- Industry: Broadcasting & receiving
- Number of terms: 5074
- Number of blossaries: 1
- Company Profile:
The largest broadcasting organisation in the world.
Action that will reduce man-made climate change. This includes action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or absorb greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Industry:Natural environment
Nitrogen oxides are compounds of nitrogen and oxygen, two elements that do not normally react with each other but will do so during high temperature combustion – such as in a car engine. Examples include nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), which contribute to air pollution, and nitrous oxide (N2O), which is a major greenhouse gas. Although its warming effect is far less than CO2, it persists in the atmosphere for far longer, so measured over 100 years its impact is 298 times greater.
Industry:Natural environment
Acid rain is simply rain with higher than normal acidity. Its main cause is emissions of nitrogen and sulphur compounds from burning fossil fuels to power transport, power stations, forest fires, fertiliser and industry.
Industry:Natural environment
Action that helps cope with the effects of climate change - for example construction of barriers to protect against rising sea levels, or conversion to crops capable of surviving high temperatures and drought.
Industry:Natural environment
Ozone is made up of three oxygen atoms. It has benefits and dangers depending on where in our atmosphere it occurs: near ground level, it is a pollutant that affects respiration; 10-50km up, in the stratosphere, the ozone layer filters out potentially harmful ultraviolet rays (which cause skin cancer) from reaching the earth. Ozone also functions as a greenhouse gas, though it is considered a less potent one than CO2.
Industry:Natural environment
Air pollution usually refers to the presence of any chemical or particulate that alters the normal make-up of our atmosphere, causing direct threats to human health (such as breathing difficulties) or longer-term damage through its effects on our planet's ecosystem. Pollutants include smoke and dust, nitrogen oxides, methane, and the fumes from aerosol sprays and other solvents. Industrial processes and transport are major contributors to air pollution, but it can also be caused by natural processes such as forest fires and volcanoes. See also acid rain.
Industry:Natural environment
A pesticide is a substance used to kill a pest, and in a farming context a pest is anything that attacks or competes with crops. Hence, there are many different types of pesticides: for example, insecticides kill insects, and herbicides kill weeds. The chemicals used in pesticides can sometimes be toxic to humans, however, so organic farming endeavours to use natural rather than synthetic substances as pesticides.
Industry:Natural environment
The atmosphere is the name for the mixture of gases surrounding the earth and retained there by the planet's gravitational pull - our air, in other words. The atmosphere comprises the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere and the thermosphere.
Industry:Natural environment
A polymer is a giant molecule made up of thousands of atoms. It can be natural or man-made (synthetic). Many plastics in everyday use are polymers, such as polythene or PVC; but then so is cellulose, which makes up wood pulp from which paper is manufactured.
Industry:Natural environment
Biodiversity (a contraction of the phrase biological diversity) means the variety of life on earth, or within one particular ecosystem, in terms of the number of distinct biological species present. Tropical rainforests, for example, support a huge variety of species, so are highly biodiverse, while polar regions are far less so. Scientists worry that deforestation, such as that associated with planting crops for biofuels, animal feed and human consumption is reducing biodiversity. See also monoculture.
Industry:Natural environment
