Air Pollution // Current

Giant Asian smog cloud masks warming impact: U.N.

A three-kilometer thick cloud of brown soot and other pollutants hanging over Asia is darkening cities, killing thousands and damaging crops but may be holding off the worst effects of global warming, the U.N. said on Thursday.

The vast plume of contamination from factories, fires, cars and deforestation contains some particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth, cutting its ability to heat the earth.

"One of the impacts of this atmospheric brown cloud has been to mask the true nature of global warming on our planet," United Nations Environment Program head Achim Steiner said at the launch in Beijing of a new report on the phenomenon.

The amount of sunlight reaching earth through the murk has fallen by up to a quarter in the worst-affected areas and if the brown cloud disperses, global temperatures could rise by up to 2 degrees Celsius.

But the overall effect of slowing climate change is not the silver lining to a dark cloud that it appears to be.

The choking soup of pollutants may hold temperatures down overall, but the mix of particles means it is also speeding up warming in some of the most vulnerable areas and exacerbating the most devastating impacts of higher temperatures.

The complex impact of the cloud, which tends to cool areas near the surface of the earth and warm the air higher up, is believed to be causing a shortening of the monsoon season in India while increasing flooding there and in southern China.

Soot from the cloud is also deposited on glaciers, which are at the center of environmentalists' and politicians' concerns because they feed Asia's key rivers and provide drinking water for billions who live along them.

There the particles capture more solar heat than white, reflective snow and ice -- speeding up melting of a key resource. At a monitoring station near Mount Everest, soot has been found at levels which scientists say would be expected in urban areas.

There is also a high human cost. The report estimates round 340,000 people are dying prematurely because of damage to their lungs, hearts and risk of cancer.A three-kilometer thick cloud of brown soot and other pollutants hanging over Asia is darkening cities, killing thousands and... more

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6 days ago

Bush Administration Loosens Laws Restricting Power Plant Pollution

The Bush administration is moving to adopt rules that would loosen pollution controls on power plants, by judging the plants on... more

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23 days ago

Coal's time bomb

Every year, South Carolina's power plants burn enough coal to fill 10 large football stadiums, leaving behind a stadium-size... more

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24 days ago

Pollution-sucking sculptures debut in Minnesota

"Two statues have debuted on Minnesota's new Interstate 35W Bridge that are shaped to look like the international... more

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1 month ago

HumanCar Powered by Human Energy, Not Ethanol

Charley and Chuck Greenwood, a father-son combo, think they know the secret to the future of cars: rowing. And they founded... more

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1 month ago

Plant, NO help in Global warming!

Plants are unlikely to soak up more carbon dioxide from the air as the planet warms, research suggests. US scientists found... more

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2 months ago

Cops Might Get Pollution Sniffers

How clean is the air outside your home, local school, or athletic field?

You’ve undoubtedly heard those news reports — probably several times this summer: It’s a bad air-quality day, so stay indoors as much as possible and avoid strenuous activity if you must go out. But you may have wondered if that really applies to you, particularly.

When the government issues the information that prods air-quality alerts, it's based on readings from several air-monitoring stations set up around a city. These pollution-sensor centers are anchored in place, often fairly high off of the ground, which puts them well above the intake zone of your sniffer and mine.The state then takes readings from several stations around town and averages them to suggest what community residents might encounter.

The problem here: None of us breathes average air.

We suck in the idiosyncratic mix of pollutants that exist at some particular time and at the precise place we happen to be — sitting beside a secluded stream, walking along a busy highway, enjoying the hammock in our backyard a quarter-mile from some manufacturing plant, or biking past a recycling center. It’s a good bet that the air is considerably and reliably dirtier in some parts of town — or rural regions —than in others. Yet stationary pollutant monitors can’t identify where these spots are.

Which is why Akos Ledeczi is designing small and eminently portable air samplers — ones that street cops could snap onto their belts while patrolling their beats, couriers could strap onto their bikes, or mail trucks could carry on every dashboard. Each of the smaller-than-a-sandwich size devices would collect air-pollution data about once a minute and temporarily store it on a flash drive. Whenever the units fell within range of a Bluetooth-enabled device in the system’s network or wireless relay station, they’d spit out their data.

Fitted with a global-positioning-satellite chip, each sensor-packed device knows precisely where it is, and links those coordinates to the air-sampling data collected from each spot, explains Ledeczi, a scientist at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems in Nashville. An on-board accelerometer identifies when the device is moving, and uses that cue to wake up its pollutant sensors. Once all movement stops, the system goes to sleep, prolonging the charge in its battery. (For infinite life, the system can be plugged into a vehicle’s cigarette lighter.) In its snooze mode, the system only momentarily rouses to take readings once an hour.

The goal would be to deploy an army of these things to meander throughout a community, collecting up-to-the-minute, street-level data on air quality.

Right now, however, this system is “a work in progress,” Ledeczi acknowledges. Only five prototypes exist. Still, they’ve been spitting out air-quality readings as they’ve been ferried by cars throughout Nashville. Last Friday, at a Workshop on Environmental Sensing Networks convened at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Ledeczi illustrated how the data could be overlain on maps of a community to depict precise and ultra-local air quality.

Environmental agencies have deployed their stationary existing air-sampling stations relatively sparsely. For example, just 10 stations collect air-quality readings for Nashville’s 526-square-mile area, home to 545,000 people. Results of a locality’s stations are compiled and analyzed. Then, state and local environmental agencies issue a composite air-quality index for the day — a single value that attempts to account for all types of regulated pollutants.

******************CONTINUES********************How clean is the air outside your home, local school, or athletic field? You’ve undoubtedly heard those news reports... more

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2 months ago

Asian Soot, Smog May Boost US Warming

"Smog, soot and other particles like the kind often seen hanging over Beijing add to global warming and may raise summer... more

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2 months ago

Scientists fear impact of Asian pollutants on U.S.

From 500 miles in space, satellites track brown clouds of dust, soot and other toxic pollutants from China and elsewhere in Asia... more

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3 months ago

Pollutants cause birds to sing tainted love songs

Traces of a chemical once used by power plants leave birds looking fit, but singing another tune altogether. Wild chickadees... more

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3 months ago

Olympics makes Beijing air clean

Sorry here's the link: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Olympics-makes-Beijing-air-clean/350925/

Olympics host Beijing enjoyed its cleanest air in 10 years this month and will adopt strict new measures to ensure its notorious smog does not return, a top environment official said on Tuesday.

Over the past 18 days, air quality in the capital ranged between excellent and fairly good on China’s index, Du Shaozhong, deputy director of the Beijing environmental protection bureau, said. And he pledged good conditions would continue.

“Beijing will be built into a liveable city,” Du said. “We will take some new measures to ensure that air quality will reach a new level after the Olympic Games.” Du said those measures would be announced after the Games end on Sunday, once officials had studied Beijing’s “successful experiences”.

“Whether it is automobile emissions reduction, or construction site dust reduction or coal pollution reduction, I believe that the requirements will be more stringent,” he said, naming three of the top sources of the air pollution that has bedeviled the fast-growing city of 15 million.

Dirty air was one of the biggest worries in the run-up to the Games and the opening ceremony on August 8 was held in a swirl of hot haze.

Hundreds of factories in Beijing and surrounding provinces have closed temporarily in a crackdown on polluters. And traffic has flowed unnaturally swiftly since late July, when the city adopted even-odd license plate number restrictions aimed at taking half its 3.3 million cars off the roads each day.

Three days of rainfall had also helped clear the haze since the Games started, Du said, and he confirmed more showers were forecast for Wednesday and Thursday.

While a cloudy day is predicted for the Games closing ceremony on Sunday, artificial cloud seeding that helped ensure a rain-free opening may also be used before the finale in the roofless Bird’s Nest stadium,Du said.

To reassure anyone fearing that the clearer, fresher air would vanish along with the athletes, Du stressed officials were committed to a long-term assault on pollution.”We have noticed overseas and domestic public opinion has pinned high hopes on the efforts,” he said. Sorry here's the link: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Olympics-makes-Beijing-air-clean/350925/ Olympics host Beijing... more

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3 months ago

Shell rebuked for 'greenwash' over ad for polluting tar sands project

The Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell misled the public about the green credentials of a vastly polluting oil project in Canada, in an attempt to assure consumers of its good environmental record, a media watchdog will rule today.

In an embarrassing rejection of Shell's "greenwash", the Advertising Standards Authority said the company should not have used the word "sustainable" for its controversial tar sands project and a second scheme to build North America's biggest oil refinery. Both projects would lead to the emission of more greenhouse gases, the ASA said, ruling the advert had breached rules on substantiation, truthfulness and environmental claims.

Carried by the Financial Times on 1 February to accompany Shell's financial results, the company claimed: "We invest today's profits in tomorrow's solutions."

The advert continued: "A growing world needs more energy, but at the same time we need to find new ways of managing carbon emissions to limit climate change. Continued investment in technology is one of the key ways we are able to address this challenge, and continue to secure a profitable and sustainable future."

Shell explained it was harnessing its technical expertise "to unlock the potential of the vast Canadian oil sands deposits".

The WWF (formerly the Worldwide Fund for Nature) complained that extracting low-grade bitumen from sand was highly inefficient and destroyed huge tracts of virgin forest. In its defence, Shell maintained that new technology was reducing pollution from the Athabasca Oil Sands Project in Alberta in which it owns a 60 per cent stake.

Shell quoted a critical WWF report as rating its Muskeg River Mine one of the least damaging coal-tar sands projects because it sought to limit emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide and organic compounds.

Making its ruling, the ASA quoted Canada's independent National Energy Board that oil sand developments had considerable social and economic impacts on water conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, land disturbance and waste management.

David Norman, the WWF's director of campaigns, said: "The ASA's decision to uphold WWF's complaint sends a strong signal to business and industry that greenwash is unacceptable."

The Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell misled the public about the green credentials of a vastly polluting oil project in Canada, in... more