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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
And the horse shit dust, too. People don't realize how much cleaner the air is now.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"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?
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...
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.
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