So, what is the ozone layer first off? It’s the barrier where our stratosphere said to be the one thing separating our atmosphere from devastation, the UVC rays blocked but UVA and UVB rays still getting through the less harmful ones. Too much ultra-violet B radiation stops reproductive cycles of plankton called Phytoplankton. They’re single-celled organisms that make up the absolute bottom of the food chain, the crops for pretty much all the other species and if they disappear, the other rungs would just plain fall apart without the concrete slate. About three decades after being discovered that living plants needed nitrogen, Jules Reiset recognized in 1856 that decaying organic matter releases nitrogen.
In 1838, Boussingault conducted in 1836, over sixty centuries after it was noted that manure and legumes were beneficial to crop production, a series of experiments, in which he grew legumes in sterilized French chemist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault also identified continued to grow, the only conclusion he could reach was that they are capable of fixing their own nitrogen, but the nitrogen as an important substance for plants, recognizing that the effectiveness of a fertilizer depends on and is proportional to its nitrogen content. (Griffis, et al., 2017). When it comes to how the UV rays coming through not only causing multiple– several cases of skin cancers such as Malignant melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma being the most common cancers via exposure to rays. The healthcare industry is the third most extensive service paid other than the military and entertainment sectors with close to $3 trillion dollars as of 2013. Adding onto the direct emissions from facilities there are indirect ones that happen because of the produced power and materials that are used. Seemingly, the health care sector is connected and supported but industrialized and contributes to the national disease problems by emitting various objects such as sulfur and nitrogen oxides, toxic metals, and adding to the world’s pollution problems.
The fundamental of practicing health care is “Do no harm”, though ironically the process causes significant pollution and consequently directs adverse effects on itself. Efforts to improve environmental performance of health care could reduce expenditures directly through waste reduction and energy savings, and indirectly through reducing pollution; the burden on public health, and ought to be included in efforts to improve health care quality and safety. (Eckelman, & Sherman, 2016). The demands for more food increased fertilizer and land use, and demand for more energy is creating mass fossil fuel combustion, leading to enhanced losses of reactive nitrogen to the environment. The human-induced Nr share of the total intake of health impacting substances through food and drinking water is large at 80 per cent, 20 per cent being of natural origin. Overall, as human fixation of nitrogen continues to rise, the direct public health benefits through food production will probably continue to rise. However, the negative health consequences on ecosystems and people may become more diverse and might in total increase more rapidly than the benefits. UV rays affect other life forms too.
It adversely affects the different species of amphibians and it’s one of the real reasons for the declining numbers of the amphibian species. It affects them in every stage of their life cycle; from hampering the growth and development in the larvae stage, deformities and decreases immunities in some species and to even retinal damage and blindness in some species. It’s been typically known that consumers, or in other words, the public doesn’t know as much about climate change or ozone depletion than scientists who really dug down into their research, and it’s true. It may look like someone who is looking confident in their work knows what they’re talking about, but examples prove otherwise. The authors suggested that lack of knowledge might contribute to a feeling of uncertainty about climate change, which ultimately might result in skepticism about the reality of climate change, the human influence, and the need for action. Thus, lack of sustainable knowledge might influence people’s attitudes toward climate change as much as people’s willingness to act upon, supporting mitigation policies.
When asked about the public’s understanding of this topic, climate change, it seems folks believe that the scientific background is clearly misunderstood. Per example, the misconceptions are rather consistent. People often confuse the problems of stratospheric ozone depletion with climate change, also having troubles between causes and actions specific to climate change. Other general good environmental behaviors included. The ignorant knowledge of climate change and causes seem to be of a global nature and unyielding over a long period of time. Hence, such misconceptions have been studied in Switzerland. A Swiss survey conveys 35% of the respondents believed that the greenhouse effect is made by a hole in the Earth’s atmosphere (Diekmann and Meyer 2008). And although most of the respondents (89%) were aware that combustion of oil, coal, and gas contributes to a greenhouse effect, 42% knew that CO2 is the main contributor to such greenhouse effects. In another study, fewer could identify CO2 as the main greenhouse gas, namely 28% of the respondents (Jaeger et al. 1993).
This indicates that the public awareness of CO2 as a contributor to the greenhouse effect has generally risen in Switzerland recently. One reason for this increase might be that the issue has been progressively covered in the mass media. Although the public understanding of climate change has been in several studies, so there has been no standardized, uniform measure to assess people’s understanding of climate change. Such a comprehensive, quantitatively tested climate-related knowledge scale would allow for comparisons in line with countries, various samples, and time frames. Importantly, an extensive knowledge scale covering different knowledge domains would enable researchers to examine whether different types of knowledge are important for different types of psychological constructs (such as attitudes, intentions, or support for climate protection measures). (Tobler, Christina, et al.) Nitrogen has a large role in Climate change, in turn, ozone depletion. Anthropogenic activities have dramatically increased the amount of Nr present in the environment [54,60].
The most dominant is agriculture, which creates new Nr through cultivation-induced BNF when legumes are planted and uses NH3 produced by the Haber -Bosch process. The burning of fossil fuels for energy production has also increased the amount of Nr in the environment, as NOx is formed as a by-product during combustion. Of equal magnitude globally with respect to Nr creation by fossil fuel combustion, NH3 produced by the Haber -Bosch process is used as a feedstock for a variety of industrial products (e.g. nylon, explosives). Through these activities, humans are now dominating the introduction of Nr to the terrestrial environment. This significant imbalance has led to several environmental and human health impacts, which have been discovered and regulated throughout the twentieth century. The most beneficial impact of the human alteration of the N cycle is that it supports food production, approximately 50 per cent of the world’s population.
The negative impacts are numerous and are magnified with time as Nr moves along its biogeochemical pathway. The same atom of Nr can cause multiple effects in the atmosphere, in terrestrial ecosystems, in freshwater and marine systems, and on human health. This sequence of effects is referred to as the nitrogen cascade. As the cascade progresses, the origin of Nr becomes unimportant. The only way to eliminate Nr accumulation and stop the cascade is to stop producing Nr or convert Nr back to the nonreactive N2 form [31]. For this current paper, we examine the historical development of understanding nitrogen’s role in acid rain, smog, eutrophication of coastal waters, the greenhouse effect, stratospheric ozone depletion and human consumption of nitrate/nitrite. In the mid-1900s, governments in the United States and Europe began to pass legislation recognizing and attempting to limit the detrimental impacts of nitrogen to water quality, air quality and human health. Much progress has been made developing integrated assessments of the human impacts on the N cycle and how to reverse them. The European Nitrogen Assessment provides an integrated and comprehensive look at the use of nitrogen in Europe and its impacts on the environment [40] Another example of an integrated assessment of nitrogen use is the 2011 EPA Science Advisory Board report on Nr in the United States [87].
This report assesses the current situation and provides specific management strategies through which the US can reduce its impact on the environment through nitrogen. In addition to these top-down assessments, tools such as the Nitrogen Footprint Calculator [88] have become available to enable broader public education on nitrogen-related issues and what the consumer can do to lessen the loss of Nr to the environment. The historical part of the story ends now, and curiosity, common sense, scientific advancement and societal concern will continue to drive future advances in the interaction between humans and the nitrogen cycle as we try to reap nitrogen’s benefits, while minimizing its negative impacts on people and ecosystems.
