Pollution

"Fix" with regard to waste is a term that means solidify. Waste slurries and sludges can be fixed by the addition of various binders and polymers to build latices that hold the waste and prevent leaching.

If "fix" is used to mean treat or make less toxic there are many options including:

• incineration or pyrolysis
• electrolysis
• chemical treatment
• reverse osmosis
• recycling and extraction
• hot salt baths

Here are some of the harmful effects of plastic bags:

Plastic bags litter the landscape. Once they are used, most plastic bags go into landfill, or rubbish tips. Each year more and more plastic bags are ending up littering the environment. Once they become litter, plastic bags find their way into our waterways, parks, beaches, and streets. And, if they are burned, they infuse the air with toxic fumes.

Plastic bags kill animals. About 100,000 animals such as dolphins, turtles whales, penguins are killed every year due to plastic bags. Many animals ingest plastic bags, mistaking them for food, and therefore die. And worse, the ingested plastic bag remains intact even after the death and decomposition of the animal. Thus, it lies around in the landscape where another victim may ingest it.

Plastic bags are non-biodegradable. And one of the worst environmental effects of plastic bags is that they are non-biodegradable. The decomposition of plastic bags takes about 1000 years.

Petroleum is required to produce plastic bags. As it is, petroleum products are diminishing and getting more expensive by the day, since we have been using this non-renewable resource increasingly. Petroleum is vital for our modern way of life. It is necessary for our energy requirements - for our factories, transport, heating, lighting, and so on. Without viable alternative sources of energy yet on the horizon, if the supply of petroleum were to be turned off, it would lead to practically the whole world grinding to a halt. Surely, this precious resource should not be wasted on producing plastic bags, should it?

Global warming is an obvious reality, the climate has been going through a warming period ever since the last ice age. During this global warming period there has been at least one mini ice age and there was a period right before the last mini ice age where the planet went through a warmer than usual period, known as the Medieval Warming Period. There are some scientists who claim that the Medieval Warming Period was not as warm as the period we are experiencing today, but these claims seem to come as a rebuttal to any science that suggests the warming period of today is a natural occurrence, pointing to the Medieval Warming Period as an example. It is the politically charged environment of global warming politics that is a scam. Scientist claim that there is a 90% chance that human activity is the cause of global warming today and politicians first take that datum and quote it as a 90% certainty then finally declaring the debate over and the same datum serves as definitive proof that human activity is causing global warming. That is the scam.

An Inconvenient Truth the book and documentary which garnered Al Gore a Nobel Prize and and Oscar is nothing but a scam with at least eleven known false assertions in the film. Both the book and film claim that the melting snows of Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. This is false. The retreat of Mount Kilimanjaro's glaciers is not attributable to contemporary temperature changes. It is not known exactly what is causing the retreat, but local and regional factors such as drops in local atmospheric moisture around the late 1800's, deforestation around Kilimanjaro resulting in a drop in local precipitation and several other factors have been proposed but the "consensus" amongst scientist is that current climate changes can be ruled out and it is the climate changes of the late 1800's that have effected and produce the retreat today.

In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore suggest that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. This is false. The rises in CO2 in that period lagged behind temperature rises by 800-2000 years. Al Gore claims that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming using apocalyptic images of a city devastated by hurricane. It is impossible to know if global warming had any effect at all on Katrina and one off event does not say anything about global warming. Hurricane Katrina can not be linked individually to any climate trend, human caused or otherwise. The devastating images of victims of Katrina reflects the reality of a city built below sea levels and protected by inadequate levees. The ineptitude of government response only worsened the tragedy. Gore claims global warming dried up Lake Chad in Africa. It did not. Lake Chad has dried up several times through out history including 8500 BC, 5500 BC, 1000 BC and 100 BC. The current drying of the lake is most likely attributed to an over extraction of water and changing agricultural patterns. Al Gore says: "A new scientific study shows that, for the first time, polar bears have been drowning in significant numbers. Those "significant" numbers amount to four polar bears that were observed to be drowned in 2004. Of the thirteen polar bear populations in Canada, only two have shown any signs of decreases and eleven show either increases or no change in the population. In Alaska, the two populations are relatively stable.

Al Gore goes on to claim that global warming will cause the gulf stream to stop and bring about an ice age for Europe. This is a scientific impossibility unless humanity figures out some way to turn off the wind system or stop the Earth's rotation or both. Al Gore blames global warming for numerous species losses and coral bleaching. Gore does not acknowledge significant variations in coral reef response to perturbations such as temperature or dissolved carbon dioxide. There are recent studies that suggest that the coral reefs will change over time rather than disappear altogether with some species already showing far greater tolerance to climate change and coral bleaching than others. Gore claims biologists have declared we are facing a mass extinction crisis with a rate of extinction now 1000 times higher than the normal back round rate. The inconvenient truth of the matter is that known species extinctions in the past several centuries total about 1,000, with very few attributed to climate change. The estimates that Gore refers to are unconfirmed estimates which either assumes that Global Climate Mean (GCM) predictions of future warming are reliable or consider the effects of phenomena apart from global warming.

Al Gore claims: "If Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea--or if half of Greenland half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, sea levels world wide would increase by 18 to 20 feet." The Greenland ice covering however, can not slip into the sea, since it is resting in a bowl shaped depression produced by it's own weight. It is only with regard to the West Antarctic ice sheet that some scientists have proposed a potential for accelerated outflow into the sea but even in terms of dire urgency, the estimates for this occurrence would take hundreds of years at worst and more likely thousands of years for both Greenland and the West Antarctic to melt. Gore claims the Antarctic ice sheet is melting but the evidence suggest it is increasing. Gore claims that sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet but even if they do rise to that level it would take more than a thousand years with a small cadre of scientist proposing it could take as little as 240-300 years. Both of these timetables undermine Gores claims of mass evacuations. And finally Gore claims that the evacuation process has all ready begun in the Pacific Islands. The evacuations referred to can not be linked to global sea level rise. Measurements of sea levels at the Pacific Islands vary from island to island, with some showing rises and some showing drops.

Many people have read or attended a viewing of An Inconvenient Truth and consider themselves to be informed. They were sadly misinformed, indoctrinated by a political propaganda. They were scammed. To further the confusion and misinformation there is a multi-media crusade to sell doom and gloom in the form of global warming. Whatever is scary the media will report with sober stature. Thus, global warming is somehow linked to greenhouse gases despite the lack of correlation. The Earth's atmosphere does not behave primarily like a greenhouse. An actual greenhouse works as a physical barrier to convection (the transfer of heat by currents in a fluid.) while the atmosphere actually facilitates convection so the impression of actual greenhouse-like activity in the Earths atmosphere is incorrect. The primary difference between the way greenhouses work and the "greenhouse effect" works is that greenhouses work mainly by modulating convection while the "greenhouse" effect works by modulating radiation. The greenhouse effect in all actuality is necessary to maintain a habitable planet and it is not the "greenhouse effect" that politicians are scaring the public with it is the RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECTthat they are using as a scary story. The primary fiction of a runaway greenhouse effect lies in the lack of understanding of the greenhouse effect to begin with. The people selling this particular scary story are under the impression that solar energy can be "trapped" by greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases do not trap energy from the sun but rather delay the transfer from Earth to space. Energy can not be "trapped". Energy can barely be contained which is why there is such a problem with fossil fuel pollution and why nuclear energy scares the beejeezus out of most people.

Climate change, on the other hand is an entirely different matter. Change is what climate does and it is the result of our planets orbital eccentricities, axial wobble, solar brightness variation and cosmic ray flux to name just a few factors involved in climate change. The obsession of the global warming scaremongers is over the global mean temperature but this is only part of climate. How wet or dry a climate happens to be is of far greater significance than the mean temperature. It is not even clear if global mean temperature is a useful metric. Even so, Earths current temperature is scaring the crap out of people and ambitious politicians smell a power grab. The science behind global warming is varied, disputed, confused and rife with speculation. For the politicians speculation wont get them elected and the only facts that matter are the facts that support their agenda. Is global warming a scam? No global warming is a process of climate change the Earth passes through in between ice ages. Are there people out there using your fear of global warming as an opportunity to scam you? You bet there are!