The State of Affairs
The region of North Carolina that Durham is in.
What is the Piedmont?
The unabbreviated version of CAFO
What is a Concentrated/Confined Animal Feeding Operation?
The carbon containing molecule responsible for much of Earth's current warming.
What is Carbon Dioxide/CO2?
When waterbodies experience eutrophication, some species of algae produce toxins that can harm people, pets, farm animals, and wildlife, and can also lead to a rapid depletion of dissolved oxygen as the algae decomposes.
What are algal blooms?
Occur when a developed area experiences higher temperature than nearby rural areas, or when areas experience hotter temperatures within a city.
What is an urban heat island?
The region of North Carolina home to the Blue Ridge and Smokies.
What are the Western Mountains?
Where all the waste goes in most operations.
What is the waste lagoon/cesspool?
The carbon containing molecule that is released by cows, sheep, and other ruminants when they burp or fart.
When the pH of rain drops due to mixing with NOx (nitrous oxides) and SO2 (sulfur dioxide) in the atmosphere and then falling to the Earth.
What is acid rain?
Occurs when humans cause a substantial change in the temperature of a water body. Most often associated with nuclear power generation.
What is thermal pollution?
The region of North Carolina where most hog CAFOs are located.
What is the coastal plain?
The name of the largest hog producer in North Carolina and one of the largest in the entire world.
Who is Smithfield?
The United States and the world in general are experiencing many effects due to climate change. List as many as you can in 60 seconds (100 points each).
What are prolonged droughts, more intense storms, sea level rise, extinction of species, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, loss of habitat, more intense wildfires, etc.?
When a toxin grows in concentration as it moves up a food chain.
What is biomagnification?
Tropical rainforests occur along the equator as water evaporates from oceans and many deserts occur at 30° N and 30° S as a result of this atmospheric circulation cell
What is a Hadley Cell?
One of the most polluted rivers for PFAS in the United States. The river is formed at the confluence of the Haw River and the Deep River in the town of Moncure, North Carolina and empties into the Atlantic Ocean near Wilmington, NC.
What is the Cape Fear River?
The means by which hog waste is removed from the lagoon and "disposed" of.
What is a spray gun/spray field?
The cycle of warming temperatures leading to melting of polar ice, leading to more absorption of heat, leading to the melting of more ice (and so on...) forms this.
What is a positive feedback loop?
The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.
What is environmental justice?
Calculate the amount of energy needed to fully evaporate a 36.04 g sample of liquid water.
Molar Mass of Water (H2O): 1 mol H2O/18.02 g H2O
Enthalpy of Vaporization:40.67 KJ/mol H2O
What is 81.34 kJ?
The county home to the 1982 PCB Protests.
What is Warren County?
The name of the award winning 3 part Indy Week series about the hog farming industry.
What is Hogwashed?
A recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. During one phase it results in North Carolina experiencing warmer and drier winters and in the other phase NC experiences cooler and wetter winters.
What is ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation)?
This south Asian country which sits in the Ganges river delta has some of the highest incidences of air pollution deaths in the world, some of the highest population densities, and is estimated that by 2050, a three-foot rise in sea levels will inundate some 20 percent of the land and displace more than 30 million people.
What is Bangladesh?
An uncontrolled fire that burns wild land vegetation, often in rural areas
What is a wildfire?