Atmospheric

If you are worried about climate change and don't embrace natural gas as a bridge to whatever energy wins the future - solar, hydrogen, nuclear - you don't understand energy density and emissions. A new paper by Cornell anti-fracking marine ecologist Robert Howarth (funded by the anti-fracking Park Foundation) doesn't try to tackle the physics, he just chooses to ignore it with the goal of undermining the energy which has kept prices for poor people low while reducing CO2 emissions so much that by 2017 the Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court had nullified in 2016, was irrelevant. After…

In developed countries, air quality is now great. So great that true smog (PM10 - particulate matter 10 microns in diameter) is basically going extinct in countries like America so epidemiologists and demographers have taken to promoting concern about particles so small they can only be detected with an electron microscope (such as PM2.5).  While claims of increased mortality due to PM2.5 have fallen flat, asthma still exists and it is well-known that asthmatics have shorter lifespans.(1) A new paper speculates that as many as 170 cases of asthma per 100,000 kids each year could be…

In the early part of the 19th century, volcanoes had such a dramatic impact people worried the climate was irrevocably changed. The "year without a summer" saw cooler temperatures and there was concern Tambora in Indonesia and four other large eruptions were going to be the norm. They caused longer droughts in Africa and contributed to the last advance of Alpine glaciers during the Little Ice Age. A new study used computer models to analyze the effects of the series of eruptions on the oceans and thus on atmospheric circulation. But some caution is warranted. It is still a computer…

With air pollution a distant memory outside some pockets in the United States (or during wildfires), the U.S. EPA oddly embraced one paper, which they had not seen any data for(1), claiming that particles so small they could only be detected with an electron microscope, 2.5 microns in size, were killing people. Data didn't show it, but it doesn't matter and that is the great thing about modern epidemiology. In this decade, epidemiologists only need to show a statistical correlation and then they get media coverage and hand it off to scientists and tell them to prove it. It's sort of like…

A study has taken a look at the radii of homes with measured data near natural gas wells and statistically linked that to higher radon. While some in media will use that to sound this week's 'science is killing us' alarm, the reality is that something that is not a concern is being linked to something else not a concern.  First, radon. It is, as is well known to Americans by now, a radioactive gas that is a byproduct of natural uranium in soil, and while that sounds scary to those weaned on a Greenpeace diet of misinformation, it isn't the case, at least at realistic levels. If you take…

Though numerical models don't always correlate with reality, a new paper states that the world can achieve a 2 degree Celsius climate-stabilizing goal and reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, without closing newer plants that, let's be honest, no country is going to close. In the paper, the authors calculate that if used at the current rate until they age out of functionality, existing power plants and other fossil-fuel-burning equipment will release about 658 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere--more than half of it by the electricity sector and with China producing the largest…

Industrial processes in the United States produce 8 gigagrams of methane emissions per year, according to experts. But Environmental Defense Fund, using a sensor on a Google street view car, is claiming otherwise in a recent article they paid to publish in a small Berkeley-based journal (Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene) that promotes stories about how humans are killing the planet. Even if methane is more than EPA scientists have detected using all of the technology available to the government (as opposed to a sensor on a Google street view car), it is not a critical problem. CO2 is the…

To many in the west, Siberia is synonymous with remote winter gulags where dissidents go to die. A new simulation estimates that if climate change occurs according to more aggressive models, the end of the century might see it as a pretty nice place to love. Russia east of the Urals towards the Pacific accounts for 77 percent of Russia's land area - 13 million square kilometers. Its population, however, is just 27 percent and is concentrated along the forest-steppe in the south, which has a comfortable climate and fertile soil.  The story of migration is a story of climate change, but it…

Academics and their conspiracy-minded followers are always the first to suggest that anyone who debunks their claims must be shills for Big Evil, but Science 2.0 gets no money from any polluter (and in the past, when I have challenged academics who insist Science Is A Corporate Conspiracy by offering to show the donor list in return for a bet that would be a tax-deductible donation if they lost, none have taken me up on it) (1) Here is the problem. They write, for example, that Between "1970 and 2017, combined emissions of six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb)…

Air in England, the United States and most of Europe is now cleaner than it's been in over a century, but you wouldn't know that if you read populist epidemiology claims, which have redefined pollution from PM10, dangerous soot like black carbon, to PM2.5, which you can only detect with an electron microscope, and even down to PM1.0, which might as well be virtual pollution. The modern hyping of air pollution in a very clean environment doesn't mean you are always safe if you have respiratory issues though, and a new paper notes which areas are the worst for real pollution, black carbon from…