2023 Environmental Chemistry

  Mason Flora News Article: Aerosols from burning fossil fuels are masking global warming, UW researchers find Scientific Article: Estimating the timing of geophysical commitment to 1.5 and 2.0 °C of global warming   The article “Aerosols from burning fossil fuels are masking global warming, UW researchers find,” published on June 8 th of 2022 by The Seattle Times , overviews recent findings that claim aerosols released from burning fossil fuels can have a net-cooling effect that may mask some of the deleterious effects of anthropogenic emissions. These findings come from a study done at the University of Washington called “Estimating the timing of geophysical commitment to 1.5 and 2.0 °C of global warming” by Kyle Armour, an associate professor of oceanography and atmospheric science, and colleagues. Their study was conducted using an emission-based climate model called the Finite Amplitude Impulse Response (FaIR) model. Using this, they were able to run climate ch...

 By Tiantian Zhu News article can be found here . Research article published on Science can be found here .         I was interested in learning about ship emissions because seeing major ports in the US and China, including Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Tianjin, always made me wonder how those massive numbers of ships influenced our environment and climate. The article Ship exhaust studies overestimate cooling from pollution-altered clouds by Carolyn Gramling portrays how scientists investigate and argue if ship tracks would serve as a reliable example to study the aerosol-cloud-climate interactions. Ship tracks contain exhaust particles that act as nuclei of cloud droplets, which has been thought to brighten the clouds and enhance the cooling effect by reflecting more sunlight. However, the peer-reviewed article by Glassmeier et al. reveals a more complex story of the aerosols from ships and an overestimation of their cooling effect  by up to 200% .   ...

 Link to Guardian article Link to Environmental Science and Technology Paper       The article "Not a breath of fresh air: study finds sewage bacteria in ocean spray" was published at the beginning of March in 2023. It publicizes to the general population some of the information from the research paper "Bacterial and Chemical Evidence of Coastal Water Pollution from the Tijuana River in Sea Spray Aerosol" which was published on the same day in 2023.       The research comes from Matthew Pendergraft, out of Kimberly Prather's lab, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The research focuses on supporting the concept that sewage dumped into the water can aerosolize and travel inland as marine aerosol. Marine aerosol, or sea spray aerosol (SSA), primarily comes from bubble bursting and wave breaking, which releases seawater aerosol containing various substances from the water, such as bacteria. As the research paper pointed out, there has b...

CNN article: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/world/cleanest-air-intl-scli-scn-climate/index.html  PNAS article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2000134117  Zach Rose Chem 474 The CNN article, “Scientists say they have found the cleanest air on Earth” was published on June 2, 2020, by Amy Woodyatt. In it, she describes the findings of Sonia Kreidenweis and team published in PNAS a day earlier. Woodyatt calls it a “first-of-its-kind study” of the bioaerosol composition over the Southern Ocean, detailing the results while mixing in some necessary background information and key methods used by Kreidenweis’s team. The CNN article states that the researchers found the boundary layer air, which “feeds the lower clouds over the Southern Ocean”, was free from anthropogenic aerosols. Woodyatt explains that the scientists sampled the air at the marine boundary level (which I had to assume is different from the boundary layer mentioned previously) as well as the compo...

  News Article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coal-study-mountaintop-contamination-lake-alberta-1.6639875 Scientific Paper:https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00677      I chose the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) article called “Dust from mountaintop coal mine contaminated pristine alpine lake, study shows” which examines a peer-reviewed article called “Transboundary Atmospheric Pollution from Mountaintop Coal Mining” and discusses the resulting big-picture impact. The environmental and local wildlife appear to be majorly affected from atmospheric pollutants being produced from a mountaintop coal mine located in British Columbia, Canada. This unique form of coal mining is being exposed as having the capability to spread fine particulate matter like PACs (polycyclic aromatic compounds) which are a known carcinogen, and other harmful material for hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the actual emission site.      Since ...