[✔️] December 9, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest.

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*December 9, 2021*/

/[  We have long known of ozone dangers  - very serious ] /
*Wildfire smoke may ramp up toxic ozone production in cities*
A new study reveals what happens when urban pollution mixes with smoke’s 
chemical cocktail
By Ariana Remmel -- Dec 9, 2021
Wildfire smoke and urban air pollution bring out the worst in each other.

As wildfires rage, they transform their burned fuel into a complex 
chemical cocktail of smoke. Many of these airborne compounds, including 
ozone, cause air quality to plummet as wind carries the smoldering haze 
over cities. But exactly how — and to what extent — wildfire emissions 
contribute to ozone levels downwind of the fires has been a matter of 
debate for years, says Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the 
University of Washington in Seattle.

A new study has now revealed the elusive chemistry behind ozone 
production in wildfire plumes. The findings suggest that mixing wildfire 
smoke with nitrogen oxides — toxic gases found in car exhaust — could 
pump up ozone levels in urban areas, researchers report December 8 in 
Science Advances.

Atmospheric ozone is a major component of smog that can trigger 
respiratory problems in humans and wildlife (SN: 1/4/21). Many 
ingredients for making ozone — such as volatile organic compounds and 
nitrogen oxides — can be found in wildfire smoke, says Lu Xu, an 
atmospheric chemist currently at the National Oceanographic and 
Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, 
Colo. But a list of ingredients isn’t enough to replicate a wildfire’s 
ozone recipe. So Xu and colleagues took to the sky to observe the 
chemistry in action.
Through a joint project with NASA and NOAA, the researchers worked with 
the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality 
flight campaign to transform a jetliner into a flying laboratory. In 
July and August 2019, the flight team collected air samples from 
smoldering landscapes across the western United States. As the plane 
passed headlong through the plumes, instruments onboard recorded the 
kinds and amounts of each molecule detected in the haze. By weaving in 
and out of the smoke as it drifted downwind from the flames, the team 
also analyzed how the plume’s chemical composition changed over time.

Using these measurements along with the wind patterns and fuel from each 
wildfire sampled, the researchers created a straightforward equation to 
calculate ozone production from wildfire emissions. “We took a complex 
question and gave it a simple answer,” says Xu, who did the work while 
at Caltech.

As expected, the researchers found that wildfire emissions contain a 
dizzying array of organic compounds and nitrogen oxide species among 
other molecules that contribute to ozone formation. Yet their analysis 
showed that the concentration of nitrogen oxides decreases in the hours 
after the plume is swept downwind. Without this key ingredient, ozone 
production slows substantially.

Air pollution from cities and other urban areas is chock full of noxious 
gases. So when wildfire smoke wafts over cityscapes, a boost of nitrous 
oxides could jump-start ozone production again, Xu says.

In a typical fire season, mixes like these could increase ozone levels 
by as much as 3 parts per billion in the western United States, the 
researchers estimate. This concentration is far below the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency’s health safety standard of 70 parts per 
billion, but the incremental increase could still pose a health risk to 
people who are regularly exposed to smoke, Xu says.

With climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires, 
this new ozone production mechanism has important implications for urban 
air quality, says Qi Zhang, an atmospheric chemist at the University of 
California, Davis who was not involved in the study (SN: 9/18/20). She 
says the work provides an “important missing link” between wildfire 
emissions and ozone chemistry.

The findings may also pose a challenge for environmental policy makers, 
says Thornton, who was not involved in the research. Though state and 
local authorities set strict regulations to limit atmospheric ozone, 
wildfire smoke may undermine those strategies, he says. This could make 
it more difficult for cities, especially in the western United States, 
to meet EPA ozone standards despite air quality regulations.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/wildfire-smoke-toxic-ozone-urban-air-pollution-cities



/[   Trump-based scientific misinformation needs to stop ] /
*YouTube Is Serving Up Climate Misinformation. This Top Scientist Says 
Google Should Ban It*
David Vetter
A leading U.S. climate scientist has called on video sharing platform 
YouTube to treat climate science denial videos in the same way it treats 
content containing Covid-19 misinformation—by removing them.

On Twitter, Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center 
at Pennsylvania State University, said: “Hey @Youtube. It's good you're 
taking down COVID denial videos. Now it's time for you to remove climate 
denial videos. They pose an even greater threat to humanity in the long 
term.”

Mann wrote the tweet in response to a post from a fellow Twitter user 
regarding a 2013 video titled “Why Has Global Warming Paused?” featuring 
William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton appointed to the 
National Security Council under the tenure of President Donald Trump, 
himself an avid climate denier. In the video, Happer, who is not a 
climate scientist, claims that global warming appeared to have halted in 
1998—a claim that subsequent research has disproved and which NOAA has 
deconstructed in a Q&A.

Speaking via email, Mann told me: “It’s great that YouTube is taking 
action to stop the spread of misinformation about Covid-19. But the 
disinformation promoted by fossil fuel-funded climate change deniers is 
just as rampant, and ultimately more deadly, given the profound damage 
we’re already seeing from human-caused climate change. YouTube needs to 
take action here as well.”...

“In general, our systems don’t recommend or prominently surface content 
that includes climate change misinformation. We raise videos from 
authoritative sources in search results through the Top News shelf and 
search ranking, and we connect viewers to additional context from third 
parties like the United Nations in information panels under a video. We 
also have policies that prohibit advertisers, publishers, and creators 
from making money on content that contains misinformation about the 
existence and causes of climate change.”

Hernandez pointed to YouTube’s advertising and monetization policies, 
updated in October, which “prohibit ads for, and monetization of, 
content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around 
the existence and causes of climate change.”

Yet this Forbes Sustainability contributor notes that, after viewing the 
video featuring William Happer posted by Princeton University, he was 
immediately served a selection of spurious videos featuring prominent 
climate deniers and skeptics.

While the science around climate change is well understood, 
misinformation about the phenomenon and its causes is still widespread 
on social media. Last month, a team of international researchers showed 
that fossil fuel-backed conservative U.S. think tanks and blogs were 
responsible for much of the climate misinformation being circulated. The 
nature of the attacks on climate science has changed over time, shifting 
from outright denial that global warming is taking place, to attacks on 
the integrity of climate scientists along with concerted efforts to 
undermine climate action.

Last month, a report from the Stop Funding Heat campaign revealed that 
Facebook posts containing climate misinformation were getting 1.36 
million views per day on the platform. The researchers also said that 
reactions, comments and shares to posts containing climate 
misinformation had risen by 76.7% over the course of the year. Stop 
Funding Heat called on Facebook to “show not tell” that it took the 
problem seriously, and that the platform would take steps to develop and 
implement a concrete plan to reduce the spread of climate misinformation.

Climate misinformation is also rife on Twitter. A report in the journal 
Science Policy last year showed that Twitter bots skew online 
conversations about climate change and are designed to diminish support 
for climate policies. To counter this, Twitter has instated policies 
such as “pre-bunks,” placing messages containing authoritative, factual 
context within users’ Twitter feeds. It is not yet clear how effective 
such policies are.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/12/07/youtube-is-serving-up-climate-misinformation-this-top-scientist-says-google-should-ban-it/?sh=46836912e365


/[   young enthusiast starts her new climate channel --  recent video  
news summary --  ] /
*United Airlines flew its first "sustainable" flight*
Dec 8, 2021
Beckisphere
This time, we're looking at the climate news from Nov 21 to Dec 3. If 
you like the work I do, please consider joining the Beckisphere Patreon 
at https://www.patreon.com/beckisphere or buying me a cup of coffee at 
www.buymeacoffee.com/beckisphere. Remember to talk about the climate 
crisis every day and support your local news organizations!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX80m0DMSOw



/[  Never let a good metaphor go to waste ]/
*Why We Should Rearrange Deckchairs on the Titanic*
Nov 24, 2021
The School of Life
There remain few expressions better able to capture the futility of a 
task than one which compares our efforts to ‘rearranging the deckchairs 
on the Titanic.’  However, once we get to know them, we might come to 
think that they are what we should have been focused on all along.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5SSLfH1iw0



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*On this day in the history of global warming December  9, 2009*

December 9, 2009:
On MSNBC's "Countdown," Chris Hayes strongly criticizes the Washington 
Post for running an article by Sarah Palin peddling climate-denial 
conspiracy theories.

http://youtu.be/R8rZ7YXHHfk


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