Atmospheric Aerosol Abundance, Absorption, and Applications

Blog made by John Paul Mester. Thoughts made in TX.

[jpmester-blog]

“Wheeler’s claim that climate change ranks high on the list of what keeps him awake at night could only be true if he’s referring to his tireless efforts to come up with new ways to make the crisis demonstrably worse.”

Andrew Wheeler is the current acting EPA Administrator. Wheeler is also the current Vice President of the Washington Coal Club and a former coal lobbyist for Murray Energy. We’ve got a real fox in the henhouse situation here, folks. Scott Priutt was bad, but at least he was sloppy enough to misappropriate funds for personal trips and expenses. Wheeler started his career in policy work with the EPA and won three organizational bronze medals between 1993 and 1994.

This dude learned the system and then went on to try and game it as legal staff for two senators for the next decade or so before coal lobbying. He holds a law degree and an undergraduate major in biology so he’s smart enough to reason the Truth of global warming. The only personal motivation this guy might have to continue to vehemently deny the effects of climate change is money. Cold hard cash is the main difference between policy work for environmental interests versus big oil and coal. And you can bet your bottom dollar that he’s getting kickbacks under the table or will leverage his position for the benefit of his investments or something shady.

Wheeler made headlines in March after an interview with CBS, in which he denied the imminence of climate change on modern life, claiming no big effect until 50 or even 75 years out. This statement directly opposed a 1,500 page climate assessment from the EPA itself, published in late April, that concludes that the effects of global warming are being felt now. The Sierra Club did not skip a beat, publishing another press briefing and filing an official, legally-binding request for documentation from the EPA regarding empirical support for Andrew Wheeler’s estimations. 

I saw an artist draw a wolf beneath the skin of a lamb this past week on the west sidewalk of Broadway between 110th and 111th. I’m reminded of Andrew Wheeler every time I walk by.

https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2019/01/sierra-club-statement-wheeler-nothing-more-scott-pruitt-new-coat-lead-paint

https://web.archive.org/web/20171105173211/https://www.faegrebd.com/andrew-wheeler

https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2019/04/sierra-club-demands-basis-for-wheeler-s-claim-most-climate-consequences-are

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/politics/sierra-club-climate-change-scn/index.html

[jpmester-blog]

Climate policy with Beto

I’d like to first annotate and summarize the most significant parts of Beto’s policy plans that I read.

Part I - First day plans

Paris agreement reentry - very cool.

“rapidly phase-out hydrofluorocarbons, the super-polluting greenhouse gas that is up to 9,000 times worse for climate change than carbon dioxide” - what aerosol-related variable is multiplied 9,000 times? Is this like how HF ingestion is 9,000 times worse than HCl ingestion?

Part II - Second day plans (Money and TAXES)

This section sounds plausible if only because of tax increases for big companies and the 1%. Whether or not a $1.5 trillion investment will turn into $5 usable trillion dollars with interest is a shaky outcome that Beto should not base his campaign promises on.

Good news for climate scientists: $50 billion would go towards oceanic and atmospheric climate research.

I like his focus on the community impact of climate change. Beto hopes to allocate public health resources to communities with unclean water and air (which he estimates to be about half of Americans).

Part III - Vague upkeep

Beto promises to keep tabs on climate goals once policies have been written into law. Thanks Beto, you won’t forget about these lofty promises.

Part IV - Sensible considerations (disaster prevention and aid)

This is a good section for him to end with, it includes considerations for disaster prevention (which is cheaper than disaster aid), and bolstering communities that have already been affected by natural disasters so they don’t remain vulnerable to extreme weather.

In general I think the overall plan is a step in the right direction. I’m not sure if Beto believes in incrementalism enough to compromise on executive actions or tax code changes. And passing this legislation is terribly dependent on a mixed-party congress [Republicans have more seats up for grabs in both the house and the senate in 2020 but it’s still anyone’s game and they could very well keep the Senate]. That being said, I do believe that were Beto able to implement the entirety of his plan, we would have “net-zero emissions by 2050.” It’s good that he left that backdoor open for himself on the net part of zero emissions, accounting for carbon sinks or climate interventions in whatever form they might take.

The Washington Post thinks that there’s a “right reason to dislike” Beto’s plan. Apparently Beto’s tax incentive idea is buried too deep in his proposal and should be featured more prominently since economists agree that it’s the way to go. Otherwise the OpEd raves about how Beto’s plan is more feasible than the Green New Deal ever was. Good news for Beto.

The Texas Tribune also reviewed Beto’s plan. They were more focused on how Beto has waffled on climate policy in his 2016 votes. Thankfully, Beto was only in the house for 6 years so he didn’t really get the opportunity to accrue a history with the issue. Reactions from political peers were mixed, the article also noted.

Beto needs to back up this policy plan with interactions with voters and experts. When on the debate podium he will have to appeal to viewers ethos and pathos. The logic of climate change is fact, whether or not it applies to the Average Joe is something Beto has more control over. Why not tell a story about a voter he met living adjacent to California wildfires or a Houston voter affected by hurricanes and floods. Besides that, Beto’s a regular Smokey the Bear, cute, likable and the harbinger of catastrophic climate disaster.

What I will say about Beto, at large, is that he chose a very opportune time to run for president. His most prominent peer hopefuls are all mired in house and senate business that takes up a majority of the time they could spend campaigning (Beto could very well visit all 3100 counties of the U.S. in the 542 days till the 2020 election). The number one complaint from all of my Democrat friends about Beto has been that he doesn’t have specific policy positions posted. This is a wonderful problem for Beto to have! Because he can wait and gauge reactions to other candidates plans and then produce the most agreeable iteration thereof.

I love Beto, I really do. Mostly because I’m from Texas but also because he’s consistently worn the most positive and grateful attitude I’ve observed in a politician since maybe Obama. Pantone 292 also runs pretty deep.

This past summer I had the opportunity to swing the vote of one of Beto’s target demographics; college-educated, suburban, Republican women. To sum up my mother in one sentence, she’s 49, and if she found out today that she was pregnant she would carry the child to term no matter the cost to self. I convinced my mom and sister to accompany me to a Beto concert rally with Willie Nelson. Beto displayed his inspiring rhetoric and emphatic tone with the constant refrain “What if….” we lived in a society in which teachers are paid a living wage, among others, etc. He then proceeded to play guitar and sang on stage with Willie.

Having heard Beto in the flesh, my mother became even more curious about this Texas DEMOCRAT. On the drive to the polling station, I made my last appeal “there’s only one senate candidate that stands for people who look and speak like you [a woman born and educated in Mexico City], one candidate that’s visited all 254 counties of Texas, one candidate that will stand up to Trump on immigration and one candidate THAT SPEAKS FLUENT SPANISH. A vote for Cruz is a vote for Cruz but a vote for Beto is a vote for Texas.” Knowing the social pressure my mother faces and the shame she would feel in admitting to conservative friends that she voted for a Democrat I asked her a favor; “vote for Beto. But tell me you voted for Cruz.”

My younger brother later asked her who she voted for. “That’s none of your business,” she retorted.

https://betoorourke.com/climate-change/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/29/beto-orourke-has-new-climate-plan-heres-right-reason-dislike-it/?utm_term=.187b243f8ea6

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/04/29/beto-orourke-policy-plan-fight-climate-change/

[jpmester-blog]

Production of N2O5 and ClNO2 through nocturnal processing of biomass-burning aerosol

In this paper on biomass burning and ClNO2 formation Ahern et. al. conduct experiments on brush and trees one might encounter in a camping trip bonfire. How these different fuel sources affect Cl concentration in smoke is also of research interest. According to the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior services, “Nitrosyl chloride is a corrosive chemical and contact can severely irritate and burn the skin and eyes” and “nose and throat...” as well as “irritate the lungs causing coughing and/or shortness of breath.”

During the first weekend in April, Fuego and I went on a weekend trip to Harriman State Park. After an afternoon hike and dip in Lake Skenonto, we retired to the campsite for dinner. A fire emerged as the primary activity of the night. Something about stoking the embers and watching the flames dance within the rock sanctuary we had corralled them in seemed primal and soothing. “The fire burns my face but I like the warmth” was a common sentiment among the group; position around the fire soon became an exact science, friends choosing their level of comfort with nitrosyl chloride exposure among other pollutants. Naturally, I was less than a foot away from the flames. As the authors of the above study note, ClNO2 is specific to nocturnal environments because photolysis changes the chlorine reaction chemistry.

I was curious about the abbreviation chosen for biomass-burning aerosol, “BBA.” I wasn’t comfortable with its similarity to other abbreviations in Millennial vernacular -for good reason. Apparently during World War II, members of the british army used an abbreviation to remind them which parts of their body they most certainly needed to attend to in the shower, “BBA.”

Four different aerosol sources; ammonium bisulfate, sawgrass, cutgrass, and birch wood were tested in the furnace attached to the teflon gas chamber for smoke production. Although the researchers went to the trouble of obtaining grass native to Georgia from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, they chose to use “birch wood” from a local grocery store in Pennsylvania. Mind you, one of the first mundane comparisons drawn in this research is its relation to atmospheric aerosol deposition from wildfires. In 2017, PA had a whopping 534 fires with a total acreage burned of 1,649. Meanwhile in California during that same year, there were 9,133 total fires burning a total of 1,248,606 acres; on average, each fire burned 137 acres (compared to 3 acres in PA).

A former firefighter answering a Quora blog questions claims that Oak, Digger Pine, forest brush, and Sierra mixed conifer were recently implicated in California’s Camp and Woolsey fires. So why not go the trouble of obtaining one of these types of fire fuel sources for research? The authors do not assume that Cl composition is the same for all trees, as evidenced in their supplemental information. Studies have been done on “longleaf pine, Douglas fir, black spruce, and ponderosa pine” all showing little to no Cl content for the conifer family of trees. I still hold that if the authors wanted their research to have a higher impact they might have considered using fuel sources indigenous to regions where wildfires are more common (think anywhere in the Western United States, really).

Mass spectrometry and IR were used to ascertain the identity and abundance of both N2O5 and ClNO2. Below is the most significant of the plots shared, comparing ozone injection to chemical prevalence over a period of about 2 hours. It clearly demonstrates that the grasses chosen have a higher chlorine output than the wood. Given the fuss that was made to obtain Savannah, Georgia grass and Pennsylvania grocery store firewood, I would have liked to see more than 3 experiments conducted for each fuel source. An average plot might have been more demonstrative of study findings.

Study authors mention briefly the potential for the teflon bag used for smoke collection to absorb small amounts of Cl during each experiment. I am also interested to see the amount of fluoride ions that might have dislodged throughout the study [as teflon is a carbon polymer with numerous terminal fluorines] and whether this phenomena could affect concentrations of ClNO2 or other chemical species. Even if this effect did not play a significant role in this study, perhaps it could help future researchers refine this study.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.7b04386

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.7b04386/suppl_file/es7b04386_si_001.pdf

https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1396.pdf

https://www.fireweatheravalanche.org/fire/

http://www.docs.dcnr.pa.gov/cs/groups/public/documents/document/dcnr_20033434.pdf

http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_stats?year=2017

[jpmester-blog]

Efficient formation of stratospheric aerosol for climate engineering by emission of condensable vapor from aircraft

Hydrosulfuric acid in this paper is thought to be better at radiation management over sulfates and other methods, in a manner similar to that of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption (aerosol injection event) of 1992. It is found that on average, the radius of H2SO4 engineered aerosols is smaller than SO2 or on par with non-engineered environments.

The result is that less sulfur is needed to cool -4 W m-2 by H2SO4 than SO2. Ozone reduction is still strongly suspected in the lower stratosphere, but on the surface (pun most definitely intended), this method seems to be a viable alternative to stratospheric aerosol enhancement via SO2. The Harvard Project’s calcite experiments came 6 years after the Pierce paper was published in 2010; CaCO3 is a much sexier option because it actually promotes ozone formation, claims a “10-fold less” radiative heating of the lower stratosphere compared to an effective load of sulfate aerosol, and is a non-toxic chemical found in tap water, often a neutralizing agent.

Still I’m left wondering which communities elected to be a part of these experiments; the equator crosses countries in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asian Island nations. Latitude degrees between 30 °S and 30 °N also cover dozens of more countries including the United States. Practically speaking, researchers likely chose a longitude across a body of water such as the Atlantic or Pacific- but let’s also assume that the plane flown needs to be relatively close to land to refuel. Were communities within a 100 mile radius informed of the potential spike in sulfur content of their water or warned of the smell… I understand how unlikely it is for nearly any of these particles to fall back onto earth’s surface but NASA should really be more careful about what chemicals it let’s fly into our atmosphere (which is a large but sensitive ecosystem).

One data point I would have liked to see in this paper is the carbon footprint of the aircraft(s) used in the experiment. An independent study, using data from the US Department of Transportation, claims that commercial airliners produce as much as 53 lbs of CO2 per mile. How many miles did each aircraft travel in each of these experiments? The world may never know…..

https://doi.org/10.1029/2010GL043975

https://blueskymodel.org/air-mile

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/52/14910#sec-3

[jpmester-blog]

Vadoud Niri, doing research with the help of SUNY - Oswego’s funding, has completed preliminary research that suggests that houseplants could be a viable alternative or supplement to ventilation systems in reducing the concentration of at least three volatile organic compounds: acetone, benzene, and formaldehyde. Niri’s team employed five different common houseplants to test both the efficiency and rate of VOC uptake over a 12-hour period.

The Jade Plant, Spider Plant, Bromeliad, Caribbean Tree Cactus, and Dracaena were all shown to be effective at acetone reduction with the Dracaena being the best overall at 94% removal efficiency. The Bromeliad, however, was the best at reducing VOCs in general at a rate of 80% over 12 hours. The absorption of VOCs take place through a process called biofiltration. At the time of publishing in 2016, Professor Niri had plans to introduce plants into an environment typically saturated with indoor pollutants, such as a nail salon. Professor Niri’s research in general suggests that types of plants could be chosen specifically for the saturated, VOC-specific environment they will occupy.

Overall this video is educational and well-produced (published by ACS). I’m not convinced that “dizziness” is a prominent issue for indoor air pollution, simply because if I walk into a room and feel dizzy, I’m not going to stay in that room for a prolonged period of time. I’m most likely to complain that it smells like paint fumes and not go back until the room is less dizzy-ing. Interestingly enough, this response might be indicative of my demographic more than anything else. I was at Dodge Fitness Center a few months back and I observed a facilities worker using some chlorinated solvent for cleaning. The odor was profuse and pungent. I asked the facilities employee if they were ever provided ventilation masks for cleaning. She responded by saying that she had never considered using a mask. So the use of plants to reduce the number of pollutants in indoor air may be an accessible way to reduce acute toxic fume exposure, though not necessarily in a gym.

A preliminary search of the literature revealed that no new publications have documented real-world testing of the biofiltration in nail salons or chemistry labs for that matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdOibycDIA4

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2016/august/selecting-the-right-house-plant-could-improve-indoor-air-animation.html

http://magazine.oswego.edu/2017/04/13/niri-students-explore-green-solution-for-air-quality/