow rate, called the background rate.
• Normal background extinction rate for mammals is 1 every 200
years.
• Scientists believe we may be in the midst of the next major extinction
The short-tailed hopping
event, due to human influences. mouse, now extinct in
Australia.
Biodiversity loss may be our biggest environmental problem; once
a species is extinct, it is gone forever