'Sooty Birds' Reveal Hidden US Air Pollution (bbc.com) 80
Soot trapped in the feathers of songbirds over the past 100 years is causing scientists to revise their records of air pollution. From a report: US researchers measured the black carbon found on 1,300 larks, woodpeckers and sparrows over the past century. They've produced the most complete picture to date of historic air quality over industrial parts of the US. The study also boosts our understanding of historic climate change. [...] This new study takes an unusual approach to working out the scale of soot coming from this part of the US over the last 100 years. The scientists trawled through natural history collections in museums in the region and measured evidence of black carbon, trapped in the feathers and wings of songbirds as they flew through the smoky air. The researchers were able to accurately estimate the amount of soot on each bird by photographing them and measuring the amount of light reflected off them. "We went into natural history collections and saw that birds from 100 years ago that were soiled, they were covered in soot," co-author Shane DuBay, from the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, told BBC News. "We saw that birds from the present were cleaner and we knew that at some point through time the birds cleaned up -- when we did our first pass of analysis using reflectance we were like wow, we have some incredible precision." Their analysis of over 1,000 birds shows that black carbon levels peaked in the first decade of the 1900s and that the air at the turn of the century was worse than previously thought.
Ehhh... (Score:5, Funny)
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So, back on topic (Score:2)
I wonder if they corrected for where the birds were collected. Population density was far lower then, and perhaps the soot was heavier, but also more local.
Intuitively speaking, I have trouble with the idea that the air all over the USA a century ago was more polluted than what I experienced in and around the 1970's, when the very rain was killing vegetation, the Delaware and other rivers ran with suds and rainbow slicks, and large areas of New Jersey were swamps of outright pollution.
The air was worse back
Re:So, back on topic (Score:4, Informative)
The air was worse back then?
It was worse back then, but it depends on how you define worse. The air had way more soot back then because humanity was very inefficient at burning fuels back then. When we got better at burning it, we released a lot more sulphur which in turned cause more acid rain. We've gotten better at the sulphur part, which in turn means our more pressing issue now is the CO2 content.
So quick recap. Soot is worse because it is a massive irritant. Sulphur is worse because it turns rain into acid. CO2 is worse because it's warming the planet. We're finding all kinds of fun new things out about burning fossil fuels.
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And the horse shit dust, too. People don't realize how much cleaner the air is now.
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Intuitively speaking, I have trouble with the idea that the air all over the USA a century ago was more polluted than what I experienced in and around the 1970's
A reporter takes a picture of main street on New Year's Eve, 1901. What you see is a row of houses with smoking chimneys, and this was AFTER Benjamin Franklin's wood stove reduced the amount of fuel needed by 90%(?, or some ridiculously high number like that).
Fast forward 50 years. Most of those fireplaces are replaced by oil (kerosene) burners. Still dirty, but not even comparable to the fireplaces. No one has to hire a chimney sweep to clean the exhaust tube of an oil heater.
Another 50 years, and most
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Was it valid, or for the birds?
Why the Angry Birds of course..
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Was this a study that they planned to do, or was this something they did on a lark?
It was planned to be just a big goose egg but it turned into something to crow about and not just fowl data.
But that's what happens when research isn't just a flight of fancy, imagination takes wing bringing understanding to new heights.
(Ducking for cover.... )
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Careful or the authors of the paper will flip you the bird.
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https://twitter.com/MSBbirds [twitter.com]
Re: air pollution != climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
It really isn't that extraordinary of a claim.
We know the properties of Carbon Dioxide from reproducible lab experiments, in particular its interaction with infrared light, and at the concentrations found in the atmosphere.
We know with reasonable precision the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere for the past few thousand years, and that it has gone up dramatically in the past few hundred years.
We have pretty good temperature measurements since the dawn of the industrial age, and good proxies that go back much further.
We know, with reasonable precision, how much carbon dioxide we as humans emit into the atmosphere on an annual basis, based on analysis of fossil fuel consumption, industrial growth, and so forth.
All of these numbers jive, and point to us as the root cause.
The only extraordinary claim is that we as humans are not responsible, and that our very obvious release of CO2 has not caused the warming we have seen. Claiming that means either denying the rise in temperature, the known physical effects of CO2, or denying the known concentrations of CO2. That requires extraordinary evidence.
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Re: air pollution != climate change (Score:5, Insightful)
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we start seeing meteoric rises in global temperatures, the kind which match exactly the predictive models that simulate 100 years of pumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere
Absolutely correct for sufficiently loose definitions of "exactly."
Back in the real world, the models don't even accurately reflect the actual historic temperature record we have . Even the apologists don't seem to deny this. See, e.g., the error bars in the first chart after the heading "Comparing models and observations" here [carbonbrief.org], which shows the models don't even purport to track actual historic performance by much better than 1 degree C.
Seriously, when you can't even build a model that can correctly spit
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Re: air pollution != climate change (Score:4, Insightful)
You're absolutely correct to say that correlation does not imply a causality. However, in this case, we do know the causal mechanism.
CO2 (and similar gasses) absorb infrared radiation at various wavelengths, and that absorbed energy translates into increased molecular motion, aka heat. This is a property that can be demonstrated experimentally in the lab, with completely reproducible results.
Those ice cores you dismiss? They're excellent time capsules of atmospheric gas composition. As the snow falls, and the cores build up, it traps small amounts of atmospheric gasses in the ice. You extract these tiny bits of gas, run them through a GCMS, and measure the concentrations of the various components. Typically these ice cores come from places that aren't subject to significant local human population (Antarctica, Greenland). They're also stratified, just like tree rings, so the date of the gas samples can be determined with a high degree of confidence.
These two things are undeniable facts. They are reproducible, and traceable.
So the real question is, if you're going to claim what you do, how has the increase in CO2 not caused an increase in temperature? What mechanism would prevent that?
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There's decades of scientific data to back it up, by researchers around the globe in dozens of fields, cited and neatly summarised in each IPCC report - but you hand-wave away the lot, pretending it's all "doctored". If that isn't the very definition of science denial then I don't know what is.
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Air pollution is unrelated to global warming.
Ah no. You are horribly misinformed. The same things that cause air pollution also cause global warming.
Burning fossil fuels for example. It's a 1.0 correlation.
Unless you crudely lump all fossil fuels together (which doesn't really match the way these things are used), there's actually no correlation at all between the emissions that cause what we consider air pollution (ground-hugging particulates) and the emissions that cause global warming (CO2, H2O):
Re:Sorry. you're completely wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually switching from coal to natural gas cuts the CO2 emissions in half due to the higher hydrogen to carbon ratio of methane compared to coal. So not only is it cleaner due to no soot, carbon emissions are also cut. So in this sense converting to natural gas can significantly reduce warming. Also, consider that many coal plants are old and not as efficient as new plants.
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Fair enough. And in truth, you can have decent levels of sulfur in gasoline and diesel, too, though it's a lot easier to filter it out of gasoline, which is why the EPA requires refineries to keep the levels low (and the limits got even lower in January of this year). Liquids and gases have
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The measurable filth on those birds is nothing but a hoax. And even if it's true: how do we know exactly how they got that crap on them. For all we know, they frequent bars that allow smoking. Or maybe they drive diesel trucks.
My guess is that they frequented tall smoke stacks and chimneys as elevated safe perches.... Remember this was before the current crop of telephone poles and wires sprang up. It was trees or a building for the most part.
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uh, you're claiming in 1917 there weren't telephone poles and power lines.....?????
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Not as many as there are now. Rural electrification didn't take place in earnest until after 1936 and that didn't subsidize phone until the mid 40's....
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most the birds might have been captures near cities / suburbs. I have family pics of the time, can tell you chicago area had a buttload of electrification. heck, the first electric train line was in 1880s.
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Good point.. Where did the birds come from? Did they study that part too?
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"just"? that's a lot. the big cities and suburbs had it, lots of it. and the phone lines went coast to coast
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Coming up with conclusions, and then trying to find data to fit your conclusion is NOT science and does NOT follow the scientific method.
To the contrary, that's exactly how the Scientific Method works. I have a proto-theory, and then I draw some conclusions from it. Then I invent an experiment to check the conclusions (e.g. I try to falsify them). If the conclusions hold, I have a very promising proto-theory. I draw some more conclusions from the theory and invent more experiments. If they still hold, I call it a theory.
The experiments themselves could be performed in a controlled environment, which makes interpretation of the measurement
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African or European?
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Huh? I... I don't know that.
(Violently thrown from bridge to certain death)
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Night of smoking at the museum? (Score:1)
How was the effect of smoking being allowed and banned at the museum accounted for?
How was oil or candle lamps being used at the museum accounted for?
Less reflected light means more carbon in air? (Score:2)
Sooty and Sweep (Score:4, Funny)
I think I've heard of this. (Score:3)
"Sooty Birds" is a failed version of "Angry Birds" targeted at smokers. It's now being re-branded for millennials as "Vaping Birds".
And now, thanks to the Trump administration, (Score:2)
we will have the return of soot. Excellent!
Do it on muesem birds in china (Score:2)