Wow these are some of the saddest pictures I have ever seen

[proud2BlibKansan]

http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/theobserver/gallery/2008/mar/20/climatechange.carbonemissions/[e-mail]
A man flying a kite in Tiananmen Square last Boxing Day. Pollution levels on a typical day in Beijing are five times above World Health Organisation standards for safety, and are worse in the summer, worrying Olympic athletes. Three million cars and coal-fired factories, steel mills and skyscraper builds throughout the city have caused the smog. To ‘clean’ the air for the Olympics, Chinese authorities will take 1m cars off the road and are closing factories a month in advance
Photograph: Oded Balilty/AP

http://image.guim.co.uk/Guardian/theobserver/gallery/2008/mar/20/climatechange.carbonemissions/[e-mail]
A girl carrying mangoes on her head descends to a village on the Olusosun landfill site in Nigeria. The Olusosun dump is Africa’s largest, comprising 100 acres of garbage and collecting 2,400 metric tonnes of rubbish every day from Lagos, one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Lagos’s population has tripled in the past 15 years and the infrastructure can’t cope. Roughly 1,000 homes have been built on Olusosun – the residents collect scrap from the dump and sell it
Photograph: Jacob Silberberg/Panos


Cattle wander around their still-smouldering pastureland in Rondonia, Brazil, one of the many huge tracts of the Amazon rainforest which are being torched to make way for agriculture. In the first five years of this century alone, Brazil burnt an area the size of England and Wales. Deforestation is responsible for 17% of human greenhouse gas emissions , mainly through the burning of wood, which results in even fewer trees to absorb CO2
Photograph: National Geographic/Getty Images

more . . . http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2008/mar/23/climatechange.carbonemissions?picture=333204025

[ColbertWatcher]

1. Not what I expected, but I have to agree with you.

They are indeed sad.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. It just breaks my heart

Those poor people in Africa don't have many choices and they probably can't do a lot to live greener. But I can.

[ColbertWatcher]

7. True, but sadly I've seen pictures like that from Haiti. n/t

[tularetom]

3. Less trees plus more cow farts spells disaster for us all

I spent a year in Brazil in the early 90's and this was just starting in a big way. It's almost out of hand and irreversible now.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. wow.

[bertman]

5. Ain't life grand?

No matter what we do to TRY to patch our world up, we still have to educate the others, too.

We're the biggest consumers and polluters so we have to try, try, try, but it ain't gonna be easy re-training all these 6 billion plus humanimals.

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. Very true

[Warpy]

8. I remember when people here heated with coal

and the air quality wasn't much better at times. People who didn't live through those bad old days have no idea how much cleaner the air got when we switched to oil and gas, bad as they are.

The top picture brought it all back, the filthy air that stank of sulfur and burned eyes and throat and caused you to cough up black stuff until spring, the filthy black scuzz on every single surface including just washed dishes, doing less running and playing on heat inversion days because you just plain ran out of air too fast.

Industrialization has not been good for China. I hope the fiasco of these summer games brings that home to them.

[SoCalDem]

9. Bringing/luring millions of poor people to cities is not a good idea

Poor people who arrive penniless, with no place to live, often find out that the fantastic jobs they heard about, do not exist, and once there, they have no way to escape back into the countryside even if they wanted to..

of course that land/forest they just left, has been "sold" to developers or loggers anyway, so the almighty dollar always wins..and the cities get worse and worse, and the poor get poorer & sicker..

there's a reason why the original humans were wanderers.. people who followed the food source, never stayed in one place long enough to defile it.. we have become the ultimate defilers:(

[treestar]

10. That smog is horrendous

And the Chinese are all about looking good for the Olympics. How are they going to outlaw it before the cameras get there? :rofl:

[OneBlueSky]

11. tragic . . . and just the tip of the iceberg . . . n/t

[lonestarnot]

12. Man, how do people live in that?

Terrible.