Talk:Pollution

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Indoor air pollution and global warming

When people think about air pollution, they usually think about smog, acid rain, CFC's, and other forms of outdoor air pollution. But did you know that air pollution also can exist inside homes and other buildings? It can, and every year, the health of many people is affected by chemical substances present in the air within buildings. Air is the ocean we breathe. Air supplies us with oxygen which is essential for our bodies to live. Air is 99.99% nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor and inert gases. Human activities can release substances into the air, some of which can cause problems for humans, plants, and animals. Heat is a pollutant because increased temperatures result in the deaths of many aquatic organisms. These changes in temperatures are caused when a discharge of cooling water by factories and power plants occurs. There are many sources of indoor air pollution. Tobacco smoke, cooking and heating appliances, and vapors from building materials, paints, furniture, etc. cause pollution inside buildings. Radon is a natural radioactive gas released from the earth, and it can be found concentrated in basements in some parts of the United States. Additional information about the radon problem is available from the USGS and the Minnesota Radon Project.

Many people spend large portion of time indoors - as much as 80-90% of their lives. We work, study, eat, drink and sleep in enclosed environments where air circulation may be restricted. For these reasons, some experts feel that more people suffer from the effects of indoor air pollution than outdoor pollution. The Greenhouse Effect, also referred to as global warming, is generally believed to come from the build up of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is produced when fuels are burned. Plants convert carbon dioxide back to oxygen, but the release of carbon dioxide from human activities is higher than the world's plants can process. The situation is made worse since many of the earth's forests are being removed, and plant life is being damaged by acid rain. Thus, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is continuing to increase. This buildup acts like a blanket and traps heat close to the surface of our earth. Changes of even a few degrees will affect us all through changes in the climate and even the possibility that the polar ice caps may melt. (One of the consequences of polar ice cap melting would be a rise in global sea level, resulting in widespread coastal flooding.)

FYI: This article duplicates within it a large block of its own text--clean-up needed.

I just thought I'd mention it. I noticed this as I was browsing through contemplating an add. This should probably be cleaned up first though. I'll get to it later unless someone can take care of it. I don't know if the duplication is complicated by slight differences and improvements in one of the blocks so were I to do it I would want to compare both sections with some care before deleting one or the other--which could be somewhat time-consuming. The first block also has more wikilinks than the second. -Onceler 03:32, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like vandalism after (15:49, 30 December 2005) and (15:50, 30 December 2005) by (71.98.46.52) that duped this block. It must just be that it looked enough like ordinary well-intended text that it didn't catch anyone's attention. Something like a new-year's, cat's-away prank. Onceler 07:50, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

the above text belongs in Indoor air quality talk ....as for the present state of the article, we need less discussion of ambiguity which can often be an apology by industry and more technical detail regarding the manifestations of pollution..i whall be gald to help out with thisAnlace 00:59, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I hadn't read the previous section until you mentioned it but after glancing through, I agree, though it is now almost two years old. There is also probably quite a bit of that posting that is discursive enough to be part of an article--that's not a bad picture of the smoky mountains either:

http://www.astrosurf.org/lombry/Documents/smoky-mountains.jpg

though I don't know if we need it or if there are copyright restrictions. In my estimate, the section above is 80% indoor pollution, 15% air pollution (CO2), and 5% water or thermal pollution. I believe dedicated articles already exist for each of these in some capacity. I'll take a look at migrating some of it.

Your point about the tone in the ambiguity section is also well taken. Perhaps it is getting lengthy as a treatment of mere "ambiguity". My initial involvement was to try and clean the article up and the headings I inserted do reflect the content, most of which was already there, fairly accurately. I might not even have stepped in if things hadn't been in such bad shape. I think I am just trying to work with what was already in the article and felt it was relevant enough not to remove. I'm trying to mold it more into context. My instinctive reaction to your insight would be that the more appropriate heading and focus is "Controversy"--there still doesn't seem to be any shortage of that around this topic. The content about ambiguity is not out of place (NPOV) but the emphasis is off. I'll endeavor to take another pass at this. Otherwise, I agree on the technical detail about pollution manifestations. More of that is in order. Did you have anything specific in mind? There are quite a few superficial examples already. Maybe these just need to be topped off to ensure thoroughness and then the work would be needed to fill the discussion out with sets of data, in table form if available. Perhaps some treatment of the topic of pollution measurement is appropriate and it might tie in well with the high-level regulations discussion. I don't know of any current wikipedia article about the topic and this might be a good place to begin it. As far as regulations in each country goes, more participation from wikipedians residing in other countries might be needed. The web should help there ...

The subjects in the following existing articles, most of which were found by searching only in Wikipedia for "pollution regulation" bear some mention:

Domestic/International Legislation/Regulation:

History:

Social manifestations:

Other:

Then there is also that awful mountain of garbage in the Philippines that seems to be the size of the cliffs along the Southern Californaia coast that nearly crushes entire neighborhoods during the rains. So there is plenty to talk about without getting very specific. But if it is appropriate, by all means add detail.

It seems like the scope of information and data here should be broad. I have been leery of adding too much detail to some articles such as this one when a dedicated article already exists. Because of this, pollution seems suited to be more of a hub-type article, with links to all the others, and where the topic of pollution can be treated in the most general sense. That would be politics, policy, history, etc. as well as the "meta-" or "interstitial"/interconnected pollution issues (eg, ties from atmospheric CO2 to ocean acidification, which already has a dedicated and vigorously maintained article itself). I had envisioned fleshed out specifics in this article sparely to illustrate points as needed lest all the other ones get rewritten here. Detailed data yes, but with a care that involved treatment does not overly duplicate existing content.

To your point about California standards: I tried to make mention of Prop 65 under the regulations section in this article, and one or two others as well, complete with a link to the dedicated article at California Proposition 65 (1986). To that article I added most of what I knew offhand and felt confident enough about. My inclination is that the prop 65-specific stuff should go there and any more general CA or US regs stuff should go on pollution as you suggest. By all means feel free to add to these. From your user page, it sounds as if you are quite qualified. By the way, there is a standing template request for expert review in the air pollution article if you are interested. Anyway, my intention was not to omit the California standard but rather to make sure it was mentioned as a start. If I have missed the crux of your comment about CA regs, don't hesitate to clarify.

A disclaimer: Most of my suggestions here should be taken as tentative wishlist/best course of action. I'm open to suggestions and don't necessarily expect to get around to it all. Compared to yourself, I don't have that much specialized knowledge of this topic beyond what I can garner through news sources and the web as a concerned consumer and earthling. Your reaction would be of interest. Thanks for the feedback. -cheers, -Onceler 12:15, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

hello onceler. thanks for your in depth and well thought out strategy. i think i concur with you on all matters. the hub notion of the article is good, lest this site become an encyclopedia..ill try to add some insights as i can, but the biggest job is to distill the volumes of possible regulatory and historical data into some meaningful skeleton. im in california and know the U.S. scene pretty well. sounds like you are in the UK, where it would be great to have insight for UK and rest of europe. i would hope we might find someone knowledgable on china and russia and we could do this pretty well...ill also check out the air pollution article {its on my list of things to do). i just did some updating of the aircraft noise article, which ties in (in a minor way). best regards or cheers as you say :) Anlace 13:56, 10 February 2006 (UTC) salut,sa va? moi ué![reply]

Military pollution

What about a paragraph about the military, like the following: Wars and violent conflicts are a source for pollution including ammunition dumps, depleted uranium in ammunition spreading low levels of radioactive contamination, sonar radar and its effects on whale beachings, bombing remants that are dispersed while containing toxic substances, contamination of lands surrounding military bases, drinking water disruptions from groundwater contamination, landmines, etc. Iraq suffers heavily from this kind of pollution with numerous unmanaged weapons depots that were looted in 2003. - Shiftchange 23:59, 10 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

hi again shift, you have some good ideas, but i think we need to use an outline that manifests the types of pollution (eg air, noise, water, soil). other wise we sould end up with hundreds of paragraphs such as how lumberjacks, ironmakers, food processors etc pollute the environment) By the way food processors contribute much more to world wide pollution than the military !! we can work most of your material into those categorical headings. while i am a stong advocate of the environment as you are, we also have to be extremely objective and be able to prove each point. finally we have to maintain perspective. for exammple "bombing remnants" contribute much less to groundwater contamination than do fuel spills or dry cleaning solvent leaks. i think on the whole most of your material could better fit into other articles such as landmines, radar, or depleted uranium. keep up all that thinking :) regards Anlace 01:14, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rename to Environmental pollution

i move that this article be renamed "environmental pollution" with a redirect from pollution. this is a more commonly used term in the scientific community to denote the class of effects discussed here. we want to clearly distinguish environmental pollution from indoor air pollution, for example...let others weigh in on this topic Anlace 05:58, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It wouldn't be such a bad idea to have a disambiguation page called pollution along with that either. I don't think that would necessarily require too much change of this article though, per se. -Onceler 16:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

... which is to say I support the idea. It would be an improvement in clarity on the current situation of having the article named one thing and referred to in bold as another in the first sentence. The current situation usurps every other possible usage of the term pollution. A wiktionary link for pollution would also go well on the above-mentioned disambiguation page. -Onceler 18:48, 11 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

good ideas onceler...ill wait a few days and see whether any other commenters weigh in...cheers, anlace

Oh, and also, as a minor comment, Pollution seems to be the "main article" in Category:Pollution. I am not sure how changing the name affects that. -Onceler 16:47, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

good point onceler, we would have to fix that category issue...would be tedious , but worth doing...by the way ive been busy upgrading the Noise pollution, Water pollution and Air Pollution articles. ive not finished with them yet, but they all needed a LOT of work and they are much improved. im getting close to being ready to come back to the environmental pollution article...i also created a new article called Noise barrier. cheers, Anlace 17:22, 13 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your additions. Incidentally, some of these articles also seem to have a similar structure.

I had been working on the history section as a launching point and to provide context for changing the former "ambiguity" section since I was not sure how to word the latter. When I saw your alterations of the history section, I just threw in what I had. I think the content was fairly complementary overall. I reinserted the "pollution/dilution" mention because I think it is the nearest thing to an anti-environmentalism manifesto I know of to refer to. Though I have not yet been able to find sources stating that it was taught in schools, I have found literal broader corroborations of it so I made the assertion more tentative and added a couple of citations. I think this content still has legs and is relevant enough to leave in, especially in a historical discussion. I also began to have concerns that the history section was looking like a history of environmentalism but there doesn't seem to be too many other ways to really talk about pollution historically, aside from a timeline, since formal measurement and recognition is a recent development. Then again, I didn't see much of a history in the environmentalism article. This may all change down the line though. It can happan at any time and the current state of things is likely just temporary.

I changed the order of the sections because jumping right into history, pre-empting sources/effects/regulation seems like burying the lead a bit--however much it might interest me. A couple of things I wanted to mention. I was not aware of it before but the content under the article List_of_environment_topics seems to be as vast a compendium as I know of on Wikipedia, almost something of a tail wagging the dog within Category:Pollution. Also not to be overlooked: Timeline of environmental events. The other is that it seems incongruous that there is no article titled soil contamination or something near to it in scope. This topic seems to get wedged under the mention of other things. Cross-referencing is OK but it probably deserves more than sub-category status. -regards, Onceler 20:07, 14 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One more point about the question of renaming. If I recall correctly, there are between 700 and 750 articles which link to Pollution. Many wikilinks may need to be updated. As far as I can tell, the only thing making Pollution the main article in Category:Pollution is the fact that the name is the same and it is in that category. I couldn't find any further documentation of this. -Onceler 01:35, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

i appreciate thoughtful additions and our dialog here. AS far as soil contamination, thats an article i plan to write in the next few months (ive actually been more active in soil contamination in recent years than air pollution). i think we generally are seeing things in a similar light and our additions do seem quite complementary. regarding renaming pollution to enviromental pollution, i still favor this change and it seems like the 700 links will be solved by redirect, although we could clean up the more commonly used links. im stumped on the category issue you allude to ....any ideas on that? best regards, Anlace 01:51, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I would bet that if the line about the "main article" disappears from the Category page, it won't be missed much. That should be all that happens if the name of the pollution article changes. I think it happens automatically, so probably not a big deal. The thing is that if there is a disambiguation article named pollution, the redirect to environmental pollution wouldn't be automatic. Maybe that is also not such a big deal and links could be gradually updated over time. Here is what I had in mind:

Pollution generally means environmental pollution, but may also refer to:

Alternatively, the disambiguation article could be named pollution (disambiguation) and pollution could become an automatic rdirect. Maybe that is the most practical way to go. I don't believe this falls foul of any Wikipedia standard of practices. -Onceler 02:36, 22 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can anyone present the source that says the maximum fine for dumping toxic waste is US$ 25,000? I can't seem to find any other source saying this, but has found some cases where the fines has surpassed this ammount.

I regret that this article remains a mess of disorganised and frequently incorrect information. We have debated the possible conversion to environmental pollution which would presumably be a relatively short article which itself references the many sub-topics. I will try and find a few hours to substantially re-vamp this article unless anyone else has the time to start it going. Mrs Trellis 17:04, 28 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I regret your regret but look forward to your improvements. Regarding the pending "rename" to environmental pollution, as far as my end is concerned, the hold-up is resolving all the redirects. As I understand it, "double redirects" are not a desireable wikipedia feature, and many would result from such a "move". Does anyone know how other-language inter-wiki links handle this? On a more minor note, the above-suggested pollution disambiguation article to take the place of this one would need to wait until all appropriate links to pollution are updated to environmental pollution. I don't know of any automatic or bot-based way to update such redirect links and don't quite have a chunk of time available to do all of this manually. If enough wikipedians are interested in signing up to a batch of manual updates though, then a number of us in concert could probably make quicker work of the task. Not having tried this before some traffic conventions could be helpful--have every volunteer's block proceed sequentially, lest a lot of edit collisions result, in relay fashion; once one person on the list is done, they can post a status, say to this page, by their name in the list and the next person can proceed and so on down until it is done. Checking just now, there are about 831 references in wikipedia to the current pollution article. I've added my name to the top of the list below. Anyone else interested feel free to add theirs in like fashion. Preceding each name by # will make it automaticlly number itself of course and we can start when the number of names is enough. That depends on how many edits each contributor wants to handle which we can also indicate by each name. I don't think I am willing to sign up for more than 20 with my slow-poke connection, though I am willing to be flexible about that. So if everyone thinks like I do, we would need about 40-42 volunteers, give or take. Once we have enough volunteers, we can get started. While I'm open to better suggestions, I'll start the list for now:

Onceler 20:17, 2 August 2006 (UTC) (20 edits)[reply]
Mrs Trellis 20:32, 2 August 2006 (UTC) (I'll volunteer 20)[reply]

Link Removal

I removed a link to this site. It didn't seem like a suitable site to be linked to from a wikipedia article, but if anyone disagrees, I'd be glad to discuss it. --Ori.livneh 10:38, 17 June 2006 (UTC).[reply]

to User:82.45.233.50 re "Edward I" date correction

(reposting this from User talk:82.45.233.50 as that might be a shared connection)

Thanks for catching my mistake in the Pollution article re Edward I's legislating from the grave--"1361" definitely was wrong. However, I just double-checked the source for the original information and it said "1306"--I typo'ed this edit in February. Do you have a reference for "1272"? -regards, Onceler 19:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

List of doomsday scenarios

Could use votes to save this article, thanks MapleTree 22:33, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Article uses Contamination and Pollution interchangably

Just completed a 3rd year University unit in Environmental Geology which focussed almost entirely on pollution and/or geological hazards (studying for the exam when I ran across this page). According to all three of my lecturers, contamination is any increase in a given pollutant above the background level, but it can only technically be defined as pollution when it reaches a point where it has an affect on health (mostly human, but also of the environment, animals etc.). Looks like it'd be a little bit of work to fix the article up, but it would increase the accuracy and technical correctness of the thing.

Weebs 01:43, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That may be a difference worthy of distinction here. Some of the mentions within this article may not necessarily contradict the stricter definition you cite though, if contamination is really a superset of pollution. I recommend digging up a citation and stating this distinction near the top in the introduction section, then the existing uses of contamination can be edited or made less ambiguous as needed. Putting contamination in bold for the initial definition would also be a good idea because apparently, per my query a few seconds ago, this article is redirected to from contamination, thus serving as the "contamination" article itself. I had not been aware of that previously. -Onceler 03:37, 28 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Citations needed

The history section is in need of citations. We need to know this information has some sort of backup, besides our own imaginations.

Merging Externality

Although the primary example of a negative externalities is pollution, the externality page should not be merged with this topic as there is much more to externalities than this one example. There are other types of negative externalities, and it is not a good fit to cover positive externalities. The focus of externalities is centered on economics, which does not seem to make that information a good fit on this page.

DJ Gregor 05:13, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

oppose merger first of all the pollution article is becoming large and unwieldy on its own. its a huge topic with a lot to cover on its own. secondly DJ Gregor is on target that externality is really focussed on economic aspects, even tho it does relate to pollution (btw it also relates to non pollution matters). Anlace 17:02, 24 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why has the person who added the merger tag to this article not discussed his reasoning here on the Discussion page? It must be obvious to anyone who has scanned the Externality article that it is much too huge to be merged into any other article and that most of it relates to economics. Very, very little of it relates this article on pollution. I oppose the merger. Since all three comments discussing the merger are in opposition, I am taking the bold step of deleting the merger tag. - mbeychok 06:47, 25 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Opposed to merger: some mention of externalities and linking within the article or at the end as part of a "see also" section might be a good idea but merging looks like going overboard. -Onceler 03:37, 28 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to merge Pollutant into Pollution

Hi everybody. I think Pollutants must be part of the Pollution article (maybe a subsection). The reasons are obvious. Wikipedia should be as concise as possible and not spread out in different articles which talk about the same thing. We are trying to gather information and make it clear for people not spread it all over Wikipedia. The Vindictive 16:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree with The Vindictive that the merger he proposed will be beneficial. - mbeychok 18:49, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Support merge. - SpLo T // 05:35, 29 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Merging

I must definitely agree with all others attempting to merge this page pollutants with the page pollution 76.175.24.159 04:00, 8 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pollutant merger

Since nobody seems to object the merger and since the articles have been tagged for some time now, I am going to undertake it in the following days, as a separate section within the Pollution article. Please let me know your ideas. The Vindictive 10:45, 9 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]