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'Sooty Birds' Reveal Hidden US Air Pollution (bbc.com)
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.
Was this a study that they planned to do, or was this something they did on a lark?
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
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 then? Locally, sure. Like what happened to London England. But everything? Seems dubious. Very.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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?
I'm trying to figure out which one of you is Russian.
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.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
African or European?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Gee, they took stuffed birds that were collecting dust in dark closets for 100 years. And they reflected less light. Is it a surprise? How do they correlate it to soot?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Huh? I... I don't know that.
(Violently thrown from bridge to certain death)
uh, you're claiming in 1917 there weren't telephone poles and power lines.....?????
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.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Neither was a bird.
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....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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):
So if you produce 100% of your power via coal and switch to producing 100% of your power via natural gas, you've cut your sulfur emissions to zero while still producing the same amount of global warming. If you switch from diesel to gasoline, you've cut your air pollution dramatically, but you have probably made global warming worse.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Sooty Birds" is a failed version of "Angry Birds" targeted at smokers. It's now being re-branded for millennials as "Vaping Birds".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So you're saying it's just coincidence that 100 years after we started pumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year 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... and that every single climatologist on the planet, the kind who are smart and went to college and know what they're talking about, are all wrong and you're right because, well, how could you possibly be wrong about anything?
Would that be regular soot or "clean coal" soot?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
In 1920, just 35 percent of American households had electricity. https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-the-1920s-thought-electricity-would-transform-farms-510917940
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we will have the return of soot. Excellent!
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?
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Good point.. Where did the birds come from? Did they study that part too?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'll bet that they come back far worse than what is expected.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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 data easy. Sometimes, it's not possible or easy to control the environment, then I have to collect and interpret the data much more carefully. Sometimes, I can't even create an environment for my experiment at all, I just have to collect the data from whatever natural events happen. In the case of the gravitational waves (which were just conclusions from Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity), at first, we just had some data that could be interpreted as being results from gravitational waves (the two neutron stars PSR 1913+16 circling each other closer and closer and thus losing energy), and then we invented an apparatus to actually measure gravitational waves coming through (the LIGO), getting much better data, which fits the theory.
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.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
"just"? that's a lot. the big cities and suburbs had it, lots of it. and the phone lines went coast to coast
According to Trump : Chinese.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Oh be honest. The models aren't "wrong" in the sense that they predicted a rise and there was a fall, they're only "wrong" in that they didn't account for this detail or that detail resulting in an error of 1% or less at this point, but the general trend is spot on and all of them agree. The only real questionable variable is how fast the rise will be and can we slow and stop it before it gets to a point that we have irreversible problems based on other theories, i.e., when the icecaps melt, it will cool the oceans temporarily, will that prevent the methane ice in the deep oceans from sublimating and releasing billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere or will that happen first and we're screwed? I'd rather we err on the side of "let's make sure that stays in the theoretical area and not test it"
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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 lots of advantages over solid hydrocarbons. :-)
Either way, the point remains that different fossil fuels have very different emissions profiles, with some emitting more CO2 per unit energy and others emitting more smog-producing particulates that contribute to a reduction of air quality.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.