From: ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2008)
Coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, contaminated the Arctic and potentially affected human health and ecosystems in and around Earth’s polar regions, according to new research.
The study was conducted by the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Reno, Nev. and partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
Detailed measurements from a Greenland ice core showed pollutants from burning coal–the toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead–were much higher than expected. The catch, however, was the pollutants weren’t higher at the times when researchers expected peaks.
“Conventional wisdom held that toxic heavy metals were higher in the 1960s and ‘70s, the peak of industrial activity in Europe and North America and certainly before implementation of Clean Air Act controls in the early 1970s,” said Joe McConnell, lead researcher and director of DRI’s Ultra-Trace Chemistry Laboratory.
“But it turns out pollution in southern Greenland was higher 100 years ago when North American and European economies ran on coal, before the advent of cleaner, more efficient coal burning technologies and the switch to oil and gas-based economies,” McConnell said.
In fact, the research showed pollutants were two to five times higher at the beginning of the previous century than today. Pollution levels in the early 1900s also represented a 10-fold increase from preindustrial levels.
Continuous, monthly and annually averaged pollution records taken from the Greenland ice core dating from 1772-2003 produced the results. And although data showed heavy-metal pollution in the North Atlantic sector of the Arctic is substantially lower today than a century ago, McConnell and his research partner, Ross Edwards, an associate research professor at DRI, said there is still cause for concern.
“Contamination of other sectors may be increasing because of the rapid coal-driven growth of Asian economies,” they wrote in the report. They argued the consequence may be greater risk to the food chain as toxic heavy metals from industrial activities in Asian nations are transported through the atmosphere and deposited in the polar regions.
Food chain contamination through toxic metal absorption from both the environment and from consumption of contaminated food sources could make its way to humans, who feed on long-lived land and marine animals such as caribou, seals and whale.
“Impacts on human health in the Arctic region haven’t been determined,” said McConnell. But he suggested cleaner burning coal technologies, or better yet reduced reliance on coal burning, may head off the potential problem.
And the rushing to update the models will commence in 5…4…3…
It’s amazing what one finds when actually looking.
I would have guessed, as these researchers did, the highest levels of pollutants would be found in the decades leading up to the passage of the clean air act.
It would appear economically appealing technologies are also cleaner technologies.
Coal was abandoned for oil, one side effect being cleaner air.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the scientists doing these experiments would focus on their scientific results, and not feel the need to be policy advocates.
Anthony,
I’ve said many times on this site (and others) that the assumption that aerosol pollution today is worse than it was 20, 40, or even 100 years ago is false. Take a look at the following graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png
As you can see, modelers require a great bit of aerosol cooling to have their models match global temps of the past century. Climate modelers assume, without question, that aerosol pollution became progressively worse during the 20th century. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the slope of the aerosol line is wrong (i.e., should be positively sloped, not negative). Note how the aerosol forcing has to go negative in order to produce a very positive forcing for greenhouse gases. When I asked the ideologues at RC to justify this graph, I received nothing but silence. When I put forth the same arguements mentioned in the article above, I got nothing but derision. When I asked if anyone ever ran the climate models at different levels of aerosol production, I got nothing but silence again. In other words, their modeling results are crap and will always be crap until they change the sign of the slope for aerosols.
REPLY: Perhaps you should embrace this maxim: “when crap is modeled, make a stink about it” – Anthony
“Conventional wisdom held that toxic heavy metals were higher in the 1960s and ‘70s, … and certainly before implementation of Clean Air Act controls in the early 1970s,”: then conventional wisemen are fools. Take a gander at Ljomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist: he pointesout that the effect of the Clean Air Act in Britain in the 1950s was that atmospheric pollution carried on declining at just the same rate that it was declining before the Act was passed. The reason, of course, was swapping from coal to oil (and later to natural gas).
“In 1989 6 U.S. Lockheed Lightning fiter planes and 2 B 17 Flying fortresses from WWII were found in the Green land Ice where they had made emergency landings. They landed in 1942, and according to the scientists who were drilling ice cores near that spot, using oxygen isotope dating methods (still being used) they should, according to their figures be found 12 meters below the surface. In reality they were found 78 meters down. ”
http://forums.modbee.com/viewtopic.php?p=271062&sid=1bdfd3a8451dcab040044c5045807ba0
I have no idea how accurate this is, but its not the first time I’ve seen comments that cast doubt on ice core dating methods.
Dr. Drew Budner, an environmental chemist and professor at Whitworth University gave a presentation to our Spokane Astronomical Society about his ice core work in Antarctica. He also stated that today’s atmosphere appears to be cleaner than it has been in the past 150 years and perhaps even 10,000 years. The findings are certainly at odds with the popular view, shaped by media reports, that the earth is in worse shape then ever.
This has been clear for many years now. Five decades ago cities were clogged with almost as much pollution as India, Russia and China are today.
Since then the U.S. has done a really superb job of cleaning up the environment. The air and water in our industrial cities is clean. We have made more progress in this regard — and during a half century of rapidly increasing population — than any other country on Earth, bar none.
The enviro lobby is no longer concerned with cleaning anything up. Now they are solely concerned with political power. If it were otherwise, they would invoke the Law of Diminishing Returns, and honestly admit that the amount of money required to achieve a tiny, incremental increase in [unnecessary] abatement has risen geometrically, to the point that most of the world’s GDP would be required to satisfy the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. The enviro lobby would gladly take away most of your paycheck in return for …nothing.
At this point, it’s all about the money. Your tax dollars. And how the green/watermelon movement can get its hands ever deeper into your pockets.
Notice in the photo in the lower right how the precious ice core sample is not carefully protected from heating and not supported along its length to prevent fractures.
Of course, no one is rushing to point out that legislation did essentially squat for the environment that those evil, grasping capitalists were not already doing.
cryosphere today is down I wonder why?……..
(sarc)I am soooooo surprised to hear that pollution was worse in 1908 than it is now. Why, I thought, modern Americans were horrible monsters, spewing out the world’s worst pollution, meanwhile, all the rest of those countries out there were living in an Ecotopian stable state. Why, I thought that pollution doubled under Reagan, then doubled again under Bush. After all, they both overturned all our clean air and pollution laws, didn’t they?(/sarc)
Since there are so few comments (only 4 right now) let me go off topic.
The Univ. of Colorado graph of sea level does not seem to have been updated in some time. Does this reflect current data?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_ns_global.pdf
Thank You! It is nice to see data that suppoorts what some outdoor air quality people have suspected for a long time. I started doing smoke stacks back in the 70s using Ringelmann charts to measure opacity. Ringelmann was NOT trying to clean up the environment…he recoginxed that carbon going out the stack was NOT being burned in the boiler…it was fuel that was being wasted. Ever since his work in the late 1800s most industries have been cleaning up thier combustion systems…to SAVE MONEY$$$$. This has had the unintended consequence of slowly improving air quality..at least per emision unit…but the effect has been very real in Europe and NA….
To Don B re: sea level.
Jason 1 has been going in and out of safe mode for a few months now and, consequently, no new data is being presented.
Jason 2 is still being calibrated and has completed its third complete cycling of measurements so far. They say Jason 2 measurements are in good agreement with Jason 1 but no numbers have been released yet.
A new agency will be releasing the data now at:
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/home/index.html
The newest sea level charts can be obtained here (play around with the settings to see how different the chart looks):
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/news/ocean-indicators/mean-sea-level/altimetry-data-and-images/index.html
I worked in the power industry for over 30 years and early in my career I frequently ran Orsat tests on boiler flue gas to determine combustion efficiency as reduced efficiency costs $$.
nice username there edcon
jeez (11:45:48) :
nice username there edcon
it’s just a contraction of sort of like jeez!
In the1930s I remember the snow in the wintertime was covered with a black coating from coal burning furnaces that eventually disappeared when natural gas was widely used.
The anti-capitalist bias shows in the assumptions that pollution was at its worst in the ’60s and ’70s and that it was the Clean Air Act that made a difference.
Any good businessman with an eye on the bottom line would not want high levels of pollution since that’s an inefficient use of fuels; all that smoke represents dollars out the smokestack, so throughout the century there were gradual improvements in efficiencies realized. Also, as living standards gradually improved {esp. after WWII}, local communities became increasingly active in pressuring polluting industries to clean up their act. The Clean Air Act was a late comer to the scene.
Despite superficial appearances in China’s biggest cities, such as the spiffy scenes from Beijing throughout the recently ended Olympics, the country is still highly agrarian and more 19th century than 21st. Too many Chinese still want further industrialization at any cost. They’re hungry and want it and are willing to accept the cost {for the time being} of a dirty smokestack to achieve the lifestyle routinely accepted in the West. As a consequence, industrialization will continue at an aggressive pace. Only when economic well-being of a large part of the country is achieved will there arise China’s own home-grown environmental movement. Perhaps by mid-century Chinese businesses will themselves start cleaning up their emissions to cut costs being wasted on inefficient burning of fuels. Of course the wild card in all this will be the Chinese government itself; its agenda may be far different than that of a businessman trying to improve upon the bottom line. So we can expect several decades of increasing levels of particulate matter, soot, and all those sundry chemicals being deposited in the high latitudes and perhaps the West coast of North America as well.
Smokey,
…to the point that most of the world’s GDP would be required to satisfy the goals of the Kyoto Protocol
Gosh, really? That sounds very alarming!
The air quality standards introduced in the 1970s resulted in the addition of electrostatic precipitators to coal fired boilers that has reduced atmospheric particulate emissions considerably.
Speaking of ice:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
“Conventional wisdom……” Oh Really?
I get the impression the research would have been considered a failure if they had found nothing to get alarmed about.
I was gobbling a sandwich when I opened to this page, nearly a Mama Cass moment!