Air Pollution: The Air Quality index between Cincinnati and Cleveland

     Air quality index is a number used by government agencies to inform the public how polluted the air currently is or how polluted it is the forecast to become. If the AQI number breaks a certain point, the danger of getting health problem's chance are increasing. They are roughly six stages in the AQI range, each of them contains 50 points. The level of each stages goes from good to hazardous.
   
      Generally, there are two main categories of air pollution, one is gaseous and the other is particulates. Gaseous pollution includes sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen fluoride and various gaseous from metals. These pollution usually come from fossil fuel fired power plants: smelters, industrial boilers and mobile sources and etc. They can case injures to eco systems and organisms, aggravate respiratory diseases and reduce visibility. Particulates pollution come from solid forms. Large particulates include dust, asbestos fibers and lead. These particulates contain sulfates, nitrates. These human behaviors cause particulates pollution: power plants, smelters, mining operation and automobiles. These human behaviors also cause acid rain and acid deposition.
   
      The Cincinnati air quality overall is better than Cleveland. Based on the data at airnow.gov, Cincinnati's air quality is good, pm 2.5 is 41, ozone is 31, and pm 10 is 22; Cleveland's air quality is moderate, the major contribute of the air quality is pm 2.5. As this blog mentions before, pm 2.5 mainly come from power plants, mining operations. There might be more power plants in Cleveland area than Cincinnati.

     The AQI is at the good level overall around the America, some moderate areas focus on middle area and southwest area. The reason why middle area of America have a moderate level maybe because there are many industrial facilities were built through the history. South California and Texas air pollution may come from dessert.

     
I took this picture when I was jogging outside in 2011. I was touched by the views because I never saw this beautiful sky after eight. The AQI level is unhealthy in China.


This is a picture of a power plant. It use coal to produce electricity. As you can see, the smoke is coming from the chimney, and it's black. The smoke contains many unhealthy chemicals which are pollution our air.

Roundup: is it harmful for humans?

     Roundup is a product from Monsanto, it's a brand of  a herbicide made from glyphosate. Glyphosate is used to kill weeds, it's a board-spectrum systemic herbicide and an organophosphorus compound, means that it has negative effects on almost every plant with which it comes in contact. But on Mar. 20 2015, there was a research published by international agency for research on cancer stated that there is evidences shows that glyphosate lead to human cancer. After that, the U.S. environmental protection agency and the USDA suggest people to stop using products which has glyphosate.

     Monsanto has false advertising on roundup's safety. It claims itself "environmental friendly", encourage customers to use it on playground, golf courses, school yards and home gardens. A French court ruled those marketing claims were false advertising. In nearly 20 years of study, scientist has found that the consequence of roundup and glyphosate in our food, air and drink. A new U.S. geological survey has concluded that glyphosate was present in 75% of air and rainfall test sample. Also, they found that people who are sick have higher level of glyphosate than normal people. There are list of major health problem of glyphosate: attention deficit disorder, Alzheimer, Autism, a birth defect called Anencephaly and many kinds of cancer.

     Roundup overuse has already enable weeds and insects to build an immunity to its toxins. The Monsanto solved this problem with stronger pesticide. Although the country or region use the toxic pesticide may bring a short term economy benefit, the potential long term health risk would cost the government even much more money, which is not worth it. The best solution is to find another product which is more safe to human and truly environmental friendly. And there is another tip to kill the weeds, just put some newspaper, leaves and other compost ingredients totally cover the weeks for about six months, the weeds wound gone without any harmful herbicide use.


It's the picture of the Roundup herbicide product. You can still find it in many supermarkets. There is some people don't aware of the dangerous of using that in there garden.


It's a field just been weeding and ready to seeding. If this field has been using the toxic herbicide, the plants grown on it would still contain the toxic. Eventually, it will all go to human body.

Bad Sides of Nuclear Power

   With the increasing demand of electricity, more and more nuclear power stations have been build around the world.

   Compared with traditional ways of how we generate power, nuclear power is much cleaner, but it's also more dangerous. For example, five years ago in Fukushima, Japan, the tsunami took the nuclear power station down and made the nuclear material leak into the ocean. It costs a very serious damage to the local environment.

   I want to talk about the nuclear leak's influence to the human body first. According to atomicarchive website, the radiation can affect human for many ways. Such as losing of hair quickly, radiation sickness which may last up to 10 years and may increase long-term risk for leukemia and lymphoma, and it may also cause heart failure and immediate death. 

   The second part is about the influence to the animals lives around the nuclear station. There are so may reports about how bad the radiation affect the local environment and made the animals mutation and the change of numbers. For example, some researchers compared monkeys from two regions of Japan, contaminated land in Fukushima and a place 400km north of Fukushima. Fukushima monkeys apparently had low white and red blood cell counts according to beyond unclear website. 

   At last, I want to talk about the plans and environment after radiation material released by accident. There are many pictures you can found online about the harmful effects on plants living within 20 to 30 kilometers of the Chernobyl power station. These genetic effects also called mutation. some of these mutation plants even been changed to a new kind of plants. which is a very terrible thing. plants evolve to fit the environment, but we don't want to see they evolve to fit the radiation.

   Overall the nuclear power is very dangerous if we don't operate it in a right way or make any mistake. And that would cause so many damages which are very hard to fix,. Like Chernobyl, you may can go to the center of it until the next century after next century.  

                                              The picture is the light in my apartment. We need to turn off the lights and save power for protecting the environment. 

 

The picture is the areas that been affect by the Fukushima nuclear power leaks. We can see this is really big. It's very dangerous of the nuclear power leak.