Atmospheric

The realization that livestock like cows are ruminants - and produce a lot of methane while chewing - was a real boon to vegetarian activists because they got to say curbing meat would mean less global warming. Methane has 23X the warming power of the more popular CO2 in climate change estimates but it drastically shorter in duration. Still, that is enough. When natural gas caused American CO2 emissions from energy to plummet back to early 1990s levels, solar and wind lobbyists and their environmental allies claimed that methane, which they had endorses as an alternative to coal for decades,…

Tablet and phone marketing executives can sleep well tonight. While those devices are commonly blamed for recent sleep problems, beams of pure digital energy shot straight into the eyeballs will do that, a new paper seeks to shore up the failing claim that tiny particulate matter, PM 2.5 (2.5 microns per cubic meter of air), is impacting human health and should be the source of new regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. The authors claim such particulate matter, 1/40th the width of even a human hair, can damage sleep. Larger particles are of course a problem. PM 10 is what is…

Though the trend has been to listen to environmental claims about the benefits of trees in cities, in science they have a well-established dark side: in urban cities, they produce a lot of ground-level ozone, the very thing environmentalists spent decades lobbying against. During hot days, trees emit compounds that worsen ozone, such as formaldehyde, which forms from isoprene, a volatile organic compound that trees can give off when temperatures are hot, and terpenes, which also interact with sunlight to create a "natural" smog. If you have witnessed the haze of the Great Smoky…

The court case over whether ExxonMobil may have deliberately downplayed the potential dangers of global warming is heating up. Eleven attorney generals have filed a brief in US District Court in Manhattan supporting a lawsuit by Exxon to halt a probe by their peers in New York and Massachusetts. Much of the fodder for the original suit results from an ongoing set of stories that originated in the Los Angeles Times in an unusual partnership with the Columbia School of Journalism - an administrator there was given free hand by the paper to allege whatever she wanted. In the latest installment…

Though subways reduce overall pollution emissions in cities, what is good for society may not be good for the poor people who ride mass transportation. A new study finds that Canadian subways personal exposure to certain pollutants, and that Toronto has the highest levels in Canada. Sounds awful for city dwellers, right? Breathe easy, the pollutant they measured has yet to be linked to any harm, and no acute deaths, outside government claims when they want to restrict businesses.  The team evaluated air quality using a metric called PM2.5, which measures the mass of particulate matter,…

Everyone knows the value of trees in the cycle of atmospheric life. They consumer carbon dioxide (CO2), the target of regulations for the last few decades. But that's not the only way they keep us cool. Trees also impact climate by regulating the exchange of water and energy between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere, which should be important considerations as policymakers contemplate efforts to conserve forested land. That's not to say we should start talking about virtual forests, the way activists try and do about the carbon and water cost of goods. But to make smart decisions about…

We think we know the perfect balance of gases in the atmosphere, and it involves a time before there was any industry, when the human population was tiny, when almost all of the planet was covered in plants. Basically, the dream of environmental groups today (with their members being the few allowed to live, of course.) But we don't really know. There have been times when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 10X what it is today, but we were only slightly warmed, and there were times when it was lower than today, and we were covered in ice. What we do know is that things are pretty good…

Dear Mr. Trump, Please Can We Study Our Climate? To the President-elect, Sir,     please consider that if climate scientists of the past had not been supported by wealthy patrons we of the 21st century would know little if anything about how to warn people that a hurricane, storm surge or tornado is imminent.     Please, let us go to the moon again, by all means, but not at the expense of  more accurate knowledge of our own planetary environment.  Can the world not fund both of these worthy  scientific endeavors?  I am sure that the people of…

Atmospheric scientists at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) have turned their attention toward the growing e-cigarette industry and found that toxic aldehydes, such as formaldehyde, are formed during the chemical breakdown of the flavored e-liquid during the rapid heating process (pyrolysis) that occurs inside e-cigarettes or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). Since the dose makes the poison, is this a concern? Not really, but in the modern world of International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) hazard assessments, risk has become irrelevant and the presence of any compound,…

The gusting westerly winds that dominate the climate in central Asia, setting the pattern of dryness and location of central Asian deserts, have blown mostly unchanged for 42 million years. A University of Washington geologist led a team that has discovered a surprising resilience to one of the world's dominant weather systems. The finding could help long-term climate forecasts, since it suggests these winds are likely to persist through radical climate shifts. "So far, the most common way we had to reconstruct past wind patterns was using climate simulations, which are less accurate when you…