Download Enviromental problems - E

Environmental problems
Started being more serious since Industrial
revolution
They still do not get enough attention
Large array of subjects and things
Many people still believe they are just myths

Ecological catastrophes
Two kinds: 1) Caused by human
2) Caused by nature
• Unfortunately very common
• Most of them can be predicted and thus limit or
erase damages
Caused by human
 At the beginning of almost every disaster is just normal
human mistake
 There have been awful lot of those events throughout
human history
 Most common are oil disasters (oil tankers accidents, oil
leaks or explosions of oil rigs)
 Though oil disasters are serious problem, nuclear ones
are even greater threat
 Thankfully only two nuclear disasters so far are Fukushima
and Chernobyl
Caused by nature
 Even more common than those caused by human
 Many believe these are examples of Natures' selfdefence
 The most common are floods (even in Czech Republic
on almost yearly basis)
 Disasters caused by wind: hurricanes, tornados, dust
storms(Dust bowl), etc.
 Disasters caused by volcanic or seismic activities:
earthquakes, Tsunami waves(Japan, Haiti)), exploding
volcanos
Invasion species
 Invasion specie is specie of animal taken from its natural
habitat and planted to ecosystem where it does not
have any natural enemy. This causes its mass spread
and total natural misbalance of the region.
 There are many examples of this in history
 Rabbits in Australia
 Bolševník in Czech Republic
 Asian Hornet in France
Pollution
 Another problem caused exclusively by human and its technology
 Just as serious as Ecological disaster, but much more subtle
 Air Pollution: Smog (caused by high concentration traffic and heavy
industry), Acid rains( sulphur getting into air is transforming into
sulphur dioxide and rains back onto surface)
 Water pollution: human waste (sewers draining into oceans), oil
disasters
 Soil pollution: mineral fertilizers (results in salty soil), pesticides (various
poisons gets piles up in soil)
Global warming
 Global warming is a result of CO2 in Earth‘s atmosphere.
 This causes so called „Greenhouse effect“
 Global warming have most effect on poles where the average
temperature has risen almost 3 degrees of Celsius over past ten
years.
 Another issue is warming of the oceans, which has already caused
many temperature sensitive species to go extinct.
 So far the humanity does not know how to stop the Earth from
further warming itself without drastic limitations to all industry and
our life level.