Air Pollution Even Worse Than We Thought

By Robert Lalasz

Air pollution is substantially harming every major ecosystem type in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States — according to a new report co-written by experts from The Nature Conservancy and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

And the report's co-authors say pollutants ranging from mercury to ground-level ozone are degrading the services nature provides us, too — resulting in smaller fish stocks, reduced agricultural production, and even a decline in honey bee populations.

"We have yet to fully understand all the impacts, but they're large," says Tim Tear, a Nature Conservancy scientist and co-author of the report. "The more we look, the more evidence we find, and the worse it seems to get."

But pollution deposition is neither adequately measured nor regulated, according to the report — which calls for new pollution limits and science-based policies to remedy this growing crisis.

Significant Environmental Problems in Air, Soil and Water

This report — based on a conference of 32 experts organized by the Conservancy and the Cary Institute — is the first effort to pull together all the research on how air pollution is affecting nature in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states.

It finds that nitrogen, acid deposition, mercury and ground-level ozone not only contaminate the air we breathe — they're entering our soils and waters, causing significant environmental issues:

• High levels of deposited mercury are having negative impacts on wildlife — from salamander species in the Appalachian Mountains to loons in the Adirondacks and bald eagles in Maine.
• Ground-level ozone reduces plants' ability to harness sunlight for growth, reducing forest and crop production throughout the eastern United States.
• Excess nitrogen — in part from air pollution — is harming waterways, fish and shellfish from Rhode Island's Narrangansett Bay to Long Island Sound to Chesapeake Bay.
• Nitrogen also decreases the disease resistance of trees, leaving them more vulnerable to pests and pathogens.
• Acid rain is making sensitive lakes and streams uninhabitable by fish in the mountains of the Northeast and the Southern Appalachians. On land, it leaches important nutrients from foliage and soil, reducing the productivity of some forest trees.

And the impact on the services nature provides humans is also significant — from decreased timber production in acidified forests to mercury levels so high they have prompted restrictions on freshwater fishing.

"Air pollution is most often pitched as directly impacting humans through respiratory problems," says Tear.

"We want this report to raise awareness of the direct and indirect impacts on nature — and because we depend on nature, those impacts also affect humans."

Read this Q&A with Tear and report co-author Gary Lovett of the Cary Institute for more on the impact of air pollution on the services nature provides humans.

'Critical Loads' for Air Pollution and Ecosystems

The report calls for key changes in the way the United States regulates air pollution and evaluates its effects:

• Better regulations: The United States needs to establish what the critical air pollution loads are for ecosystem health — the precise levels that cause negative effects on ecosystems — and use these loads to refocus and expand air pollution regulation to address ecosystem effects.

Europe has used critical loads for regulating air pollution for over a decade, and some U.S. agencies have already established critical loads for particular landscapes. But these initiatives need to be scaled up dramatically, according to the Cary Institute's Lovett.

“We need a new way of thinking about how to regulate air pollution to protect ecosystems,” says Lovett. “Critical loads provide a way of measuring pollution that is more relevant to wildlife and natural habitats.”

• Better monitoring: Current programs for monitoring air pollution and its effects are fragmented, underfunded and have serious gaps, according to the report. The authors maintain that the nation should develop a more integrated monitoring approach that includes air, water, forests, soils and wildlife.

"We can't get a sense of the impacts on ecosystems and biological diversity without this information," says Lovett.

Air Pollution Doesn't Respect Boundaries

“Everyone has a role to play,” Tear says. “Congress should direct the Environmental Protection Agency to develop and implement critical loads, while the EPA should use the best available science to establish these loading levels."

"Federal land management agencies and conservation organizations need to work together with research scientists," Tear adds. "They should offer their lands and waters to advance critical loads research.”

And people in other parts of the country shouldn't take comfort from the report's focus on an eastern U.S. region, says Lovett.

"Other regions of the United States such as the Rocky Mountains and California are also quite concerned about these effects in their backyards," says Lovett. "Air pollution doesn't recognize regional boundaries — we need a national solution."

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Texas to Tel Aviv

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club? You’d get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin? You’d get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric cars?

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

You’d have the start of an energy revolution.

The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.

Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP. He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars. He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel. On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi’s prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads.

Agassi’s plan, backed by Israel’s government, is to create a complete electric car “system” that will work much like a mobile-phone service “system,” only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes. Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel — as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed.

His company, Better Place, and its impressive team would run the smart grid that charges the cars and is also contracting for enough new solar energy from Israeli companies — 2 gigawatts over 10 years — to power the whole fleet. “Israel will have the world’s first virtual oilfield in the Negev Desert,” said Agassi. His first 500 electric cars, built by Renault, will hit Israel’s roads next year.

Agassi is a passionate salesman for his vision. He could sell camels to Saudi Arabia. “Today in Europe, you pay $600 a month for gasoline,” he explained to me. “We have an electric car that will cost you $600 a month” — with all the electric fuel you need and when you don’t want the car any longer, just give it back. No extra charges and no CO2 emissions.

His goal, said Agassi, is to make his electric car “so cheap, so trivial, that you won’t even think of buying a gasoline car.” Once that happens, he added, your oil addiction will be over forever. You’ll be “off heroin,” he says, and “addicted to milk.”

T. Boone Pickens is 80. He’s already made billions in oil. He was involved in some ugly mischief in funding the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry. But now he’s opting for a different legacy: breaking America’s oil habit by pushing for a massive buildup of wind power in the U.S. and converting our abundant natural gas supplies — now being used to make electricity — into transportation fuel to replace foreign oil in our cars, buses and trucks.

Pickens is motivated by American nationalism. Because of all the money we are shipping abroad to pay for our oil addiction, he says, “we are on the verge of losing our superpower status.” His vision is summed up on his Web site: “We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year ... I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.”

Pickens made clear to me over breakfast last week that he was tired of waiting for Washington to produce a serious energy plan. So his company, Mesa Power, is now building the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, where he’s spent $2 billion buying land and 700 wind turbines from General Electric — the largest single turbine order ever. The U.S. could secure 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind alone.

But Pickens knows he’s unique. Unless, he says, “Congress adopts clear, predictable policies” — with long-term tax incentives and infrastructure — so thousands of investors can jump into clean power, we’ll never get the scale we need to break our addiction. For a year, Senate Republicans have been blocking such incentives for wind and solar energy. They vote again next week.

If only we had a Congress and president who, instead of chasing crazy schemes like offshore drilling and releasing oil from our strategic reserve, just sat down with Boone and Shai and asked one question: “What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?” Then just do it, and get out of the way.

Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.

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Young Galaxies Have Surprisingly Strong Magnetic Fields: Contradicts Popular Theories

What equates to the magnetic field of perigee galaxies for quasars that are billions of light years away (large: "whirlpool" galaxy; small: quasar OC-65)? (Credit: Photo: www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de)

The origin of magnetic fields in galaxies is still a mystery to astronomers. Popular theories suggest continual strengthening over billions of years. The latest results from Simon Lilly’s group, however, contradict this assumption and reveal that young galaxies also have strong magnetic fields.

“There is an astronomer joke that goes ‘to understand the universe, we examine galaxies for radiation, gases, temperatures, chemical constitution and much more. Anything we can’t explain after that we attribute to the magnetic fields’”, explains Simon Lilly, Professor at the Institute of Astronomy at ETH Zurich. The creations of the magnetic fields in galaxies remain a badly researched mystery. Until now, it was deduced that galaxies which formed after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago had very weak magnetic fields that then proceeded to grow exponentially in strength over several billions of years. At least that is what the dynamo theory (see box), which is often used to explain the development of magnetic fields, conveys.

Statistical approach for exact proof

In the journal Nature, Martin Bernet, Francesco Miniati and Simon Lilly probed into the topic of magnetic fields in young galaxies. The results are astonishing: Contrary to the popular dynamo explanatory model, the team was able to prove that even very young galaxies have a strong magnetic field on the basis of a statistical analysis of existing and new astronomical data. Technically speaking, determining the strength of magnetic fields that are many billions of light years from Earth is difficult and extremely time-consuming. This is probably one reason why the field has hardly been researched.

Using the Faraday Rotation (FR) as the parameter, however, the strength of a magnetic field can be deduced from the polarization of the light in the radio field. If linearly polarized light radiates through a magnetized gas cloud, the polarization level of the light rotates. The rotation of the polarization level is all the larger the stronger the magnetic field is. This effect was first described by Michael Faraday in 1845. The researchers used quasars as radiation sources to measure the magnetic fields in the galaxies in question. These are extremely luminous objects whose radiation can in all likelihood be explained through the existence of supermassive black holes at the heart of the galaxies.

Observations in Chile

For their analyses, the scientists around Lilly had recourse to FR quasar measurements conducted by the astronomer Philipp Kronberg from the University of Toronto. Martin Bernet, a PhD student of Lilly’s and Miniati’s, studied the relationship between the Faraday Rotation and the redshift of the quasars’ light for 300 of these FR measurements. In astronomy, the redshift is used to determine the age and distance of galaxies.

The researchers developed a thesis from the statistical distribution of values obtained: “The stronger, observed rotation of the quasar light with a higher redshift is on a longer path and can be ascribed to the subsequently greater probability of coming into contact with other galaxies”. To verify this thesis, the astronomers selected 76 quasars from the original Kronberg sample and, using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, observed how many magnesium absorption lines are contained in quasar spectra. We know from earlier studies that almost every galaxy along a quasar’s line of sight (path of the light between quasar and telescope) displays magnesium absorption.

The researchers were thus able to determine how many galaxies there are between ours and the quasar and ascertain the galaxies’ magnetic field by comparing the FR values of the line of sight with and without magnesium absorption. For the magnetic fields of the galaxies, the calculations yielded a value of approximately 10 μGauss, in other words a field that is about a million times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field. This more or less corresponds to the values of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The results enabled the researchers to prove that young, distant galaxies also have a strong, large-scale magnetic field.

This at a time when the universe was only a third as old as it is today. The realization contradicts the popular dynamo theory, according to which magnetic fields build themselves up exponentially over billions of light years through constant reinforcement. “A galaxy’s magnetic field has to develop much more rapidly during its evolution than we previously assumed. A lasting equilibrium then appears at a relatively early stage”, explains Lilly.

Magnetic fields slip into the consciousness of astronomers

The scientific community has had doubts about the dynamo theory for some time. Kronberg also repeatedly expressed misgivings with regard to the existing model during his thirty-year FR measurements. The proof, however, has been lacking until now. According to Lilly, the latest issue of “Nature” above all reveals the high quality of the VLT measurements and the clear response to the original question that is somewhat rare for astronomy.

“I could imagine that the methodology we recently introduced and the combination of Faraday Rotation measurements and data from telescopes like the VLT might open a new window into the distant universe”, Lilly speculates.

As the authors point out in the conclusion of the “Nature” article, the results should also lead to the reconsideration of the existing astronomical practice, where the magnetic fields are often ignored. Lilly and his team will continue to peer out of the window that has just opened and probe into the secrets of the magnetic fields. The researchers have already been granted additional observation time with the telescope. The next steps towards a more comprehensive understanding of the “mystery of the magnetic field” will be to increase the quasar sample and localize the magnetic fields precisely in the galaxies.

The Dynamo Theory

A dynamo converts mechanical energy into magnetic energy. The dynamo theory is an attempt at explaining the mechanism with which bodies in the sky can develop a magnetic field. In astronomical objects like planets, stars or galaxies, the dynamo effect occurs if there are turbulent currents and a non-uniform (differential) rotation prevails. This so-called alpha-omega dynamo can generate large-scale magnetic fields – even if the initial field was chaotic.

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