Clean-up of coal soot and similar, sulfurous smog-makers in Europe has somewhat brightened skies there in recent decades, but that’s about it on the bright side of air clarity news. Pollution is making days steadily dimmer and murkier in most of the world since the 1970s at least, says a report from researchers at the Univ. of Maryland and Univ. of Texas that is out today in Science Magazine. The news got wide media pickup.

The dimming is rather slight if statistically significant globally at about 0.1 percent per year. It is dramatic in some areas including but not limited to China, India, and nearby regions. The causes are solid and liquid aerosol particles, like a very fine dust or mist. Some varieties are dark enough to absorb sunlight and heat the lower atmosphere, some are brighter and scatter the sun’s energy back into space. All reduce direct as well as indirect sunshine at ground level. The process and the direction of change are no surprise. Some studies conclude that farm productivity in South Asia and China has dropped as crops get less sun. But to have solid, global numbers got this paper prominent play in this world-class journal. The US has dimmed, but barely. One question: how about those reports of some years ago that airplane contrails, spreading into a high thin cirrus, are substantially dimming the sun? Is that still considered the case and how does that phenomenon fit with the aerosols that are this new study’s focus? Further, speculation has been that, overall, such industrial and other human-caused aerosols somewhat blunt global warming and that cleaning them up might provide a little uptick in the temperature. Where does that speculation stand?

Stories:

• AP : Pollution dims skies as well as befouling the air ; Hmm. Watch that synax.
• USA Today - Doyle Rice: Your eyes aren’t deceiving you: Skies are dimmer ;
• Reuters - Will Dunham : Growing pollution leads to “global dimming” ;
• Bloomberg - Ryan Flinn : World’s Skies Dimmed Since 1970s as Pollution Rose, Study Says ;
• Financial Times - Clive Cookson : Science briefing: Darkening skies ; And Europe, he writes, is “the shining exception.” Just a shorty, part of a roundup.

Grist for the Mill: U. Maryland Press Release ;

PIc - source ;

In Nature magazine engineers at MIT report they think they have a better way to make lightweight, high-power lithium ion batteries that charge up extremely fast and deliver their energy with higher power too. If so, that’s good news. These are the same general category as those that made news a few years ago for making a few laptop computers to explode - and are making their way to market, slowly, for long range electric and plug-in hybrid cars.

At PCWorld, Brennon Slattery writes - and says in the hed too - that we may see versions that recharge in three seconds. Well, okay. That is a jolt for sure. Hmmm. But if you try that with a car’s load of energy you’ll melt or maybe blow to smithereens any extension cord now to be found lying around any house The Tracker has ever been in. The local grid would likely collapse before one’s three energizing seconds were up. Maybe we’ll all get thick power lines of superconducting niobium to feed tomorrow’s electro-cars. Be sure to wear a rubber suit when topping up for a trip.

Almost everybody else tells the story pretty much the same way so maybe it’s true. Take a look below at the story from the Register however. Maybe it’s not.

• Reuters - Julie Steenhuysen - Engineers find way to build a better battery ; Could be available in three years, it says here. The associated wiring, a battery man tells her, will need to be beefed up.
• Boston Globe - Clifford Atiyeh : MIT fast-charge batteries excite promise of quicker EVs ;
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson : Breakthrough battery can charge up in seconds ;
• Technology Review - Kevin Bullis : Ultra-High-Power Lithium-Ion Batteries ; Could run quick cars - or laser weapons, it says here.
• Register (UK) - Lewis Page: Superfast-charging batteries? Whoa there, MIT ; After composing the above opening remarks, The Tracker was relieved to come across this one. Page isn’t buying the proffered line. Melted wiring, etc. Plus, he reports, similar theoretical performance is already claimed for others in the lithium family of batteries - such as li-titanate ones. “All in all,” he writes, this is not “worthy of the attention it’s getting.”

Grist for the Mill: MIT Press Release ;

Pic: This is the material that MIT engineers say is the key ;

Other Battery News: A concept for immense, efficient batteries that could store enough solar energy for a city’s worth of overnight power? The Tracker found it fascinating after it came in the mail the other day. Technology Review - Kevin Bullis: Liquid Battery ;

-CP

Widely separated gushers of news - and press conferences - bring today two angles on the high waters likely to be coming. In Copenhagen at the big Int’l Scientific Congress on Climate Change (mentioned in yesterday’s post on ocean acidification) speakers provided their latest estimates of worldwide sea level rise in this century and beyond. The new numbers take account of recently-measured, rapid changes in Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets (The Copenhagen meeting also has reverberated with with multiple, dire warnings about climate warming in general). At the same time, a study commissioned by the state of California disclosed specifics on what a projected rise of about 1.4 meters (nearly five feet) - a bit higher than mean estimates discussed in Copenhagen - will mean to coastal wetlands, low-lying communities, harbors, and essentially to its map.

COPENHAGEN SEA LEVEL STORIES:

• Manila Business Mirror - Imelda V. Abaño : RP in deep danger of sea-level rise, scientists warn ; Smart lede - she says yes you’ve heard this before. But now it has “a more urgent tone..” with one study forecasting a rise of most likely one and perhaps two meters by 2100;
• Economist: A sinking feeling/Sea levels are rising twice as fast as had been thought ; Perhaps drowning in rising water does feel like sinking. The story’s angle is that this meeting sets a tone for the overtly political, big Copenhagen round, later this year, that will sculpt the regulatory frame of the post-Kyoto era.
• Australian - Leigh Dayton: Seas ‘rise faster than forecast’ because of climate change ; Dayton apparently did not attend, but manages to stitch together a pretty good, long-distance account of the basics.
• ClimateWire via New York Times - Jean-Marie Macabrey : Researchers: Sea Levels May Rise Faster Than Expected ; Very concise summary. Also interesting to see that NYTimes did not staff the meeting directly (apparently), but uses up this from a service, ClimateWire, maintained by the people who have long provided the trade newsletters and such of Energy & Environment Daily.
• ABC (Australia) Barbara Miller : Sea levels rising faster than thought;
• Christian Science Monitor - Eoin O’Carroll: Scientists: Sea-level rise worse than thought ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Copenhagen/Int’l Scientific Congress on Climate Change Press Release ;

CALIFORNIA SEA LEVEL STORIES: The news is that the Pacific Institute, a long established and well regarded non-profit water and climate analysis agency based in Oakland, released a study done under state contract;

• AP (via Long Beach Telegram) - Samantha Young : Warming linked to flooding at ports ;
• Bloomberg - Alex Morales : California Sea-Level Rise May Threaten $100 Billion of Property ; Neatly throws in some material from Copenhagen for context ;
• Orange County Register - Pat Brennan: Global warming could displace 110,000 on OC coast, report says ; This has one of the better explanations of the report’s provenance. And, no surprise, reader reactions are almost uniformly more or less like this example: “It is a total scam. There is no global warming….” plus jokes about Al Gore.
• San Jose Mercury News - Mike Taugher : San Francisco Bay vulnerable to rising waters;
• AP - Jason Dearen : Report: rising seas could cost CA more than $100B ;
• San Francisco Chronicle - Jane Kay : Ocean expected to rise 5 feet along coastlines ; like where else would it matter? Heavily illustrated piece with maps showing calculated inundation were it to happen instantaneously.
• Los Angeles Times - Margot Roosevelt : California panel urges ‘immediate action’ to protect against rising sea levels ; She includes an explanation that this is one of several state reports on warming’s peril, all from “dozens of world-class scientists and economists, many from the University of California and state research institutes…” ;

Grist for the Mill: Pacific Institute Press Release etc ;