China to cut Major Pollutant Emissions From Power Sector 60 % by 2020

China will cut emissions of major pollutants in the power sector by 60 percent by 2020, the cabinet announced on Wednesday, after world leaders met in Paris to address climate change.

China will also reduce annual carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power generation by 180 million tonnes by 2020, according to a statement on the official government website. It did not give comparison figures but said the cuts would be made through efficiency gains.

In Paris, Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said she had not seen the announcement, but linked it to expectations that China's coal use would peak by the end of the decade.

"I can only assume they are talking about the same thing," she told Reuters.

Researchers at Chinese government-backed think-tanks said last month that coal consumption by power stations in China would probably peak by 2020.

An EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday's announcement seemed to relate more to air pollutants than greenhouse gas emissions.

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China's Carbon Market Launches in 2017

China's long-awaited nationwide carbon market will cover as many as 10,000 firms and regulate nearly half of the country's total emissions once launched in 2017, a senior official said on the sidelines of the Paris climate talks on Tuesday.

Jiang Zhaoli, vice-head of the climate office of the state planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said China's carbon market would become the world's biggest, and its targets would be higher than those set by the state "in order to guarantee it had sufficient effect".

"When the market begins in 2017 it will already have almost 10,000 firms," Jiang said. "After 2020, the size will be bigger and will involve more enterprises."

The market will cover 31 provinces, six industrial sectors and 15 sub-industries, and will involve 4 billion tonnes of annual carbon emissions at its launch, amounting to almost half of the country's total, he said.

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Britain to Close Last Coal Power Plant by 2025

The UK's remaining coal-fired power stations will be shut by 2025 with their use restricted by 2023, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has proposed.

Ms Rudd wants more gas-fired stations to be built since relying on "polluting" coal is "perverse".

Only if gas-fuelled power can fill the void created by closing coal-powered stations would coal plants be shut, she said.

Environmentalists are concerned little is being done to promote renewables.

Announcing the consultation, Ms Rudd said: "Frankly, it cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the UK to be relying on polluting, carbon-intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations.

"Let me be clear: this is not the future.

"We need to build a new energy infrastructure, fit for the 21st century."

Former US vice president Al Gore, an active campaigner for clean energy, described the announcement as an "excellent and inspiring precedent".

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Diesel Emission Scandal Spreads Beyond VolksWagon to at Least Four Other Auto Makers

Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi have joined the growing list of manufacturers whose diesel cars are known to emit significantly more pollution on the road than in regulatory tests, according to data obtained by the Guardian.

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The Smog Free Tower

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Evidence of air Pollution From Spanish Conquest of the Inca Found in Glacier Ice Cores

In the 16th century, during its conquest of South America, the Spanish Empire forced countless Incas to work extracting silver from the mountaintop mines of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia--then the largest source of silver in the world. The Inca already knew how to refine silver, but in 1572 the Spanish introduced a new technology that boosted production many times over and sent thick clouds of lead dust rising over the Andes for the first time in history.

Winds carried some of that pollution 500 miles northwest into Peru, where tiny remnants of it settled on the Quelccaya Ice Cap.

There it stayed--buried under hundreds of years of snow and ice--until researchers from The Ohio State University found it in 2003.

In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report discovery of a layer within a Quelccaya ice core that dates to the Spanish conquest of the Inca, contains bits of lead and bears the chemical signature of the silver mines of Potosí.

The core provides the first detailed record of widespread human-produced air pollution in South America from before the industrial revolution, and makes Quelccaya one of only a few select sites on the planet where the pre-industrial human impact on air quality can be studied today.

"This evidence supports the idea that human impact on the environment was widespread even before the industrial revolution," said Paolo Gabrielli, a research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State and corresponding author of the study.

Lonnie Thompson, Distinguished University Professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and co-author of the study, called the find "another keyhole into the past of human activity in that part of the world," and suggested that further investigation could ultimately help us better understand the fate of pollution circulating in the atmosphere today.

Previously, Thompson has called the Quelccaya ice cores a "Rosetta Stone" for gauging Earth's climate history. The samples were cut from ice that formed over 1,200 years as snow settled on the Peruvian Andes. Layer by layer, the ice captured chemicals from the air and precipitation during wet and dry seasons for all those years. Today, researchers analyze the chemistry of different layers to measure historical changes in climate.

For this study, the researchers used a mass spectrometer to measure the amount and type of chemicals present in the ice dating back to 800 AD. They looked for antimony, arsenic, bismuth, molybdenum and especially lead. That's because the refining process that the Spanish introduced to South America involved grinding silver ore--which contains much more lead than silver--into powder before mixing it with mercury in a process called amalgamation. So atmospheric pollution from silver production would chiefly contain traces of lead particulates.

The mass spectrometer revealed some spikes in the concentrations of these elements in the years before Spanish rule, but those layers all likely coincide with natural contamination sources, such as volcanic eruptions. Starting just before 1600, however, the Quelccaya ice began capturing much larger quantities of these elements, and the high amounts persisted until the early 1800s, when South American countries declared independence from Spain.

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The Dark Snow of Greenland

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China to ban Coal Burning by 2020 in Beijing

China's smog-plagued capital has announced plans to ban the use of coal by the end of 2020 as the country fights deadly levels of pollution, especially in major cities.

Beijing's Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau posted the plan on its website Monday, saying the city would instead prioritize electricity and natural gas for heating.

The official Xinhua News Agency said coal accounted for a quarter of Beijing's energy consumption in 2012 and 22 percent of the fine particles floating in the city's air. Motor vehicles, industrial production and general dust also contributed to pollution in the 21 million-person city.

Even with the Beijing ban, coal use is expected to soar in China. Coal-fired power and heating is a major generator of greenhouse gases and has helped turn China into the world's largest emitter of carbon and other heat-trapping gases.

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Greenland is Darkening

Greenland’s white snow is getting darker. Scientists have generally attributed that darkening to larger, slightly less white snow grains caused by warmer temperatures. But researchers have found a new source of darkening taking hold: impurities in the snow.

“It can increase the speed of melting,” says Marie Dumont, a remote sensing scientist at Météo France in Grenoble, who publishes today with her colleagues in Nature Geoscience.

Scientists have known for years that Greenland’s snow is getting darker, based on satellite observations that have revealed lower albedos, or reflectivity. That’s a problem because the darker the snow is, the more sunlight it absorbs, and the faster it melts. Greenland’s melting ice sheets are already predicted to raise sea levels by 20 centimeters by 2100.

But Dumont and her colleagues have found that, since 2009, there has been a darkening that cannot be explained by larger snow grain size alone. Using satellite observations, they found lower albedos at elevations and at times of the year that are too cold for larger snow grains to form.

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Humans Greatly Impact Cloud Formation

Understanding how clouds affect the climate has been a difficult proposition. What controls the makeup of the low clouds that cool the atmosphere or the high ones that trap heat underneath? How does human activity change patterns of cloud formation? The research of the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Ilan Koren suggests we may be nudging cloud formation in the direction of added area and height. He and his team have analyzed a unique type of cloud formation; their findings, which appeared recently in Science indicate that in pre-industrial times, there was less cloud cover over areas of pristine ocean than is found there today.

Clouds need tiny particles called aerosols that rise in the atmosphere, in order to form. These aerosols – natural ones like sea salt or dust, or such human-made ones as soot – form nuclei around which the cloud droplets condense. In relatively clean environments, clouds can only grow as large as the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere allows: They will be the limiting factor in cloud formation.

The question is: Does the current load of aerosols in the atmosphere already exceed that limit, in which case adding extra particles should not greatly affect cloud formation; or do they continue to be a limiting factor as pollution rises, so that added aerosols would continue to influence the clouds? A model developed by Koren and his team showed that an increase in aerosols, even in relatively polluted conditions, should result in taller, larger clouds that rain more aggressively. But proving the model was another story: Experimenting on clouds, or even finding ways to isolate the various factors that go into their formation in real time, is a highly difficult undertaking.

Koren, research student Guy Dagan and Dr. Orit Altaratz in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department looked to an unlikely place to test their model: near the horse latitudes. These are subtropical regions far out in the oceans that were reviled in the past by sailors because the winds that carried their sails would die out there for weeks on end. Here was a lab for them to test the basic physics of their model: an atmospheric region controlled by well-defined meteorological conditions, which was sometimes pristine, sometimes containing low levels of aerosols. If the model was correct, transitions from one to the other should be dramatic. And they wanted to test their theory on the clouds that do form in this region – warm convective clouds that are fuelled by the ocean's moisture.

With other potential factors – wind, large temperature swings or land formations – out of the way, the team could concentrate on the aerosols, comparing daily satellite images of cloud cover and measurements of the aerosol load to the predictions of the model. Using many different types of analysis, they found that their model closely matched the satellite observations.

They then looked at another source of data: that of the Clouds' and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellite instruments which measure fluxes of reflected and emitted radiation from the Earth to space, to help scientists understand how the climate varies over time. When analyzed together with the aerosol loading over the same area at the same time, the outcome, says Koren, was a "textbook demonstration of the invigoration effect" of added aerosols on clouds. In other words, the radiation data fit the unique signature of clouds that were growing higher and larger. Such clouds show a strong increase in cooling due to the reflected short waves, but that effect is partly cancelled out by the enhanced, trapped, long-wave radiation coming from underneath.

At least over the oceans, the pre-industrial cloud conditions would have been considerably different from those of today; this implies that the aerosols we have been adding to the atmosphere may have had a significant effect on global patterns of cloud formation and rain.

Koren: "We showed that convective clouds do not necessarily stop being aerosol-limited; under relatively polluted conditions the increase in aerosol loading will make the clouds taller, larger and their rain-rate stronger. As the area of this cloud cover grows, it reflects more of the shortwave radiation; but as the clouds get taller, their greenhouse effect becomes more significant, counteracting about half of their total cooling effect."

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Slash and Burn Agricultural Fires in Congo

It is currently the dry season in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this image on May 24, 2014. MODIS detected hundreds of active fires (location marked in red) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and northeastern Angola, a sign that the agricultural burning season is underway.

Agriculture is responsible for more than half of the products produced by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and fire is a central feature in agriculture across most of Africa. Places where traditional plots of open land are not available because the vegetation in the area is dense are the places where "slash and burn" agriculture is practiced most often. These regions include parts of Africa, northern South America, and Southeast Asia, where an abundance of grasslands and rainforests are found. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. Fire is also used to drive game and grazing animals to new locations and to stimulate new growth in pastures. This annual burning has taken place for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and it is not necessarily immediately hazardous. But it can have a strong influence on air quality and public health, as well as on climate and natural resources.

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China's Agriculture Department Declares Over 8 Million Acres of Farm Land too Polluted for Crops, Probably Higher

More than 8 million acres of China's farmland is too polluted with heavy metals and other chemicals to use for growing food, a Cabinet official said Monday, highlighting a problem that is causing growing public concern.

The threat from pollution to China's food supply has been overshadowed by public alarm at smog and water contamination but is gaining attention following scandals over tainted rice and other crops. The government triggered complaints in February when it refused to release results of a nationwide survey of soil pollution, declaring them a state secret.

The figure given at a news conference by Wang Shiyuan, a deputy minister of the Ministry of Land and Resources, would be about 2 percent of China's 337 million acres of arable land.

Some scientists have given higher estimates of as much as 60 million acres, or one-fifth of the total, though it is unclear how much of that would be too badly contaminated for farming.

The issue poses a dilemma for communist leaders who want to maximize food production but face public pressure to ensure safety after an avalanche of scandals over shoddy infant formula and other goods.

The explosive growth of Chinese industry, overuse of farm chemicals and lax environmental enforcement have left swathes of the countryside tainted by lead, cadmium, pesticides and other toxins.

Investigations by the Ministry of Environmental Protection have found "moderate to severe pollution" on 3.3 million hectares (8.3 million acres), Wang said at a news conference.

"These areas cannot continue farming," Wang said. He did not say whether the information came from the national pollution survey.

Farmers already are prohibited from raising crops for human consumption in areas across China that are deemed too badly polluted. But tainted rice and other crops have made their way into the food supply.

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Existing Coal Power Plants Not Required to Install Carbon Capture Technologies

Power plants already in operation in the United States will not be required to be retrofitted with equipment to capture carbon emissions, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday.

Agency chief Gina McCarthy addressed concerns raised after the EPA on Friday announced the first regulations setting strict limits on the amount of carbon pollution that can be generated by any newly built plant.

Coal and utility industry groups denounced the rules, and complained that the agency was forcing the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which they say is unproven and expensive.

Some companies expressed fears that EPA rules expected to be announced by June 2014 would call for conventional coal plants already in operation to be retrofitted with CCS technology.

"It (CCS) is not seen, at least at this stage, as an add-on that could be used to put on an existing conventional coal facility," McCarthy told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

She said CCS technology is only an effective technology when it is designed as part of a new plant.

McCarthy said the EPA is engaging with states, industry and other groups about how best to establish federal emissions standards for nation's existing fleet of more than 1,000 power plants.

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So Much for the Living With Nature Myth: Earliest Lead Pollution is From North America 8,000 Years Ago

Humans began contributing to environmental lead pollution as early as 8,000 years ago, according to a University of Pittsburgh research report.

The Pitt research team detected the oldest-discovered remains of human-derived lead pollution in the world in the northernmost region of Michigan, suggesting metal pollution from mining and other human activities appeared far earlier in North America than in Europe, Asia, and South America. Their findings are highlighted on the cover of the latest issue of Environmental Science & Technology.

"Humanity's environmental legacy spans thousands of years, back to times traditionally associated with hunter-gatherers. Our records indicate that the influence of early Native Americans on the environment can be detected using lake sediments," said David Pompeani, lead author of the research paper and a PhD candidate in Pitt's Department of Geology and Planetary Science. "These findings have important implications for interpreting both the archeological record and environmental history of the upper Great Lakes."

The University of Pittsburgh research team—which included, from Pitt's Department of Geology and Planetary Science, Mark Abbott, associate professor of paleoclimatology, and Daniel Bain, assistant professor of catchment science, along with Pitt alumnus Byron A. Steinman (A&S '11G)—examined Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula because it is the largest source of pure native copper in North America. Early surveys of the region in the 1800s identified prehistoric human mining activity in the form of such tools as hammerstones, ladders, and pit mines.

The team from the Department of Geology and Planetary Science investigated the timing, location, and magnitude of ancient copper mining pollution. Sediments were collected in June 2010 from three lakes located near ancient mine pits. They analyzed the concentration of lead, titanium, magnesium, iron, and organic matter in the collected sediment cores—finding distinct decade- to century-scale increases in lead pollution preserved from thousands of years ago.

"These data suggest that measurable levels of lead were emitted by preagricultural societies mining copper on Keweenaw Peninsula starting as early as 8,000 years ago," said Pompeani. "Collectively, these records have confirmed, for the first time, that prehistoric pollution from the Michigan Copper Districts can be detected in the sediments found in nearby lakes."

By contrast, reconstructions of metal pollution from other parts of the world, such as Asia, Europe, and South America, only provide evidence for lead pollution during the last 3,000 years, said Pompeani.

Chinese Coal Consumption is Growing and Enormous

Chinese coal consumption surged for a 12th consecutive year in 2011, with the country burning 2.3 billion tons of the carbon-emitting mineral to run power plants, industrial boilers and other equipment to support its economic and population growth.

In a simple but striking chart published on its website, the U.S. Energy Information Administration plotted China's progress as the world's dominant coal-consuming country, shooting past rival economies like the United States, India and Russia as well as regional powers such as Japan and South Korea.

In fact, according to EIA, the 325-million-ton increase in Chinese coal consumption in 2011 accounted for 87 percent of the entire world's growth for the year, which was estimated at 374 million tons. Since 2000, China has accounted for 82 percent of the world's coal demand growth, with a 2.3-billion-ton surge, the agency said.

"China now accounts for 47 percent of global coal consumption -- almost as much as the rest of the world combined," EIA said of the latest figures.

The rising consumption numbers reflect a 200-plus percent increase in Chinese electricity generation since 2000, with most of the new power coming from coal-fired power plants. Chinese growth averaged 9 percent per year from 2000 to 2010, more than twice the 4 percent global growth rate for coal consumption. And when China is excluded from the tally, growth in coal use averaged only 1 percent for the rest of the world over the 2000-2010 period, according to EIA.

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Another Post Humanity Geological Signal

Anthropogenic osmium in rain and snow reveals global-scale atmospheric contamination

1. Cynthia Chena,
2. Peter N. Sedwickb and
3. Mukul Sharmaa,1

-Author Affiliations

1.
aRadiogenic Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory, Department of Earth Sciences, Dartmouth College, 6105 Sherman Fairchild Hall, Hanover, NH 03755; and
2.
bDepartment of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University, 4600 Elkhorn Avenue, Norfolk, VA 23529

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Edited by Karl K. Turekian, Yale University, New Haven, CT, and approved March 27, 2009 (received for review November 19, 2008)

Abstract

Osmium is one of the rarer elements in seawater, with typical concentration of ≈10 × 10−15 g g−1 (5.3 × 10−14 mol kg−1). The osmium isotope composition (187Os/188Os ratio) of deep oceans is 1.05, reflecting a balance between inputs from continental crust (≈1.3) and mantle/cosmic dust (≈0.13). Here, we show that the 187Os/188Os ratios measured in rain and snow collected around the world range from 0.16 to 0.48, much lower than expected (>1), but similar to the isotope composition of ores (≈0.2) that are processed to extract platinum and other metals to be used primarily in automobile catalytic converters. Present-day surface seawater has a lower 187Os/188Os ratio (≈0.95) than deep waters, suggesting that human activities have altered the isotope composition of the world's oceans and impacted the global geochemical cycle of osmium. The contamination of the surface ocean is particularly remarkable given that osmium has few industrial uses. The pollution may increase with growing demand for platinum-based catalysts.

Footnotes

* 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mukul.sharma@dartmouth.edu

There's another signal of our presence that we'll leave in the rocks long after we're gone. And, no, I don't support the anthropocene idea.