this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
300 points (98.4% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5394 readers
152 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Heavy metals are present in the soil/water in many regions. It's often a natural accumulation. For example the arid production zones in California and Arizona were highly contaminated naturally (and salty). When they started irrigating the land they deep plowed it to breakup the caliche layers. They then continuously flooded it to push the salt and water soluable heavy metals lower in the soil profile. Much of it ended up in the groundwater.
Some heavy metals like lead and arsenic were used as pesticides for almost 90 years. Most productions zones were contaminated during this period. Of course once you apply them, they don't disappear.
At this point, pretty much all production areas are contaminated to some degree. We have no good way to remediate the issue in the soil. So regulators focus on limiting the contamination from controllable sources.