ALERT: Water polluted with drugs around the world!

[Edufer]

Hold it!. This topic is going nowehere. The original topic was concerned with the minute amounts of medicines, antibiotics, estrogens, and other chemicals that have found their way into the undergroung waters. That's what seems to scare truthseeker, a person easily scared, in my opinion.

Remember "Little Chicken", whern an accorn fell from an oak and struck his head? He started yelling: <b>"The sky is falling!, the sky is falling!"</b>. And people like Nelson believed him...

As for the polar ice caps melting: if the Arctic ice melts (a wild assumption and an impossible event) the oceans will not rise a millimeter. When floating ice melts down, it returns the same <B>VOLUME</B> of water it took when it froze. that's why the icebergs float. they are less dense (More volume at equal weight) than surrounding water. Result: levels do not vary. Simple physical laws you have learned at school (I hope).

The amount of water in Earth is the same one that existed at the time of the planet's formation. No more, no less (except for infinitesimal amounts of water dissociated by industrial processs to make hydrogen --counteracted by the formation of water by some other industrial processes).

If our tap water gets polluted (and that claim is highly doubtfull) that's another matter. Drinkable waters in poor countries has been lousy since the formation of Earth and the ruling of politicians. So, there seems to be no solution for Nelson's concerns. So, let's go out, and have lots of fun before the planets collide!

 

[Xev]

Doesn't the water of the ice caps go to the ocean, where the water is salty...?

Desalination. Easy enough.

http://resources.ca.gov/ocean/97Agenda/Chap5Desal.html
http://www.coastal.ca.gov/desalrpt/dsynops.html

Will this melting increase the level of water and destroy cities in the shore...?

Depends on how much water melts. I haven't reviewed the figures, but I find the extreme figures (Japan being flooded) to be a bit, well, unbelievable.

Edufer:

As for the polar ice caps melting: if the Arctic ice melts (a wild assumption and an impossible event) the oceans will not rise a millimeter. When floating ice melts down, it returns the same VOLUME of water it took when it froze. that's why the icebergs float. they are less dense (More volume at equal weight) than surrounding water. Result: levels do not vary. Simple physical laws you have learned at school (I hope).

Archimedes principle. Interesting. However, the ice in the Antarctic is behaving as a solid, as a glacier almost...

If it melts, the water level will rise. However, this problem has been exaggerated:

The ice sheet's disappearance is of concern because of estimates that its complete melting could raise the global sea level by 15 to 20 feet, swamping low-lying coastal communities around the world.

At the current rate of melting, that will take about 7,000 years, the researchers estimate. Conway said the melting annually contributes about 1 millimeter - nearly one-twenty-fifth of an inch - to sea-level rise.

So if the antarctic ice sheet completly melts (likely - NOT!), we won't have much to worry about for hundreds to thousands of years.

May as well worry about asteroid strikes. -Not that I'm saying it's horridly stupid to worry about those.

Also note that the proposed human caused global warming did not start this trend:

"It seems like the rate (of melting) that been going since the early Holocene is similar to the rate right now," Conway said in a telephone interview. "Collapse appears to be part of an ongoing natural cycle, probably caused by rising sea level initiated by the melting of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets at the end of the last ice age."

From http://www.usatoday.com/weather/antarc/aicesheet.htm

(The source was published in Science, though)

P.S: Edufer, this is off topic, but you have (if memory serves) claimed that DDT was not much of a threat - that banning it was a bad move. I got into an argument about this at work.....

Could you re-post the links on DDT? I'd really appreciate it.

P.P.S: Edufer, I just remembered 'Captain Planet and the Planeteers' from my childhood - it was a cartoon. I think you'll get a kick out of it:

http://www.turner.com/planet/static/graphics/captain.gif

More on the Planeteers:

http://www.turner.com/planet/static/heroonly.html

*Grins*

 

[TruthSeeker]

Xev,

Desalination. Easy enough.

Isn't it expensive...?

Love,
Nelson

 

[Xev]

Not horridly. All depends on how much water you produce - the more plants, the cheaper water gets.

 

[wet1]

Isn't it expensive...?

Having had some experience with desalination units, I can tell you the expense depends on the method. Those that use osmosis use chemicals to keep the membranes in working order. Very frequently, and they are maintaince intensive. The last membrane unit I worked with had to have the membranes replaced about every 2 years and membranes are not cheap!

I have worked with another model that used a set of core bundles in the process that was a little less maintaince intensive and used a vaccumn process. It still required a lot of time spent to keep the unit in optimum operating range.

No matter which methods are used, the water requires furthur processing before it is fit for consumption. Filtering, treating, ect. and that is ongoing.

These methods will not remove any chemicals and contaimination that are present in the water at the start. They only remove the salt.

 

[TruthSeeker]

For all:

Originally posted by wet1:

These methods will not remove any chemicals and contaimination that are present in the water

And if the water is polluted with drugs? :bugeye:

What bring us back to the subject of the thread...

Love,
Nelson

 

[Xev]

Nelson:

And if the water is polluted with drugs?

Oceans are very large, so any pollution would be diluted by the vast quantities of water.

However, there are ways of filtering out 'drugs' - charcoal, and chlorine and genetically-modified bacteria.

 

[Edufer]

<i>"... the ice in the Antarctic is behaving as a solid, as a glacier almost... If it melts, the water level will rise. However, this problem has been exaggerated:"</i>

You can bet it was. The Antarctic ice <b>is not melting</b>, on the contrary, it has been growing at rates hard to believe. Why? The increased evaporation from the "warming oceans" became clouds that deposite huge amounts of snow on the Antarctic ice cap. It was posted in these forums that the figure was around 75 billion tons a year (perhaps 750 billion?). If I were not so lazy I would search the forum and find out, but I will stay with the lower figure. The "prophesized" temperature increase of 2 to 4°C will take average Polar temperatures from -25°C (minus) to minus 21°C, so there will be no melting of the ice cap.

But forget about it: satellite and radiosondes (baloons) have shown that <b>the Antarctic has been cooling since the readings began.</b> See this nice data page on temperatures of the whole world:

<A HREF=http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm><b>"What the Stations Say"</B></A>

<i>"Collapse appears to be part of an ongoing natural cycle, probably caused by rising sea level initiated by the melting of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets at the end of the last ice age."</i>

Sorry, but no sea levels increase either. In the website provided above, there is a page on "sea levels", and the last Chicken Little Scare: the Tuvalu islands' claimed sea levels increase. It turned to be a hoax by the Tuvalu government to get "resident visas" to the Tuvalu people in Australia. Clever, isn't it? It didn't work.

"<i>Could you re-post the links on DDT? I'd really appreciate it./i>

Here they are:
<center>
<A HREF="http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/INGLES/CaseDDT.html"><b>"The Case of DDT"</b></A>
<A HREF="http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm#ref16"><b>"DDT FAQs"</b></A></center>

If this is not enough, I could scan some articles I have in our archives and email them to you (and other people interested in the subject).

<i>"Desalination. Easy enough" ... "Isn't it expensive...?"</i>

As Wet1 said, depends of the method you use. The osmosis way is the most expensive. Much cheaper and "ecologically friendly" is the boiling and condensing, (as ol' good bottleggers used to do with booze) where you would get "distilled water", no pollutants, no drugs ... but also no useful and essential minerals dissolved. This side of the matter is solved by the addition of controled amounts of minerals (iron, potasium, magnesium, and others considered essential for the human health).

This technique needs a lot of energy for the boilers, and the cheapest and safest is by all means nuclear energy. There was a project in Israel, a few years ago to build a series of small but highly efficient nuclear centers called "Nuplex" (where some industries would use the surplus electricity generated by these nuclear plants), for obtaining water for irrigating the deserts of the Gaza strip and surroundings, and conveting them into useful lands for agriculture, cattle, and, why not, also people.

But green organizations started their Little Chicken cry and put the project to sleep. Don't you think that irrigating the desert and making thousand of square miles available to Jews and Palestinian for farming, wouldn't transform the economy there and give some peace to the Near East? (and the rest of the world that's getting sick and bored with the problem). Maybe the oil cartels had something to do with that. Unstable conditions of the region keep the oil price up. Or have we had not experience in this matter before? OPEP's oil embargo in the early 70s; the 1991 Desert Storm clownish war; the present "threat" to US National Security imposed by Saddam Hussein, etc. The threat is about oil, because Irak is a threat to the US in the same way Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti were "threats" to the US National "security". Whose security? The US people? No, the "security" of corporations that are behind big business. But this a topic for another forum.

<i>"However, there are ways of filtering out 'drugs' - charcoal, and chlorine and genetically-modified bacteria."<i>

Much better is boiling and condensing the water. Cheaper too...

 

[BobG]

Originally posted by TruthSeeker


Emotions, body language... The information passed through words is only about 10% of the communication...

Hitler was a very good speaker used huge amounts of body language. He had twisted rascist views but was a very good speaker.

 

[goofyfish]

Australian Campaign to Dispose of Medicine Safely

An innovative Australian campaign now provides people a way to safely dispose of old, unwanted medicine via drop-off site at pharmacies. This hopefully replaces flushing them down the toilet, pouring them down the drain, or tossing them in the garbage.

The substances in many medicines can't be taken out of water by the purifying plants, hence these substances end up in streams, soil, and elsewhere. Medicines tossed in the trash and then buried in landfills also can get into water supplies.
Australia has an excellent idea here, one I hope gets adopted elsewhere. They've already collected 230 tons of old medicines.

Peace.

 

[Edufer]

It is an excellent idea, showing that when common sense is used, we can find solutions for most of our problems. But, nowadays, <b>what happened with common sense?</b> The abundance of politicians and other ignorant and dishonest people, mingling in matters they don't understand (for a profit), and we allowing them to keep doing it, demonstrate that common sense is as precious and rare as iridium.

 

[TruthSeeker]

Oh well...
goffyfish's post proves my whole point of the thread...