3D Maps Reveal a Lead-Laced Ocean 266
sciencehabit writes "About 1000 meters down in a remote part of the Atlantic Ocean sits an unusual legacy of humanity's love affair with the automobile. It's a huge mass of seawater infused with traces of the toxic metal lead, a pollutant once widely emitted by cars burning leaded gasoline. Decades ago, the United States and Europe banned leaded gas and many other uses of the metal, but the pollutant's fingerprint lingers on—as shown by remarkably detailed new 3-D maps released this week. The 3D maps and animations are the early results of an unprecedented $300 million international collaboration to document the presence of trace metals and other chemicals in the world's oceans. The substances, which often occur in minute quantities, can provide important clues to understanding the ocean's past—such as how seawater masses have moved around over centuries—and its future, such as how climate change might shift key biochemical processes."
Avgas (Score:5, Interesting)
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The EPA is expected to start the phase-out of leaded AVGAS as soon as next year.
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Is it really leaded gas, or just gas with a lead substitute? [wikipedia.org]
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Aviation is a huge polution problem... I came to this realization when planes where grounded on sept 11th 2001, after about 24 to 48 hours the air was much cleaner smelling!
That was all in your head. Unless you live at an airport, the air is largely unaffected by the air traffic.
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That's true but the amount of leaded gas burned by piston powered aircraft it pretty minimal. Old lead paint on walls is a far bigger problem.
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Nothing lasts forever and sooner or later it needs to be cleaned up.
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That is a very tiny amount compared to what autos produced.
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So what? Look up, what do you see? Empty sky. Look down, what do you see? Cars.
The scale is not even close.
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My Turbo Arrow needs 13 GPH of sweet leaded fuel. This does not change my point. I look down, many cars. I look around, not so many airplanes. The scale is not even close between cars and aircraft.
I can't believe most people even know what a R22 is, even around KTOA.
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Romans (Score:2)
Lead! The Romans used the stuff for pipes, and so did we in the fifties. We use graphite in pencils now, so we don't use it there. Where do we use lead these days? Nuclear containment and superman films? (And probably illegal Manhattan plumbing repairs, where legacy systems would be impractical to replace)
Re:Romans (Score:5, Informative)
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Pencils never contained lead though. It's a misunderstanding from when graphite was discovered back in the 16th century and people thought it was a type of lead and called it "black lead" or "plumbago".
Actually the paint that was used on pencils contained lead in the past. Considering how many kids chewed on pencils in grade school, this wasn't the best idea.
Re:Romans (Score:5, Funny)
It's OK, those kids studied law and became politicians.
Oh wait...
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I find it hard to believe that anyone could confuse graphite for anything reassembling a metal.
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I'm not sure about the reassembling part. I don't think it is capable of that without maybe some extreme heat and pressure or something.
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Do you? [google.com]
I'm not sure about the reassembling part. I don't think it is capable of that without maybe some extreme heat and pressure or something.
Good point. And actually comparing it to lead ore [google.ca] shows it's not that different.
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Imagine the surprise when they tried to smelt graphite by mistake.
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The only common and modern lead items I that I can think of are fishing sinkers, car batteries and tire balancing weights. I've seen electronic devices with lead to give weight.
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Until the recent explosion of LCD, TV screens contain a lot of lead. (CRT)
Now they're worthless, people are throwing them away.
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Being at the lowest part of the vessel and constantly in the water, keels are prone to blistering, leaching, and sometimes they just fall off. All this is just
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We still use lead in some electrical solder, although it is rather discouraged today. Most old electronics, therefor, contain led in their circuitry and thus have a chance of releasing it when they are disposed of. Some vehicle's windshields have lead embedded into the glass. Exercise equipment can sometimes contain lead weights.
It pops up all over the place. It's not quite as harmful, though, if you aren't burning it.
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Try TIX solder for electronics. Not sure how much lead is in it (it's partly silver and iridium) but it's easier to manipulate, melts at a lower temp, and becomes very hard but not brittle. (I used to work for the outfit that made it.)
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It's doubtful that the Romans introduced much lead into the water. from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~... [uchicago.edu]:
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The Roman Empire stretched far beyond Rome, just FYI, and they smelted a LOT of lead all over the place. The lead contamination they cause was not runoff from corroding pipes, it was from the actual smelters themselves.
You don't know the half [io9.com] of it.
The Romans are gone (Score:3)
Dredge it up, bottle it, sell it (Score:3)
Slusho [slusho.jp] - You Can't Drink Just Six!
What's the worst that could happen?
<_< [rogerebert.com]
Bullets (Score:2, Interesting)
Looking at TFA maps, the highest concentration appears to be in the outflow from the Mediterranean. That's probably a result of all the wars fought over there.
Case Study in Environmental Law (Score:5, Informative)
Banning lead gasoline - Best environmental law ever passed. Lower blood lead levels in kids, higher test scores, less crime in cities.
Banning lead in solder - Worst environmental law ever passed. Lead in solder never escaped in the environment, was at worst destined for a lined landfill. Was replaced by dredging coral reef islands for TIN and SILVER (the alternatives to lead). Tin and Silver have very low recycled content, the lead was 85% recycled content.
I'm very pro environment, very pro scientific method. The unintentional consequences of the success of lead gasoline bans were stupid tin mining in coral islands to divert solid solder from rich nations lined landfills.
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Don't believe the hype. EU and Japanese companies have managed to source alternatives to leaded solder without dredging coral reef islands. As far as I can tell it's just unscrupulous people making money out of the situation and some propaganda from opponents of RoHS, and hardly common practice for supplying lead free solder to the billions of products that use it every year.
Re: Hype? Case Study in Environmental Law (Score:2)
Businessweek - A third of all tin comes from Bangka. http://www.businessweek.com/ar... [businessweek.com] Bangka tin mines were opened to supply deleaded solder. The point is that the environmental cost of extraction is nearly always more significant than the environmental cost of exposure. Environmental laws that consider only the "end of pipe" without considering lifecycle costs are to environmentalism what mercury laxative was to medicine (very effective if all you care about is an excellent crapping experience)
80% of
Incinerators and Trash-to-Energy (Score:2)
Banning lead in solder - Worst environmental law ever passed. Lead in solder never escaped in the environment, was at worst destined for a lined landfill.
I didn't understand the seemingly poor cost-benefit trade-off either, until I realized it was the European Union that pushed for this. In Europe, they incinerate a much larger portion of their trash than we do -- thus, the lead in the garbage stream was actually a big problem for them.
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Lead was used in gasoline, in-part, as a lubricant in the parts of the engine where you did not want oil.
For valves and seats. You can say it with me: valves and seats. No other part of the engine but the cylinder walls themselves are touched by fuel, and they are not in the best case. They, of course, are lubricated by oil. Tetraethyl lead's primary purpose, though, was as an octane booster. Today we use ethanol or MTBE. MTBE is almost magically toxic, it's worse than lead in spills and it is readily absorbed through skin. It improves combustion, however, so when burned it's clean, unlike burning lead. Ethano
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pretty map meaningless without scale (Score:2)
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anything really
That's why they put words next to the pictures.
The lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what you’d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools
The "small spoonful of frozen orange juice" is too ambiguous to use directly, so I'll just fill a teaspoon with solid lead. Given 5.014×10^34 atoms of water in 200x 2.5E6 L Olympic pools (Wikipedia) and 1.62E23 atoms of lead in a teaspoon, you have 3 atoms of lead per trillion molecules of water.
Sure to panic homeopaths everywhere. The EPA actionable drinking water limit for lead is 15 parts per billion; three orders of magnitude higher.
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you're missing the point (Score:2)
and they know? (Score:2)
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I had the same question -- how much is natural leeching? have any of these traces been tracked back to sources?
I'd think lead from bullets (if any) would drain more northward, given where most of the shootin' wars were fought.
Where I used to live, the ground was more-than-average radioactive. Blame got pointed at the air force base, but... no. Truth is, the area is lousy with uranium deposits.
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...is because of human activity.
Without some sort of baseline of ocean lead levels before the industrial age, it's difficult to assert that the levels observed are caused by humanity in any specific percentage.
Where's the proxy for historic ocean lead levels pre-1850?
Exactly what I was thinking. Zero point in doing research on how the ocean has acted in the past naturally when we humans keep fucking it up with toxic sludge.
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...is because of human activity.
Without some sort of baseline of ocean lead levels before the industrial age, it's difficult to assert that the levels observed are caused by humanity in any specific percentage.
Where's the proxy for historic ocean lead levels pre-1850?
Who else was adding tetraethyllead to their fuel supply, alien invaders?
Seeing concentrations which dilute along known currents isn't very iffy stuff, even a kid dripping oil in a stream of water can witness this effect.
I wonder how much of that lead comes back in fish - the 'brain' food.
Next week news - Zombies in peril, main food source contaminated by lead. Zombie health institute issues warnings, zombies lurch in protest.
Re:Not everything observed... (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, the article said "lead," not "tetraethyllead" [sic].
Guess what? That lead came from the earth - humans dug it up. It's not like alchemy is real.
Are sub-sea geothermal vents spewing lead in some form? Are there exposed veins of lead on the ocean floor? Is it from fishing weights or ballasts of sunken ships?
If you can't answer all those questions and other similar, your comment is less than worthless.
Well it's obvious you didn't read it, particularly the bit about a concentration diluting along known currents. Guess those were some big words and you might have had trouble with them.
Tetraethyllead was added to gasoline as a catalyst. Once the fuel was burned the catalyst exited into the atmosphere (are you keeping up?) where it could land anywhere or go into solution where rain fell, taking it through drains, watersheds, down rivers and into the ocean. Spotting it in the water column is pretty easy. Spotting it in your water and food, well, that's a less heterogeneous environment. But with all the fuel burned with that additive, it's somewhere, it doesn't go POOF and magically disapper (out of sight, out of mind.) Got that?
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Re:Not everything observed... (Score:5, Insightful)
There appears to be a direct correlation... Guess it wasn't so difficult after all?
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I'd have more faith in that if there was a larger network of observations. 787 sites to cover the entire atlantic ocean seems a bit thin.
Correlation isn't causation, of course :)
Re:Not everything observed... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was wondering why it only appears in the known Ocean Currents.
Is this a case of looking for your lost keys under the streetlamp because its easier to see there?
Do they not find any evidence in areas away from the currents?
Maybe they didn't take random bottom readings anywhere else. Or maybe it settled out everywhere else but
within the currents. Oh, that's it. Its Settled Science.
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What I do know of marine research comes from a friend who worked a couple years at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) They'd go out to see for weeks at a time, visiting various sensors to gather data. Some of this data comes from deep in the water column. Aggregating from stations, over several years can paint a pretty clear picture. 700+ stations is pretty significant. A lot more telling than a statement like "Gee, I don't think that's very much" - based upon feck all knowledge of the sci
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The fact that they confirmed their hypothesis doesn't prove they had confirmation bias.
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Wait, why is that the most predictable place?
Atmospheric lead gets rained out over the whole ocean, no?
The story was not clear that they even checked anywhere else, and absent that, all they can say is
this is what we found here, but it could be a lot worse elsewhere.
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Population sampling may be good if your sample is truly random, but there's little reason to believe from their 3d map that they did anything of the sort.
Hell, for a sensor network of 300,000,000 on the ocean, you'd still be taking only a representative sample :) There's a *lot* of cubic volume there :)
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The article in question didn't seem to include any of that significance or skill testing at all though.
That kind of thing should probably be mandatory for papers which are basing their discussion on particular applications (and possible misapplications) of statistics.
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Specifically, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Myanmar are known to still sell gasoline containing TEL at the pump.
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And you could still buy 4 star leaded fuel in the UK in 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk]
The US went lead free decades ago, Europe a few years ago.
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And you could still buy 4 star leaded fuel in the UK in 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... [dailymail.co.uk] The US went lead free decades ago, Europe a few years ago.
How did you come up with that when the article states it was banned in the UK in 1998?
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Because I miss read it. I knew that the UK had leaded long after the US made it illegal and Did a search to find when they stopped selling it.
The EU banned it a decade an a half ago the US several decades ago is the correct statement. My bad.
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Leaded fuel can still be sold for use in aircraft and race cars in the US.
Re:Not everything observed... (Score:5, Informative)
Uranium has a 4.5 billion year half-life, and the end-product of its decay chain is lead. Since the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, you should expect to find about equal amounts of uranium and lead in the environment overall (I'm not an expert on how minute quantities of these elements act in seawater). The trace uranium in seawater is about 3.33 parts per billion [ieee.org].
According to TFA (which didn't give exact numbers), "the lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what youâ(TM)d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools". An Olympic-sized swimming pool [wikipedia.org] is about 2.5 million liters. According to Google, 1 teaspoon in 2.5 million liters is about 2 parts per billion [google.com].
So the amounts of lead they're detecting are about 0.01 parts per billion, or two orders of magnitude less than the amount of naturally-ocurring uranium in seawater. The charts linked in TFA bear this out. Clicking through random charts, lead concentrations [egeotraces.org] are around 25 pmol/kg, while uranium concentrations [egeotraces.org] are around 3 nmol/kg (3000 pmol/kg).
So (1) for whatever reason uranium dissolves in seawater much more readily than lead, and (2) the amounts of lead they're detecting are minuscule even by "trace elements" standards.
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*ring ring*
Hello? Mr D? Are you there?
Ohh.. that's right.. it became a problem.
And you died. Oops.
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*ring ring*
Hello? Mr D? Are you there?
Ohh.. that's right.. it became a problem.
And you died. Oops.
Lead in food leads to neurological disorders, retarding intelligence, impairing motor functions, etc.
Now, I'm not saying there's evidence of that in any responses here ...
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I would assume it also ends up concentrating at higher levels as you work up the food chain, just like mercury and things like ciguatoxins.
So I guess the take-away here is that we shouldn't cannibalize anyone that is a fish eater in South Africa.
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Lead in food leads to neurological disorders, retarding intelligence, impairing motor functions, etc.
I refuse to let the validity of your facts detract from the validity of my humor.
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I hope this is satire to mock climate deniers.
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No, it's to mock climate nazis :)
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Which one of those search results do you believe has the answer?
Let's look at the top three:
1) ice:
Trace metal suites in Antarctic pre-industrial ice are consistent with emissions from quiescent degassing of volcanoes worldwide
2) 20th century measurements (aka, after the industrial age)
Lead in corals: reconstruction of historical industrial fluxes to the surface ocean
3) a model, not data
Global 3-D land-ocean-atmosphere model for mercury: Present-day versus preindustrial cycles and anthropogenic enrichment f
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Science:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1755... [iop.org]
Pay close attention to the caveats about Pb and paleo measurements of it.
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The article you linked isn't relevant to your question, since we're interested in the question on whether gasoline lead is being measured in the ocean. As such, we only need to look at a time course for Pb in the ocean over the time period in question [mit.edu]. (i.e., the age of leaded gasoline.) Your linked paper is concerned with much larger time scales, on the order of 10k years [iop.org].
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I'm always interested in people who give actual cites :)
That being said, my concern is this - without a *pre industrial baseline* it's difficult to make sure you haven't made the wrong assumptions about your isotope sourcing/sinking logic. Given Pb is reactive (to the tune of "living" 50-200 years), it makes not only direct measurement iffy, but with the 10k year resolution of proxies, you're left with a lot of holes. Even your first cite only shows what, 9 sample areas? Given that we *know* Pb isn't wel
motivated reasoning (Score:2)
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Thank goodness we have all these armchair experts to correct those worthless braindead scientists. My goodness, between the experts on hydrology, climatology, physics, biology and all those other disciplines who always seem so quick to poke holes in theories without RTFAing or the papers the articles are based on, why Slashdot is a regular renaissance man's hangout.
Clearly we have no need of academia at all. We can shut down the universities and the research facilities, because here on Slashdot we have geni
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Well, if the "science is settled", we don't need any more research, right? :)
But seriously, a network with only 787 observation sites? Isn't that a bit thin for the entire atlantic ocean?
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Based on these comments, Slashdotters are also experts on moving goal posts.
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Proven by who? The Koch Brothers? Exxon mobil?
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Assuming we've properly modeled the isotope ratios, this is great - now where's the graph of the data? Perhaps we have more than three coring sites besides Bermuda, Rhode Island and British Columbia?
Do we have it for the 787 study sites in the article mentioned?
Seems like a lot of holes in that cheese :)
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I'm talking about modeling the movement of the isotopes. The assumption is that isotope ratios change over time due to specific causes - but that isn't always clear. For example:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/200... [wattsupwiththat.com]
"But if you examine the above equation, you will see that the C13 index that is reported can go down not only from decreasing C13 content, but also from an increasing C12 content (the other 98.9% of the CO2)."
"BOTTOM LINE: If the C13/C12 relationship during NATURAL inter-annual variability is the s
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Why would you give credibility to some superfluous wrong interpretation by a non-expert and not to the tons of data and studies made by people who actually knew what they were doing?
Because he has some sort of agenda (probably a religious one)
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I agree with rational wiki and others:
"While Spencer has become an ID PRATT machine, he hasn't contributed any new cards to the creationists' deck. He mostly just parrots the greatest hits like "no transitional fossils" and "microevolution not macroevolution." He also flogs the "secular religion" trope even harder when it comes to evolution than he does for global warming."
Evolution denier is even looper than doubting isotope dating. Yep, religious agenda. From his comments on "The Evolution Crisis":
"To exa
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Evolution has a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Catastrophic global warming does not.
Neither does creationism.
The fact that Spencer manages to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind, one rational, one irrational, is no more surprising than otherwise rational atheists believing in the Cult of Global Warming.
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Evolution has a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Catastrophic global warming does not.
This is absurd. If we show that climate sensitivity is low, or that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that humans didn't put it there, that that there are negative feedbacks -- any of those lines of evidence will falsify AGW, and therefore CAGW as well.
What *precisely* is catastrophic is problematic because people have different value systems. Nonetheless, no warming would not be CAGW, and 10C warming would make many places unlivable -- as in animals would be slowly cooked. So it is more nuanced in pointin
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Nope, that was intentional :)
So was that :)
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Appeal to authority?
Isn't that like Catholics claiming an infallible pope?
If you're going to argue against the interpretation, argue against the interpretation, don't just wave your hands and say that your interpretation is magically correct because it is backed up by nameless authorities with an unstated argument.
Cite your work :)
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RoHS effect... When you can't sell something to the US or Europe, you tend to use the same things that you sell to them, because producing two things costs more.
Re:"Once widely emitted"? (Score:4, Informative)
Do you really think the US and Europe account for the majority of vehicles?
Yes I do [who.int]. It's not extremely lop sided, but there are more vehicles in Europe and the US combined than there are in China and India combined. I'd also throw all the cars in Japan under the US/Europe column for not using leaded gas.
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In America almost every family can afford cars. Not true in most Asian societies. (Yes there are exceptions, such as Singapore, hence I said most.)
I don't know how many people in Singapore can actually afford a car but I can tell you that the certificate required to own a car costs $93k for 10 years and the cost of the car can be as much as triple that of a "Western" nation. A lot of people catch cabs.
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China has over three times the population of the US, so it still produces a lot more pollution. They are also the top automaker in the world, so their automobile use is increasing.
They also make castings for engines assembled in America by people like International-Navistar. Hey, International is right there in the name, don't look so surprised! Fact is, most of our pollution has been exported to China. Unfortunately, it comes right back. Fortunately for me, it comes back more to SoCal than NoCal. Most days there's more Chinese pollution in LA than local stuff. The CARB worked, but it didn't solve the global problem.
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"Fact is, most of our pollution has been exported to China."
Not a fact. The single largest contributor to air pollution is transportation
Only if you include shipping, because container ships run on bunker fuel. And guess where the shipping is coming from?
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In the 1920's and 30's, "ethyl" (leaded gasoline) was the more expensive grade. By the 1940s, virtually all gasoline contained TEL and manufacturers designed engines with higher compression ratios to take advantage of the fuel. So, by the 1970s, unleaded gasoline required more expensive octane boosters to work in modern engines.
Today, lead additives for vehicle fuel are banned in almost all countries.
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Because "unleaded" is a misleading name. There have been three major types of gasoline over the years:
1) Raw gasoline: unmodified crude-oil distillates. This is one of the original automobile fuels, and had a varying octane rating; this made building high-performance engines difficult.
2) Leaded gasoline: crude-oil distillates with Tetraethyl lead [wikipedia.org] added to raise and stabilize the octa
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Not to mention that the original replacement for TEL was MTBE http://www.epa.gov/mtbe/gas.ht... [epa.gov] which is still in use in limited quantities. MTBE has been largely replaced with ethanol for octane boosting. Ethanol is pretty cheap compared to MTBE, but it carries large government subsides.
Re:fukushima (Score:5, Insightful)
"The solution to pollution is dilution" - man, that was one big lie, wasn't it? It started dying with this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_Bay].
More than 15 years ago I was involved in such study and already at that time it was understood that the water might be safe for drinking but should you eat fish from it you are in trouble. The operative word here is "bio accumulation". I was working on a project commissioned by the [much smaller] EU at the time to readjust the safety levels of heavy metals in marine and river waters. We worked along the south-west coast of France and north-west cost of Spain. You know what's funny - because of the importance of our finds which would lead to legislation change we worked "under cover" .I am not kidding. A fishing boat was used with an analytical lab on board but we would always say on the radio we were fishermen. Even to the people that direct the traffic in harbors. We were told not to say to anyone what we research. I think the very fact that such measures were taken on a EU project no less, says something...something that is not nice.
However, your particular anger is not warranted in this case, IMO. The radioactive material form that disaster is truly insignificant compared to the heavy metal pollution from everything else. I am not saying that we should close our eyes and mouths of course...