3 ms·

I read an article on here that we’ve polluted the environment so badly now that rain water is unsafe to drink basically anywhere it falls. Rainwater…[1] I get

I read an article on here that we’ve polluted the environment so badly now that rain water is unsafe to drink basically anywhere it falls. Rainwater…[1] I get it PFAs might not cause cancer but we’re pushing things to some pretty crazy extreme when it comes to pollution. Microplastics in the clouds ? I really hope these things aren’t related because it’s going to fucking suck if they are. Can’t just put microplastics away. I’m personally in the camp that thinks we should just be doing everything we can to minimise all types of pollution because we just cannot really predict what the effects will be. Even if we think something is benign. I might be an extremist but I’m even worried about tyre dust. And even those blue plastic tarps people love to let rot in the sun and dissolve everywhere. What we’re doing isn’t good, I just think we struggle to admit to ourselves because it’s quite horrific. [1] https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals.html https://phys.org/news/2022-08-rainwater-unsafe-due-chemicals...

nswest23 3y ago
did anyone read the conclusion? > with notable variances in mortality and DALYs between areas, countries, sex and cancer types. Encouraging a healthy lifestyle could reduce early-onset cancer disease burden. and... > Dietary risk factors (diet high in red meat, low in fruits, high in sodium and low in milk, etc), alcohol consumption and tobacco use are the main risk factors underlying early-onset cancers. seems to indicate that the authors of this article were not pointing the finger at environmental causes.
airstrike 3y ago
> I’m personally in the camp that thinks we should just be doing everything we can to minimise all types of pollution because we just cannot really predict what the effects will be. Even if we think something is benign. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
- bamboozled 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. What worries me is this is always going to be about a quick buck vs long term risk. We do not have the collective wisdom to stop.
  - throwaway743950 3y ago
    Even if we have the collective wisdom, that doesn't mean it will outweigh the incentives, especially if that decision-making power is unchecked.
  - rewgs 3y ago
    Yup. The shitty thing about the prisoner's dilemma is that we nearly always lose it.
  - omnimus 3y ago
    I think the wisdom is there more than you think (look around, every other person is concerned about environment especially younger ones). The problem is collective power to do anything about it. The few on top have disproportionate power and don’t care at all (because it wont affect them).
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  It's not "unscientific." We have something like a century and a half worth of evidence that the hazards to environment and human health from man-made substances is very often missed, understated, or outright suppressed by the industry that is profiting off it. How many more decades do we need? Given we are seeing plunging birth rates and species unprecedented rate (a dozen to hundreds of species a day), I'd say shifting to a "you have to prove it's not harmful" is a good policy.
- nextos 3y ago
  Yes, the chemical industry has not stuck to the precautionary principle. Besides, lots of excellent drugs are used in a trigger-happy way. Take for instance antibiotics, which are one of the greatest achievements of modern science. Lots of children are prescribed antibiotics for mild infections, i.e. when they don't need them, ignoring side-effects. Thankfully, doctors are starting to be a bit more cautious. This is one of the reasons autoimmunity has skyrocketed during the last 50 years, and quite a few friendly commensal bacteria are nearly extinct. Persistent gut inflammation, below what is considered autoimmunity, is responsible for lots of colon cancer cases in adults. It is all tied.
  - parentheses 3y ago
    Blind trust in doctors is such a societal problem.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      It doesn't help that the systems we have in place to keep them in check are failing us. In the US doctors can tell their patients that their illnesses are caused by demon sperm and that alien DNA is used to make medical treatments and they will still keep their medical license.
      - prirun 3y ago
        To me, doctors are not as big of a problem as hospitals. In my area, nearly all doctors are now hospital employees. Doctors don't have the independence they used to have with their own practice: as employees, they have to do what the hospital tells them to do. Doctors can't afford to run an independent practice because of the cost of paperwork, computer systems, and liability, so now they work for hospitals, ie, a corporate machine designed (even obligated) to maximize profits over care.
- dinkleberg 3y ago
  I know it’s true, you even see it here all the time, but it is really disappointing to see people see this approach as unscientific. Progress at all costs should not be the goal! We should be working towards the betterment of humanity and if new innovations have a significant chance of working against that via side effects, we should absolutely be cautious.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    I think it's more relaxing and enjoyable for us as a species to slow down a bit. There is no need to keep rushing into problems. We had / still have a pretty good environment, even if all technological progress stopped tomorrow, thousands of generations would still have beautiful lives. Everything from here is a bonus IMO.
- paulmd 3y ago
  One might describe it as conservatism, had conservatism chosen to anchor itself to preventing change rather than social/human regression and the advancement of capitalism and laissez-faire regulatory/economic policy.
taf2 3y ago
I agree with most of this but I think we do recognize and every year we get smarter about how we handle it… I think it’s just very hard to see how we improve over a few years time scale… I remember in 1986 or 1987 my dad took us to his office I think it was cricket software in Pennsylvania and in the front of the very shiny new office was an extremely polluted stream. It was a bright red/orange color. I recall my dad telling us to avoid playing in the water and explaining that it was not supposed to be that color… years later and while much of the area that was farm land in PA is now homes and neighborhoods- I don’t believe such a stream exists…. That said plastic is still very hard thing to reduce in our environment already we see many more bio degradable examples of packaging being used and a lot of research into which plastics are harmful and ways to help reduce or mitigate the impacts… back in the 80s if it was known it was not talked about… progress is slow but if you care very deeply about it you should IMO go into research or engineering to do something positive about it. Understand why we use it and find good alternatives
- bamboozled 3y ago
  I think this is because we have offshored manufacturing and even farming. Could you imagine what rivers in China and India look like ? I do agree we have improved in some areas for sure. But we don’t get clouds contaminated with plastic for no reason.
  - maxglute 3y ago
    Half of adult men also smoke in China... who consumes ~50% of world total cigarettes, on the 1/3 of land that's not sand or plateau. 2.5 trillion cigarettes per a year smoked on 3m sqkm, or 2% of terrestial land. I don't know if that means anything, but if it does, it's not good.
- srvmshr 3y ago
  Those streams and rivers exist. Look up industrial pollution in China, India or Vietnam. The manufacturing base which got pollution to that point is just geographically shifted. When running industries, there is unfortunately no free lunch -- someone's paying the consequences. If not you, someone upstream who made the raw materials or any priors.
apwell23 3y ago
Its still a disease of old age not of environmental factors
- bamboozled 3y ago
  If you lived next to a coal fire power plant it might tell a different story ?
Waterluvian 3y ago
I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria, so I think tomorrow the scientist and geographer in me needs to figure out if I can see them through my own eyes at home or my university’s hydrology lab or something.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/microplastics-clouds-study-mount-fuji-mount-oyama https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/micropla...
- autoexec 3y ago
  > I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria We don't know yet just how much harm microplastics are causing us, but the fact that they are everywhere (including in your blood and organs) isn't helping. I don't think there's anything hysterical about all of earth's water being unsafe to drink unless it's filtered. (https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-antarctica-and-on-the-tibetan-plateau-rainwater-is-unsafe-to-drink-1.620735 https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant...). The world has never been poisoned at this scale before. Your body is already polluted, and our children's bodies will be polluted from the moment they are born.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I think everyone agrees that it's much better to clean up pollution, but the problem is not really so much that we are bombarded with more pollution (in many places, especially in the West, most measures of environmental pollution are much lower than in the past), the problem is you are just constantly bombarded with more information. Some of it is valid, but nearly all of it is designed to scare you. Just consider this study, which is simply bad reporting. Check out some of the other comments in this thread, but all of these numbers can simply be explained by the growth in the global population during the study period. Actual per-capita cancer deaths among young people are way down during this timeframe.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  More young people in the southern hemisphere are dead from skin cancer than would be otherwise if we didn’t pollute the atmosphere with CFCs,l and put a hole in the ozone layer, for example. We might’ve seen a decline in cancer rates even with more people if we didn’t pollute so much. Imagine living in a less polluted world with the medicine we have now ? Wouldn’t that be fantastic?
resonious 3y ago
While plastic and car tires might have some measurably bad effects on humans, we still live on average way longer than our ancestors. You could draw a weird but valid correlation between poison rain water and living longer. You're right though that we ought to be careful and try to reduce bad stuff. I suspect that will be key to increasing our life expectancy even further.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  I'd argue our ancestors would outlive us had they had the medical care we do. I suspect our lifespan was prolonged mostly, or maybe solely due to advances in medicine.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  I was going to say, if we keep fucking up, I can see that life expectancy hitting a cliff. Birth rates are already down.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  > we still live on average way longer than our ancestors Ted Kaczynski would like to ask about the average amount of happy years lived.
kirso 3y ago
I think the world fossil fuel capitalists will have something to say about that unfortunately :/

nswest23 3y ago

did anyone read the conclusion? > with notable variances in mortality and DALYs between areas, countries, sex and cancer types. Encouraging a healthy lifestyle could reduce early-onset cancer disease burden. and... > Dietary risk factors (diet high in red meat, low in fruits, high in sodium and low in milk, etc), alcohol consumption and tobacco use are the main risk factors underlying early-onset cancers. seems to indicate that the authors of this article were not pointing the finger at environmental causes.

airstrike 3y ago

> I’m personally in the camp that thinks we should just be doing everything we can to minimise all types of pollution because we just cannot really predict what the effects will be. Even if we think something is benign. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

bamboozled 3y ago
Thanks for sharing. What worries me is this is always going to be about a quick buck vs long term risk. We do not have the collective wisdom to stop.
- throwaway743950 3y ago
  Even if we have the collective wisdom, that doesn't mean it will outweigh the incentives, especially if that decision-making power is unchecked.
- rewgs 3y ago
  Yup. The shitty thing about the prisoner's dilemma is that we nearly always lose it.
- omnimus 3y ago
  I think the wisdom is there more than you think (look around, every other person is concerned about environment especially younger ones). The problem is collective power to do anything about it. The few on top have disproportionate power and don’t care at all (because it wont affect them).
KennyBlanken 3y ago
It's not "unscientific." We have something like a century and a half worth of evidence that the hazards to environment and human health from man-made substances is very often missed, understated, or outright suppressed by the industry that is profiting off it. How many more decades do we need? Given we are seeing plunging birth rates and species unprecedented rate (a dozen to hundreds of species a day), I'd say shifting to a "you have to prove it's not harmful" is a good policy.
nextos 3y ago
Yes, the chemical industry has not stuck to the precautionary principle. Besides, lots of excellent drugs are used in a trigger-happy way. Take for instance antibiotics, which are one of the greatest achievements of modern science. Lots of children are prescribed antibiotics for mild infections, i.e. when they don't need them, ignoring side-effects. Thankfully, doctors are starting to be a bit more cautious. This is one of the reasons autoimmunity has skyrocketed during the last 50 years, and quite a few friendly commensal bacteria are nearly extinct. Persistent gut inflammation, below what is considered autoimmunity, is responsible for lots of colon cancer cases in adults. It is all tied.
- parentheses 3y ago
  Blind trust in doctors is such a societal problem.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    It doesn't help that the systems we have in place to keep them in check are failing us. In the US doctors can tell their patients that their illnesses are caused by demon sperm and that alien DNA is used to make medical treatments and they will still keep their medical license.
    - prirun 3y ago
      To me, doctors are not as big of a problem as hospitals. In my area, nearly all doctors are now hospital employees. Doctors don't have the independence they used to have with their own practice: as employees, they have to do what the hospital tells them to do. Doctors can't afford to run an independent practice because of the cost of paperwork, computer systems, and liability, so now they work for hospitals, ie, a corporate machine designed (even obligated) to maximize profits over care.
dinkleberg 3y ago
I know it’s true, you even see it here all the time, but it is really disappointing to see people see this approach as unscientific. Progress at all costs should not be the goal! We should be working towards the betterment of humanity and if new innovations have a significant chance of working against that via side effects, we should absolutely be cautious.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  I think it's more relaxing and enjoyable for us as a species to slow down a bit. There is no need to keep rushing into problems. We had / still have a pretty good environment, even if all technological progress stopped tomorrow, thousands of generations would still have beautiful lives. Everything from here is a bonus IMO.
paulmd 3y ago
One might describe it as conservatism, had conservatism chosen to anchor itself to preventing change rather than social/human regression and the advancement of capitalism and laissez-faire regulatory/economic policy.

taf2 3y ago

I agree with most of this but I think we do recognize and every year we get smarter about how we handle it… I think it’s just very hard to see how we improve over a few years time scale… I remember in 1986 or 1987 my dad took us to his office I think it was cricket software in Pennsylvania and in the front of the very shiny new office was an extremely polluted stream. It was a bright red/orange color. I recall my dad telling us to avoid playing in the water and explaining that it was not supposed to be that color… years later and while much of the area that was farm land in PA is now homes and neighborhoods- I don’t believe such a stream exists…. That said plastic is still very hard thing to reduce in our environment already we see many more bio degradable examples of packaging being used and a lot of research into which plastics are harmful and ways to help reduce or mitigate the impacts… back in the 80s if it was known it was not talked about… progress is slow but if you care very deeply about it you should IMO go into research or engineering to do something positive about it. Understand why we use it and find good alternatives

bamboozled 3y ago
I think this is because we have offshored manufacturing and even farming. Could you imagine what rivers in China and India look like ? I do agree we have improved in some areas for sure. But we don’t get clouds contaminated with plastic for no reason.
- maxglute 3y ago
  Half of adult men also smoke in China... who consumes ~50% of world total cigarettes, on the 1/3 of land that's not sand or plateau. 2.5 trillion cigarettes per a year smoked on 3m sqkm, or 2% of terrestial land. I don't know if that means anything, but if it does, it's not good.
srvmshr 3y ago
Those streams and rivers exist. Look up industrial pollution in China, India or Vietnam. The manufacturing base which got pollution to that point is just geographically shifted. When running industries, there is unfortunately no free lunch -- someone's paying the consequences. If not you, someone upstream who made the raw materials or any priors.

apwell23 3y ago

Its still a disease of old age not of environmental factors

bamboozled 3y ago
If you lived next to a coal fire power plant it might tell a different story ?

Waterluvian 3y ago

I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria, so I think tomorrow the scientist and geographer in me needs to figure out if I can see them through my own eyes at home or my university’s hydrology lab or something.

bamboozled 3y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/microplastics-clouds-study-mount-fuji-mount-oyama https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/09/micropla...
autoexec 3y ago
> I feel like “microplastics are in our clouds” sounds like science hysteria We don't know yet just how much harm microplastics are causing us, but the fact that they are everywhere (including in your blood and organs) isn't helping. I don't think there's anything hysterical about all of earth's water being unsafe to drink unless it's filtered. (https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-antarctica-and-on-the-tibetan-plateau-rainwater-is-unsafe-to-drink-1.620735 https://www.su.se/english/news/it-s-raining-pfas-even-in-ant...). The world has never been poisoned at this scale before. Your body is already polluted, and our children's bodies will be polluted from the moment they are born.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

I think everyone agrees that it's much better to clean up pollution, but the problem is not really so much that we are bombarded with more pollution (in many places, especially in the West, most measures of environmental pollution are much lower than in the past), the problem is you are just constantly bombarded with more information. Some of it is valid, but nearly all of it is designed to scare you. Just consider this study, which is simply bad reporting. Check out some of the other comments in this thread, but all of these numbers can simply be explained by the growth in the global population during the study period. Actual per-capita cancer deaths among young people are way down during this timeframe.

bamboozled 3y ago
More young people in the southern hemisphere are dead from skin cancer than would be otherwise if we didn’t pollute the atmosphere with CFCs,l and put a hole in the ozone layer, for example. We might’ve seen a decline in cancer rates even with more people if we didn’t pollute so much. Imagine living in a less polluted world with the medicine we have now ? Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

resonious 3y ago

While plastic and car tires might have some measurably bad effects on humans, we still live on average way longer than our ancestors. You could draw a weird but valid correlation between poison rain water and living longer. You're right though that we ought to be careful and try to reduce bad stuff. I suspect that will be key to increasing our life expectancy even further.

lewhoo 3y ago
I'd argue our ancestors would outlive us had they had the medical care we do. I suspect our lifespan was prolonged mostly, or maybe solely due to advances in medicine.
bamboozled 3y ago
I was going to say, if we keep fucking up, I can see that life expectancy hitting a cliff. Birth rates are already down.
Aerbil313 3y ago
> we still live on average way longer than our ancestors Ted Kaczynski would like to ask about the average amount of happy years lived.

kirso 3y ago

I think the world fossil fuel capitalists will have something to say about that unfortunately :/