European Union Forums

[Laurentine]

In this topic we are going to discuss the environmental issues and its causes and effects. Name an issue, for instance I will begin with the global warming, and name its causes and negative or positive (if there exist so) effects on the environment and people. Also you can number the possibilities of solving the problem.

[Laurentine]

What causes global warming?
Scientists have determined that a number of human activities are contributing to global warming by adding excessive amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide accumulate in the atmosphere and trap heat that normally would exit into outer space.
The Consequences of Global Warming
As the concentration of greenhouse gases grows, more heat is trapped in the atmosphere and less escapes back into space. This increase in trapped heat changes the climate and alters weather patterns, which may hasten species extinction, influence the length of seasons, cause coastal flooding, and lead to more frequent and severe storms.

[Benn]

Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions.
It is feared that human activity is causing massive extinctions. From various animal species, forests and the ecosystems that forests support, marine life. The costs associated with deteriorating or vanishing ecosystems will be high. However, sustainable development and consumption would help avert ecological problems.
Humanity's impact on the earth has increased extinction rates to levels rivaling the five mass extinctions of past geologic history, transformed nearly half of Earth’s land and created 50 dead zones in the world’s oceans, according to research being presented this week at the 16th International Botanical Congress.
The solution is not to litter water...

[Peach]

Another great problem is overpopulation and it can be hardly solved.
Many of us have grown up learning and being told that 6 billion is too much and this "over population" is primarily impacting the planet's ability to cope. But is that really the case? Sure, the planet is facing incredible stress.
Studies point to ecological limits to sustain people, but these limits can be different, based on the way we consume resources etc so it is hard to say for sure what over population means let alone if we are at some threshold, below, or above it.

[Riser]

One of the most important problems on the globe is poverty.
Poverty is the state for the majority of the world’s people and nations. Why is this? Is it enough to blame poor people for their own predicament? Have they been lazy, made poor decisions, and been solely responsible for their plight? What about their governments? Have they pursued policies that actually harm successful development? Such causes of poverty and inequality are no doubt real. But deeper and more global causes of poverty are often less discussed.

Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization are global decisions, policies, and practices. These are typically influenced, driven, or formulated by the rich and powerful. These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions, and influential people.

[Terry]

An unacceptable number of species are still being lost forever despite world leaders pledging action to reverse the trend, a report has warned.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says the commitment to reduce biodiversity loss by 2010 will not be met.

It warns that a third of amphibians, a quarter of mammals and one-in-eight birds are threatened with extinction.

[Kieth]

Global warming makes the temperature of the earth warmer what does it leads to?
- Ice melting, the water level will rise, lesser land, land price go up, scientist will come up something to life on water or under. It would deffently change the economy, like some island as HongKong a big economy will go down will change a lot of things.

- Warmer earth means the seawater will vaporize more, that means there will be more heavy long storms. While some places will have heavy storms, some places will never have storm and the land will try up. As some places will dry up and plants die, the desert will spread. Deserts are like a plage the only way to stop it is having planting plants, trees and the like (i’m not so sure about the desert stuff, you should check it out), forest fire will go up

- Some river comes from constant melting of ice on mountains, as on point 1, those ice melt and rivers will dry up, some transport that rely on rivers will go down, some tribes that rely on those rivers have to move, … (i’m stuck here)

- Some animal cant stand the sudden temperature change and will die out, or animals that live on those ice places like the polar bear. As some animals will die out the chain of nature will be broken, some animal that rely on those animal for food will die out to.

- as the land will be drying there will be more earthquake because drying up the land will make it easyer to crack.

- Global warming is caused by burning fuel and creates CO2 this is also what happend before the iceage, before iceage… volcano’s put CO2 in the air, but in a longer periode, so that animals could adobt it, but now we dug up those fuel back up and firing all those back in the air in just 100 year.
Global Warming Survival Center

[jeofjingjeff]

Concern about rising temperatures has been growing in recent years as atmospheric
scientists report rising temperatures associated with greenhouse gases released into
the air by industrial and other human processes.


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[jeddie80]

"ATTENTION! BIOHAZARD! DEATH! "
These are the words placed along the secured restricted zone, they mark the facilities which are of serious hazard to all living beings, which are used as a place to work at different toxins, bio- and bacteriological materials, this work being held under seal of secrecy. And such a facility is nearly put into operation not high in the mountains or in a deserted area but in a Tbilisi suburb - Alekseevka village.
Despite nearly all the countries in the world signed the biological and toxin weapons convention Washington is keen to freeze up the negotiations on the mechanism of its inspection by all means available. And there are some good reasons for that.
Diligently keeping away from making up a global non-proliferation of biological weapons control system the USA have been actively developing their overseas laboratories. And the geography of the facilities is rather extended -Afghanistan, Egypt, Peru, Thailand, Germany and several European countries. And now it's Georgia.
It is known, that any biological laboratory concerned with drugs development has all the resources to perform operations going against the Convention.
Forcing the start-up of Health and disease control center laboratory Washington actively train specialists in this field. But judging by the guidelines of the training the laboratories will handle not only hemorrhagic fever, anthrax, plague, aphtha, phthisis and goat fever agents.
On certifying the laboratory as a top level biosafety one its owners mean not higher standards for the engineers and laboratorians but a certain equipment reserve factor. The staff can be replaced, the equipment configuration can be changed in several hours - and we have an output of last generation combat biological agents. And it's worth mentioning that we have them outside continental US.
But even vaunted American specialists do mistakes, and do them on the verge of a fall.
For instance, last year an independent commission detected some egregious violations in Fort Detrick infection diseases research institute. They could lead to a global disaster. The personnel was unskilled, so it was attacked by infected animals, the protective suits were marred by lab tools, the transport containers with test biomaterials were losing their hermiticity. And, in addition to all that, some used protective suits and injection syringes were found at the city waste dump, say nothing of an attempt to hush up the loss of a container with first class pathogens.
From all appearances, Georgia will face the same problems in the nearest future, and it may be not the only one. The Georgians' well-known devil-may-care attitude to secure arrangements and their homebred microbiologists' total inability of dealing with deathful biological materials may lead the world to its final edge.
These are just factors concerning the organization of the process and they can be somehow overcome. But no one including his American advisers is able to predict the way M. Saakhashvili may behave. His sharp desire to have the independent republics back under Georgian jurisdiction may play a low-down trick with the future of the whole world.
Launching a "small" biological war under the guidance of his advisers, M. Saakhashvili risks letting the uncontrollable genie out of the bottle. And who would be responsible for the consequences? In that situation it may happen that there just won't be anyone to be called to account, and, most likely, nobody will be left to do that.
Could Alekseevka laboratory be just a new storage, an international virologic waste dump? There's a chance.
But about eight square kilometers is obviously too much to study human and animal diseases.
May be it's world expert community which will be able to give an answer to the mankind, what is going on here in Georgia and who develops its highly dangerous technologies far away from its own borders?