Clear The Air News Blog Rotating Header Image

Research

Melting Greenland ice now source of 25% of sea level rise, researchers say

Ocean levels rose 50 percent faster in 2014 than in 1993, with meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet now supplying 25 percent of total sea level increase compared with just 5 percent 20 years earlier, researchers reported Monday.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/06/27/world/science-health-world/melting-greenland-ice-now-source-25-sea-level-rise-researchers-say/#.WVWU6YiGOHs

The findings add to growing concern among scientists that the global watermark is climbing more rapidly than forecast only a few years ago, with potentially devastating consequences.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world live in low-lying deltas that are vulnerable, especially when rising seas are combined with land sinking due to depleted water tables, or a lack of ground-forming silt held back by dams.

Major coastal cities are also threatened, while some small island states are already laying plans for the day their drowning nations will no longer be livable.

“This result is important because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” — the U.N. science advisory body — “makes a very conservative projection of total sea level rise by the end of the century,” at 60 to 90 cm (24 to 35 inches), said Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Oxford who did not take part in the research.

That estimate, he added, assumes that the rate at which ocean levels rise will remain constant.

“Yet there is convincing evidence — including accelerating losses of mass from Greenland and Antarctica — that the rate is actually increasing, and increasing exponentially.”

Greenland alone contains enough frozen water to lift oceans by about 7 meters (23 feet), though experts disagree on the global warming threshold for irreversible melting, and how long that would take once set in motion.

“Most scientists now expect total rise to be well over a meter by the end of the century,” Wadhams said.

The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, reconciles for the first time two distinct measurements of sea level rise.

The first looked one-by-one at three contributions: ocean expansion due to warming, changes in the amount of water stored on land, and loss of land-based ice from glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

The second was from satellite altimetry, which gauges heights on the Earth’s surface from space.

The technique measures the time taken by a radar pulse to travel from a satellite antenna to the surface, and then back to a satellite receiver.

Up to now, altimetry data showed little change in sea levels over the last two decades, even if other measurements left little doubt that oceans were measurably deepening.

“We corrected for a small but significant bias in the first decade of the satellite record,” co-author Xuebin Zhang, a professor at Qingdao National Laboratory of Marine Science and Technology in China’s Shandong Province, told AFP.

Overall, the pace of global average sea level rise went up from about 2.2 mm a year in 1993, to 3.3 mm a year two decades later.

In the early 1990s, they found, thermal expansion accounted for fully half of the added millimeters. Two decades later, that figure was only 30 percent.

Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds in England, urged caution in interpreting the results.

“Even with decades of measurements, it is hard to be sure whether there has been a steady acceleration in the rate of global sea level rise during the satellite era because the change is so small,” he said.

Disentangling single sources — such as the massive chunk of ice atop Greenland — is even harder.

But other researchers said the study should sound an alarm.

“This is a major warning about the dangers of a sea level rise that will continue for many centuries, even after global warming is stopped,” said Brian Hoskins, chair of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

Arctic sea ice, Eurasia snow, and extreme winter haze in China

Download (PDF, 773KB)

A New Air Pollution Database Is Good, but Imperfect

WHO’s most recent atlas of air quality leaves significant gaps in coverage

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released its latest global urban air pollution database, including information for nearly 3,000 cities—a doubling from the 2014 database, which itself had data from 500 more cities than the previous (2011) iteration. These increases in coverage in air pollution measurement and reporting is encouraging, but the WHO numbers reveal that we still have a ways to go to construct a comprehensive and accurate picture of global air quality.

WHO singles out Onitsha, Nigeria and Zabol, Iran as the cities with the world’s worst air pollution, the first for elevated coarse particulate, or PM10, levels and the second for extreme fine particulate, or PM2.5, concentrations.

Yet these dubious rankings come with many uncertainties and stir more questions than they answer. “It is difficult to get accurate measurements in Africa,” a WHO spokeswoman said. “[I]deally the measurements should be done over a year to include different seasons and times of day. The reading in Onitsha may be representative but not altogether reliable.”

The air in Onitsha and Zabol is, in other words, bad, though just how bad we cannot say with certainty. Global air quality is worsening, human exposure to air pollution is on the rise, and deaths caused by these toxins have increased from 4.8 million in 1990 to 5.5 million in 2015. These trends are not, however, represented evenly throughout the world. Developing nations, those experiencing rapid industrial and urban expansion, bear the brunt of air pollution’s pernicious effects. The air in cities like Onitsha and Delhi has worsened as their populations and polluting industries have grown, while New York and London’s air quality has steadily improved.

And yet it is developing cities and nations that are least equipped to monitor and manage their ambient environment. WHO’s latest air quality database underscores this problem, as nations with the most resources have steadily increased air quality monitoring and reporting and have seen their air quality steadily improve. Developing countries have experienced deteriorating air quality alongside economic growth, as measurement in these places lags behind.

The vast majority of ground-based monitors are located in Europe and North America meaning there are major “blindspots” obfuscating where air pollution is affecting the most people in the most pernicious ways. These blindspots are why we need new ways to monitor global air pollution. The 2016 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) reveals the extent to which ground-based air monitoring and reporting is missing areas suffering from some of the world’s worst air pollution. Using satellite data, researchers at Dalhousie University have estimated ground-based exposures to fine particulate pollution or PM2.5—microscopic particles that can penetrate deep into human lung and blood tissue, leading to cardiovascular disease and other serious health impacts.

These satellite data have advantages as well as their disadvantages compared to ground-based information. Satellites offer a globally-consistent, long-term, and dynamic view of air pollution levels, exposures and trends. Satellite data provide a picture of the average PM pollution that an individual living in a particular place would be exposed to on a typical day, potentially smoothing out outlying spikes in air toxin concentrations. These data can be used to gauge pollution’s impacts on human health – in total, Global Burden of Disease estimates outdoor and indoor air pollution is responsible for 5.5 million premature deaths a year. Satellites do not, however, measure air pollution at the ground level, where people live and breathe, which is why governments need to invest in ground-based monitors.

Here we present four visualizations from Data-Driven Yale’s latest research on global air pollution and a fifth graphic from recent studies on pollution sources with original analysis:

1. Nearly half of the world’s people breathes unsafe air, with populations in developing countries disproportionately exposed. One-third (1.3 billion) of these people live in the East Asia and Pacific region, where in China and South Korea more than 50 percent of their populations are exposed to unsafe levels of fine particulate matter. In India and Nepal, the percentage is nearly 75 percent – a figure reinforced by WHO’s 2016 database, showing that 16 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities are in India. In our interactive map areas shaded red or darker experience air pollution that exceeds 10 micrograms/m3 – the threshold WHO considers unsafe for people to breathe. The map shows that East Asia, Northern India, and Northern Africa have the world’s highest levels of fine particulate pollution.

GLOBAL EXPOSURE (IN MICROGRAMS PER CUBIC METER) TO FINE PARTICULATE POLLUTION (PM.5).

GLOBAL EXPOSURE (IN MICROGRAMS PER CUBIC METER) TO FINE PARTICULATE POLLUTION (PM.5).

2. Nitrogen dioxide pollution, produced mainly from fossil fuel combustion, is a precursor of ozone and smog and mostly affects Europe and East Asia. In Europe, tax policies dating back to the 1970s and regulations from the 1990s designed to limit tailpipe CO2 emissions have encouraged the production and use of diesel vehicles, resulting in elevated NO2 levels. While diesel vehicles generate 15 percent less CO2 than their gasoline counterparts, diesel engines emit four times more NO2. In London, NO2 pollution is linked to 9,500 deaths annually. These data, derived from satellite estimates, show that air pollution is not only a developing world problem, but that industrialized countries also suffer from foul air. European cities, however, are implementing ambitious policies to reduce air pollution, such as the British capital’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone, which is expected to cut central London’s pollution in half by 2020. Overall air quality has improved in Europe in the last decade, while pollution continues to worsen in most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

GLOBAL EXPOSURE (IN PPM) TO NITROGEN DIOXIDE (NO2).

GLOBAL EXPOSURE (IN PPM) TO NITROGEN DIOXIDE (NO2).

3. Global monitoring is improving, primarily in developed countries. Figure 3 shows increases in the number of cities monitoring air pollution from the WHO’s 2011, 2014 and 2016 databases. Cities monitoring air pollution have increased in number to the greatest extent in Europe and high-income countries in the Americas in the last five years. Progress in lower to middle-income countries has been much slower.

NUMBER OF CITIES WITH AIR POLLUTION DATA IN WHO’S URBAN AIR POLLUTION DATABASE IN 2011, 2014 AND 2016. DATA SOURCE: WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

NUMBER OF CITIES WITH AIR POLLUTION DATA IN WHO’S URBAN AIR POLLUTION DATABASE IN 2011, 2014 AND 2016. DATA SOURCE: WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

4. Governments that have implemented policies to control air pollution have reduced deaths. New data released in February of this year as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GDB) project show that 5.5 million premature deaths occur each year due to air pollution. Looking at GBD data over 10 years (Figure 4), key trends emerge. Air pollution-related deaths in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia have worsened more dramatically than other regions the last decade. The United States, European Union, and Australia have significantly reduced air pollution-related deaths, largely due to policy interventions targeted at industrial pollution control, reducing fossil fuel consumption, and improving fuel quality in the transport sector.

PERCENTAGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AIR POLLUTION-RELATED DEATHS IN 2000 AND 2013. DATA SOURCE: GLOBAL BURDEN OF DISEASE (GDB)

PERCENTAGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AIR POLLUTION-RELATED DEATHS IN 2000 AND 2013. DATA SOURCE: GLOBAL BURDEN OF DISEASE (GDB)

5. New sources of air pollution detected. Recent studies show that a major contributor to air pollution is shipping. This finding is particularly salient in coastal regions in East Asia. Forty-two percent of Hong Kong’s particulates, for instance, are from the maritime sector. And East Asia has experienced the highest number of shipping-related air pollution deaths. A new study shows that air pollution from the agriculture sector exceeds anthropogenic sources of particulate pollution in the United States and Europe (Figure 5). These studies underscore air pollution’s complex origins, as airborne toxins come from many different sources and activities, both natural and human-driven. The mix of sources makes it ever more challenging to design policies and interventions to address this class of pollutants. Despite the challenges, the imperative is clear: more efforts must be made to reverse the current trends, to reduce human exposure to air pollution and to improve global air quality.

DOMINANT CONTRIBUTOR TO PM2.5 CONCENTRATIONS WITH RESPECT TO NATURAL (BEIGE), ANTHROPOGENIC (WITHOUT AGRICULTURE IN RED), AND AGRICULTURAL SOURCES (GREEN). SOURCE: BAUER ET AL. (2016).

DOMINANT CONTRIBUTOR TO PM2.5 CONCENTRATIONS WITH RESPECT TO NATURAL (BEIGE), ANTHROPOGENIC (WITHOUT AGRICULTURE IN RED), AND AGRICULTURAL SOURCES (GREEN). SOURCE: BAUER ET AL. (2016).

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-new-air-pollution-database-is-good-but-imperfect/

Meet the Scientist Connecting the Dots Between Air Pollution and Dementia

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/35356-meet-the-scientist-connecting-the-dots-between-air-pollution-and-dementia

At first blush, you might not think air quality is related to brain health. But what if the two are connected? Air pollution continues to worsen in the developing world, especially in rapidly developing countries like China and India; at the same time, our global population is aging, and dementia rates are expected to rise accordingly. Increasingly, research suggests a link between air pollution exposure and the risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. How might this relationship be possible, and what might it mean for what the world is — or isn’t — prepared to handle in the coming decades?

Aaron Reuben is a science writer, recovering policy wonk, and neuropsychologist-in-training who’s exploring just these questions. A PhD student at Duke, Reuben’s journalistic endeavors include an eye-opening feature for Mother Jones (cross-posted at Grist) that draws attention to the connection between dementia and dirty air.

Driving Reuben’s work is the notion that the countries that will see the most aging in the coming years are the same countries that are going to have the most polluted air — and the same places that have some of the least developed infrastructure for diagnosing and treating brain disease. I caught up with Reuben to chat about the state of the science, the justice issues at stake, and the difficulties of communicating the invisible.

Q: What do we know about the links between air pollution and dementia?

A. There are two branches of relevant science here. The first body of research studies people in older age brackets and maps their health outcomes onto possible air pollution exposures generated from regional pollution monitoring data. When you do that, you find that people who are exposed to more air pollution, particularly fine particles, show an increased risk for dementia and pre-dementia, called mild cognitive impairment. A study that came out of Taiwan, for example, drew on a cohort of nearly 100,000 people and showed that for every unit increase in exposure to particle pollution, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s went up by more than 100 percent.

Of course, before we can say that one causes the other, one of the things that needs to happen is data to arrive from longitudinal studies in which you follow people from day one, categorize their exposures, follow their outcomes, and control for things you’d like to control for, like exposures to other toxins like lead. But every month and every year, more and more studies are coming out, and the fact that they’re all finding the same thing is very compelling.

The other kinds of studies that are contributing to the evidence base are animal studies. You can’t sit someone down and expose them to air pollution and watch their brains degenerate in real time. But you can do that in mice. There are a lot of studies coming out now on changes in cell dynamics and epigenetics in mice exposed to air pollution, and you see that many of the changes are in the direction of Alzheimer’s disease and heavily related to dementia outcomes. Something that’s really sexy that hasn’t been published yet are studies using transgenic mice that have been engineered to develop Alzheimer’s-type pathology. If you expose generations of these mice to air pollution and that changes the development of pathology, then you can make a call that in this particular animal, the exposure to fine particles fostered the disease. So far the mouse studies are pointing in the same direction as the cohort studies.

Q: So are we at smoking-causes-lung-cancer levels of evidence?

A. No, we’re not there yet. But when people ask me this, I also ask them how long it took to get there for lung cancer. How long did we think cigarettes caused cancer before we were finally willing to say ‘we know’? It took decades. I don’t think anyone thinks the evidence is going to start weighing against this trend. It’s a matter of how long new research needs to pile up before people are willing to make a bold statement.

Q: And what do we know about how pollution might contribute to dementia?

A. There are a couple ways we think it works. One is by nature of the fact that some of the particles are very small. Your sense of smell is a very potent sense, and there is a direct connection from the nose to the brain via the nasal nerve. That means that once you get something in your nose, if it’s small enough, it can pass into the nerve and make its way all the way to the brain.

Keep in mind that pollution particles typically bring in a host of other nasty things with them, including heavy metals: things that can directly kill neurons. The end result is a disruption of the brain’s homegrown immune system. Microglia cells — which clear waste, trim away dead neurons, improve synaptic connections, and clear pathogens — end up performing an unsuccessful process. They continue to release oxidative chemicals that are designed to kill pathogens, but instead of killing anything, the chemicals just accumulate and disrupt neural activity. The damage this causes looks a lot like what you see in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients.

Another mechanism comes via the lungs. When pollution particles are inhaled into the lungs, they tend to be small enough to make it past the body’s defenses and end up in the deepest tissue, where they then pass into the bloodstream. When they do that, they trigger an immune reaction that circulates molecules related to inflammation, cytokines, in the bloodstream — the kind of thing that seems to cause chronic low-level inflammation wherever the particles go. We’re not sure if the particles can enter the brain through the blood directly or if the chemicals they trigger actually reach the brain, but there’s evidence that they interact with the blood-brain barrier and damage it somehow. It’s all about low-level inflammation that turns into long-term damage. Particles that enter through the nose will cause neuroinflammation directly, and particles that enter through the lungs will also cause neuroinflammation indirectly.

Q: You’ve suggested we’re past the tipping point at which this theory is going to be wholly refuted, but you’ve also cited overly cautious scientists who are wary of overstating the evidence. Why do you think this hesitance exists?

A. I think in all of science there’s a tendency to be as precise as possible. It’s never unusual for scientists to hedge their bets. But the other thing I think is going on here is that there’s been a sort of history of jumping the gun on Alzheimer’s. We’ve been talking about one cause, but there are many ways to brain disease. The brain is uniquely susceptible to damage. Air pollution isn’t causing all the dementia we see around us. There’s pesticide exposure, there are concussions — there’s not just one way to get this disease. And it’s also a function of your cumulative exposures and your genetic predisposition.

There’s a lot to fear when it comes to dementia. It comes out of nowhere, there’s no cure, it erases everything about you. If you can point to something that’s causing it, people are going to take you seriously. That’s what happened with the aluminum scare in the 1980s, which led to sensationalist headlines and people worrying about their pans and the things they were drinking. The studies that found unusually large aluminum deposits in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were real, but that didn’t mean that your personal exposure to aluminum actually influenced your dementia risk. The field of gerontology remembers this and is going to be slow to embrace air pollution. Especially because it’s something that everyone is exposed to, unlike, say, a concussion.

Q: I’m interested in what you just said about air pollution being something that everyone is exposed to. There are obviously inherent justice questions at stake here given the inequities of air pollution exposure. How does environmental justice enter the conversation for you?

A. I think there are two things going on, and neither of them are good. The same communities that are reliably exposed to the most air pollution are the same communities that have the fewest resources to defend themselves or compensate for the effects.

Something you see time and again is that high-income, high-resourced individuals not only can buffer themselves against exposure to air pollution — they live in the nice parts of town, they don’t live by busy roads, they live by a lot of greenery, which we know can reduce pollution levels — but they also have the resources to respond to the kinds of cognitive impairments that we’re predicting. Researchers at the University of Southern California have found that air pollution levels are linked to developmental disorders. We know that if your child has a developmental disorder, there are plenty of services and activities you can do to improve their cognitive abilities. These are the kinds of things that aren’t always available to low-income communities, who are also at greater risk.

Another thing that people are talking about are the synergistic stressors at play. It’s not just that you’re living in a neighborhood that has higher levels of air pollution, it’s that there might also be more violence in your social environment. You might have an incarcerated family member. These are many forms of adversity that, on their own, modify the way the brain develops and modify a slew of risk factors. When you put them all together, these effects may be magnified.

Q: What if I buy your story about air pollution and dementia but can’t move out of my heavily polluted neighborhood? What are my options?

A. Something we used to study in my old lab was called cognitive reserve. The basic idea is that there are some things you can do that appear to make you more resilient against showing symptoms of disease or brain injury. It’s based on old evidence of people who had died and, once an autopsy of their brain was done, appeared to have had Alzheimer’s-like pathology — but there was no evidence they had Alzheimer’s when they were alive. And it seems to be the case that they were compensating somehow to the brain damage.

There are certain things we know lead to good cognitive reserve. Yes, a lot of them are associated with your socioeconomic status, but some of them aren’t. If you have a higher IQ, it seems you’re buffered a bit against insults to your brain. For every year of education you get, your risk of presenting Alzheimer’s goes down — not because you’re immune to the disease, but because if you start to get early damage, you’re more able to deal with the damage in a way that maintains your cognitive function. More physical activity is another one.

With respect to age, young people and old people are the most vulnerable. Young people’s brains are still developing; old people have brains that are less likely to bounce back and repair themselves after injury. As a society, we can choose to design better communities around some of this knowledge. In California, there’s a law that says you can’t put an elementary school on a busy road.

But no, we can’t all move. In Beijing, if you wanted to move, you’d have to change your whole life. You can’t escape the pollution.

Q: I feel like there’s a certain paradox here when you mention a place like Beijing. We’re building these factories in the name of progress, but for whom? If people’s brains are atrophying because of exposure to air pollution, there’s a pretty abysmal vicious circle going on.

A. It’s not just that we’re going to die younger or age more poorly. There’s lots of evidence that you’re stopping people at the start of their lives. Studies have found that kids drop IQ points for every unit of air pollution exposure. Or look at what’s happening in Flint. There’s a whole generation of kids getting set at a disadvantage from day one. We’re doing the damage to ourselves.

Q: Something like climate change is already so slow and abstract. Something like air quality isn’t always something you can see. When you combine these kinds of things with mental health or brain health — which are already siloed off from the rest of the health spectrum — there’s a lot of abstraction going on in one place. That must make these effects particularly difficult to communicate. Does this ever leave you frustrated?

A. This actually reminds me of something I’m working on now, which is trying to look at the long-term effects of exposure to positive things like parks and green spaces — improved environments. I think of it as the flipside of these stressors. Almost everyone you talk to can speak at a personal level to the benefit of green spaces. Trying to find that effect in data and trying to make that data compelling is hard. There are a lot of things that are going to contribute to how well or how poorly you live. Something like your environment is just one of them. Trying to pull out the influence of that one factor is really hard, both scientifically and with respect to communication.

But we do know the places where people are getting older. In a lot of those places, we can reliably say there are going to be greater rates of dementia than there should be. A lot of those places don’t have infrastructure yet for diagnosing or treating these things, and I think it’s time we started thinking about the resources that need to be put into place in the areas where the air is bad. At some point we’re going to have to start paving the way to dealing with the brain health crisis that’s coming. Of course, it’d be great to clean up the air in these places, and we know how to clean up the air, but we’re not going to be able to do it right away. In the meantime, we know who the people are at risk, and we know pretty well what’s going to happen. Can we start getting ready for that in a real way?

STUDY REVEALS ENVIRONMENT, BEHAVIOR CONTRIBUTE TO SOME 80 PERCENT OF CANCERS

Download (PDF, 278KB)

Download (PDF, 541KB)

Download (PDF, 1.43MB)

Tipping points – no safe limit

http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/tipping-points-%E2%80%93-no-safe-limit

18 possible tipping points well before +2°C is reached

New research reported by Climate News Network has identified at least 37 “tipping points” that would serve as evidence that climate change has happened – and happened abruptly in one particular region.

Eighteen of them could happen even before the world warms by an average of 2°C, the proposed “safe limit” for global warming.

Researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they “screened” the massive ensemble of climate models that inform the most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and found evidence of abrupt regional changes in the oceans, sea ice, snow cover, permafrost and in the terrestrial biosphere that could happen as average global temperatures reached a certain level.

The models did not all simulate the same outcomes, but most of them did predict one or more abrupt regional shifts.

But the future is not an exact science according to the researchers. “Our results show that the different state-of-the-art models agree that abrupt changes are likely, but that predicting when and where they will occur remains very difficult. Also, our results show that no safe limit exists and that many abrupt shifts already occur for global warming levels much lower than 2 °C.”

The researchers explore some of the telltale indicators of such abrupt change. One of these would be the wholesale collapse of the Arctic Ocean winter ice: the Arctic is expected to be largely ice-free most summers in the next few decades. Winter ice would then become increasingly thin. Once sufficiently thin, warming and wave power would do the rest, and tend to leave clear blue water even in the coldest seasons.

Another indicator would involve massive unexpected plankton blooms in the Indian Ocean as a consequence of an upwelling of nutrient-rich waters from the ocean bottom, in response to changes in the Asian monsoon regime.

A third would involve massive snow melt on the Tibetan plateau: in 20 years, the annual average snow cover could fall from 400 kilograms per square metre to a trifling 50 kg.

A fourth signal would be massive dieback in the Amazon rainforest over a few decades, mainly because of reduced rainfall.

Yet another telltale aspect of climate change would be the sudden, paradoxical dramatic drop in temperatures in the North Atlantic, as a response to global warming and a collapse of the ocean current that carries warm surface water north, while denser, colder and increasingly more saline water in the Arctic sinks to the bottom and flows back southward.

The researchers conclude: “An additional concern is that the present generation of climate models still does not account for several mechanisms that could potentially give rise to abrupt change. This includes ice sheet collapse, permafrost carbon decomposition, and methane hydrates release.”

Reinhold Pape
Source: Climate News Network

Comparative Assessment of Particulate Air Pollution Exposure from Municipal Solid Waste Incinerator Emissions

Download (PDF, 5.5MB)