Tag "Particulates"
Earth Gauge Tip of the Week: Burn Wisely
Earth Gauge Tip of the Week: Burn Wisely.
It may smell good, but wood smoke can impact indoor air quality and your health.
Smoke is a mixture of tiny particles and gases produced when wood burns – the fine particles can get into your eyes and lungs, where they may aggravate some health conditions like lung disease, bronchitis and asthma.
Use these “best burn practices” at home to minimize wood smoke and protect your health:Before you burn, make sure your chimney is clean.
A clean chimney provides a good draft and reduces the risk of a chimney fire: Have your chimney inspected by a professional at least once per year and regularly clean ashes from your fireplace or wood-burning stove to increase efficiency.
Only use seasoned wood for burning.
Never use gasoline, kerosene, charcoal starter or propane.
Build hot fires, which are more safe and efficient than smoldering fires.
Burning these materials can release harmful chemicals into the air inside your home.
Burn Wise: Consumers – Best Burn Practices.
Seeding The Clouds – Should We Mess With Our Earth’s Climate?
Seeding The Clouds – Should We Mess With Our Earth’s Climate?.
Spencer McNab Wikipedia CC 3.0 Cloud seeding involves putting particles, gasses or chemicals like silver iodide, dry ice or SO2 into clouds or where clouds are forming, encouraging snow, ice or rain precipitation.
The changes can increase the amount of heat radiated back into space and help cool a warming world.
But more recently it has been investigated as a way to reflect back heat into space in order to mitigate global warming.
The next deadline is 2020, when we have to start reducing emission by almost 10% per year until midcentury.
Changing the Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, is what these strategies target.
Enter cloud seeding.
Usually, the temperature drops and water begins to precipitate on a particle of something like dust or salt, called atmospheric aerosols.
We actually have sufficient understanding of these systems to begin evaluating cloud seeding.
For example, we know that temperature and precipitation cannot both be controlled at the same time, that summer monsoon precipitation would be reduced with seeding, that even if global average temperature could be kept from increasing, there would be cooling and warming in different places not easily predictable beforehand.
Three Reasons Why You Should Bet On Guangzhou As The Next Big Global City
Three Reasons Why You Should Bet On Guangzhou As The Next Big Global City.
In less than three years the city of 14 million people will have a brand new 30,000-strong greener and energy efficient fleet plying on its roads.
You might think Guangzhou is only catching up, for Beijing and Shanghai started phasing out old public buses in favour of electric or hybrid vehicles years earlier.
But Guangzhou is already ahead of the game on a much larger metric.
The southern port city currently leads the tally on clean air amongst all the five national cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing, through achieving a phenomenal reduction in its PM 2.5 levels.
(The particulate matter has a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometres and can enter the blood stream once inhaled.
It is used worldwide to measure the severity and scale of pollutants present in air).
Guangzhou, according to the local authority’s data, recorded 310 days of clear blue skies in 2016, with air quality commensurate with the national standards.
Earlier this year Greenpeace East Asia and the Shanghai Qingyue Environmental Protection Centre had released a report into China’s air quality standards and its nation-wide efforts to combat air pollution.
The city is already planning to encourage individual consumers of electric cars by reducing prices, charging tariffs and maintenance costs.
Pollution Caused by Summer Wildfires Significantly Higher Than Previously Thought
A new study revealed that the amount of pollutants released into the air during wildfires were significantly higher than what were noted in the emissions inventories of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “You can see the smoke, and it’s dark for a reason,” said researcher Greg Huey from the Georgia Institute of Technology, in a press release. “When you go measuring wildfires, you get everything there is to measure.
You start to wonder sometimes what all is in there.”
For the study, the researchers collaborated with NASA’s Studies of Emissions and Atmospheric Composition, Clouds and Climate Coupling by Regional Surveys (SEAC4R) and US Department of Energy’s Burning Biomass Observation Project (BBOP).
A group of about 20 scientists from more than a dozen universities and organizations installed different measuring and recording instruments in the aircraft of NASA and USDE.
These instruments were used to measure chemicals and particles in real time and cull masses of data.
Aside from fine particles, the researchers also detected methanol, benzene, ozone precursors and even certain nitrates in the plumes from wildfires.
Fine particles are considered to be dangerous to human health, particularly to heart and lungs.
These controlled burns, or most commonly known as prescribed burnings, are conducted to prevent or reduced the damage caused by wildfires.
In America, coal pollution is nearly as deadly as car crashes
Tens of thousands of Americans die every year from old-fashioned air pollution, generated by electric power plants that burn fossil fuels.
We found that such a shift would have tremendous positive effects on human health in America.
After adjusting for factors like smoking, they found that the death rate was 26 percent higher in the most polluted cities than in the cleanest ones.
But current air pollution levels are not that low.
Another huge study, published in 2013, focused on small particulates in the air of 545 U.S. counties and yearly county-specific life expectancy for the period 2000–2007.
But this research found that 18 percent of the recent increase in urban life expectancy was due to decreased air pollution.
So we asked in our research: What would happen if current low natural gas prices or pollution control policies caused all U.S. coal-burning power plants to be replaced by natural gas generators?
If current estimates are correct that the leakage rate is around 3 percent, then we calculated that switching all coal plants to average-efficiency natural gas plants would have little effect on the power sector’s contribution to climate change.
More coal use will not create more jobs President Trump has called the Paris climate accord “very unfair” for the United States, especially the coal industry, and pledged to restore coal miners’ jobs.
Coal mining jobs are declining partly because low natural gas prices have cut coal’s market share from 50 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2016.
No one’s breathing easy in the nation’s new megawarehouse hub
Those environmental and health concerns will get much worse, advocates say, if the city of Moreno Valley — a town of 200,000 located in the heart of the Inland Empire — builds the largest warehouse project anywhere in the country.
But after a developer proposed a project in 2012, city officials rezoned that dirt patch next to Thornsley’s house to make it home to one of the world’s largest warehouse complexes.
As a planner, Thornsley doesn’t have a problem with industrial development.
That makes the Inland Empire one of the unhealthiest places to live in the country.
The South Coast Air Basin — which encompasses parts of Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Los Angeles counties — exceeds federal and state requirements for lead and small particulate matter, which can lodge in the lungs.
San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which make up the Inland Empire, ranked first and second, respectively, among the top 25 most ozone-polluted counties in the American Lung Association’s 2016 air quality report.
In a community where nearly 20 percent of people live in poverty, it’s easy for a big developer to gain support for a project like the World Logistics Center — especially with the promise of 20,000 permanent jobs and $2.5 billion a year added to the local economy.
“These are not jobs that are just back and hands, they’re technical jobs, they’re jobs that are going to be able to support a family,” said one woman who has lived in Moreno Valley for more than 30 years.
Meanwhile, Thornsley’s group pushed back.
“This is precisely what the WLC does.” Benzeevi notes that Moreno Valley is requiring Highland Fairview to ensure that diesel trucks servicing the WLC meet a 2010 federal government standard for clean diesel.
Air pollution: Why and how it kills
Source: The Economic Times Air pollution: Why and how it kills * Air pollution is responsible for about one in
