Atmospheric

Britain's Air Pollution - It's Not Dust Having read in today's news that smog affecting much of England is caused by dust from the Sahara I decided to implement the incredibly scientific Mark 1 eyeball test.  I went out on my bike with a camera. I know what desert sand and dust looks like, having traveled more than a little.  I've even driven on two deserts and cycled across another.  (Admittedly the latter was only 60 miles on a tarmac road.)  Even if I had no first-hand experience, I could rely on scientific reports about how far the winds can carry sand and dust. …

The extreme cold weather observed across Europe and the east coast of the US in recent winters is due to to natural, long-term variations in sea surface temperatures, according to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters. The researchers from University of California Irvine show that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) phenomenon — a natural pattern of variation in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures that switches between a positive and negative phase every 60-70 years — can affect an atmospheric circulation pattern, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO),…

Increasing heat is estimated to extend dry conditions to far more farmland and cities by the end of the century, according to a new paper. Much of the concern about future drought under a global warming scenario has focused on rainfall projections but higher evaporation rates may also play an important role as warmer temperatures wring more moisture from the soil, even in some places where rainfall is forecasted to increase, say the authors, who use the latest computer simulations to model the effects of both changing rainfall and evaporation rates on future drought in the journal Climate…

Ammonia pollution from agricultural sources poses larger health costs than previously estimated, according to a numerical model by Harvard University researchers Fabien Paulot and Daniel Jacob, who estimated chemical reactions in the atmosphere to better represent how ammonia interacts in the atmosphere to form harmful particulate matter. The improved simulation helped the scientists narrow in on the estimated health costs from air pollution associated with food produced for export – a growing sector of agriculture and a source of trade surplus. "The 'cost' is an economic concept to measure…

A 60,000-year record of rainfall in central Indonesia used sediments from a remote lake reveals important new details about the climate history of a region that wields a substantial influence on the global climate as a whole. The Indonesian archipelago sits in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool, an expanse of ocean that supplies a sizable fraction of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere and plays a role in propagating El Niño cycles. Despite the region's importance in the global climate system, not much is known about its own climate history, says James Russell, associate professor of…

There was a time when advocates knew that linking weather events to climate change was a bad idea; it left the science open to criticism if Al Gore was giving a talk on global warming during a blizzard. Yet since 2012, when SuperStorm Sandy was linked to climate change and a reason to vote for President Obama, claims that every weather event, be it drought or flood, hot or cold, is evidence of global warming, have gotten more prevalent. It does more harm than good, according to a paper, because not only does it undermine climate science, it lends to the belief that if we cut CO2 emissions,…

There are many enduring mysteries regarding the composition of the Earth's atmosphere but one may be a little closer to being solved. Researchers have discovered a microbial soil process that helps ensure that the explosive gas hydrogen remains at trace levels.  In recent decades it was found that about 80 percent of all hydrogen released into the air is rapidly removed through soil activity, but exactly what is recycling it, and how, has remained unclear. Researchers at New Zealand's University of Otago have found that the soil bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis uses two special enzymes…

The criticism of wind farms is that they are expensive, don't product enough electricity to be meaningful and change the weather patterns even a thousand miles away. That may have a benefit; they may weaken hurricanes before landfall. Imagine a 2012 US presidential election without New York City media whipping up a "Super Storm" and implying that Republican candidate Mitt Romney would cause hurricanes? He still would have lost but it would have given environmentalists one less reason to be against protecting people by embracing common-sense changes like waterproof subway doors and a seawall.…

Methane has 23X the impact of carbon dioxide on warming and livestock produces methane - burping cows burp. But it is a tiny fraction of climate change impact unless you are in the activism business, and then livestock accounts for 12 percent of human-related greenhouse gas emissions, using incredibly false metrics like "it takes a gallon of gas to grow a pound of beef" and adding in estimates based on land use change and deforestation. A much lesser amount comes from manure management and feed production. To activists, driving to the store is better for the environment than walking, if…

The upside to global warming might be milder winters. This would naturally lead to fewer deaths to due cold but an analysis of data from the past 60 years shows that is not likely. Researchers from the University of Exeter and University College London set out to debunk the widely held view that warmer winters will cut the number of deaths normally seen at the coldest time of year. They looked at how the winter death rate has changed over time, and what factors influenced it and found that from 1951 to 1971, the number of cold winter days was strongly linked to death rates, while from 1971 to…