How Now Brown Cloud?

Brown clouds are not the sinister creation of a science fiction writer, but rather the name that atmospheric scientists have given to smog, soot and dirt clouds that obscure the Earth’s surface from space. Smog originates mainly from the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, but can also form naturally in some locations. Soot is found in the atmosphere as a result of wood or coal burning, or natural occurring forest fires. Some people explain these clouds to “pollution clouds,” but in truth these clouds are more complicated than that, sometimes being a result of man’s activities, but other times being wholly natural.

When you spend a lot of time looking at satellite images of the Earth as I do, you get used to certain features of the Earth looking a certain way. Sometimes, these features become obscured by a grey haze. Occasionally this grey haze becomes thicker and darker in color. This is what is referred to generally as a brown cloud. Brown clouds are common over India and Southeast Asia, especially in the late fall through early spring, where rapid industrialization has increased emissions from human activities.


The above figure, taken from NASA’s MODIS website, features Southeastern Asia. To the north of the image is Nepal and China, the mountainous terrain there is crisp and clearly brown in color. As you move south into India and Bengladesh, the surface becomes obscured by a grayish obscuration. The green of India and Bengladesh’s forests is barely visible. This is due to the presence of a so-called brown cloud, a cloud made of soot, smog and dust, most of which are due to human activities.

However these brown clouds are not only native to Asia, but can be found in the United States as well, as the image below shoes.


This satellite photograph, taken from NASA’s MODIS website, shows the Southeastern United States. Here a brown cloud is seen over Louisiana and Texas. The origin of this cloud, seen in the summer of 2004, were extensive forest fires in Southern Canada.

Scientists recently have been examining what exactly causes these brown clouds over Asia to form so regularly each year. Understanding this is important because these brown clouds can affect how much sunlight reaches the surface in these regions, affecting not only climate but crop growth. These clouds are also thought to interact with regular water clouds, changing the way the normal clouds reflect sunlight and how they produce rainfall.

The results of the scientists research are quite shocking, at least to me. The expectation was that a large portion of these brown clouds would come from fossil fuel combustion. The team of scientists report that around 2/3rds of the source material for the brown clouds come from biomass burning. In this region, biomass is used for home heating and cooking, along with burning of residual crops to produce fertilizer. This is an important finding, because it would allow for regional governments to address the issue of unclean home cooking and heating fuels, if they wanted to improve air quality.

When NIMBY meets Drill Baby Drill

What happens when an irresistible force meets and immovable object?

“Drill, Baby, Drill” is the Republican rally call for extensive exploration of continental shelves for additional oil and natural gas resources, and eventually construction of offshore platforms to extract these fossil fuels from the depths. “Drill, Baby, Drill” is gaining traction nationally with many conservative and moderate voters who would like America to become energy independent, or non-reliant upon foreign nations for our energy needs.

Take a peek at the crowd response at this year’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.


Certainly energy independence is a great goal for the United States to achieve in the next 10 years. Drilling for offshore oil is obviously popular with the American people. But also popular with the American people are clean, beautiful oceans. Citizens of coastal regions are also quite protective of their ocean views, sometimes voting down offshore windfarm proposals that could reduce their property values. Will voters change their support for offshore oil and gas drilling when it’s their backyard ocean and harbors that are being drilled in?

There is precedence for such a switch in support. Environmentally minded folks refer to this phenomena as NIMBY, or Not In My BackYard.

The Philadelphia Inquirer looks into the possibility of offshore drilling off the coast of New Jersey. The results of their inquiries suggest that local residents are not suffering from a case of NIMBY when it comes to something that could* affect gas prices.

A 62 percent majority of likely New Jersey voters polled this month by Quinnipiac University Polling Institute said they favored drilling in protected offshore areas.

An even higher percentage of Jersey Shore voters - 70 percent - supported lifting the ban, polling spokesman Pat Smith said. The poll released yesterday did not ask specifically about drilling off the New Jersey coast.

Look, I’m not here to argue the merits and flaws of offshore drilling**. All I’m trying to say here is that, people are really supportive of the idea, even those who would most likely be negatively affected by such activities. This strong sentiment, that of keeping gas prices as low as possible, regardless of the environmental costs is just something that people and politicians need to keep in mind.


* - You know it could affect gas prices, in like 10 years or so.

** - But just for the record, offshore drilling is in my opinion not worth the risk right now. We don’t yet know the environmental impacts of the construction of offshore oil rigs. We’ll have to invest a lot of resources into offshore exploration, to find the reserves. Then we will have to construct new infrastructure to extract the oil and natural gas. By the time we get a steady flow of oil and natural gas, it will be 10 years later, and oil prices will likely be outrageously high. Additionally, the amount of energy we get from such an endeavor will be very small compared to our consumption rate.

Additionally, if we do invest in offshore drilling infrastructure, we will be committing a tremendous amount of money into something that will probably only be viable for a short period of time. There is a limited amount of fossil fuels off the US coast, and it is not likely to meet our energy needs for a long duration of time. Instead, doesn’t it make sense to start investing in alternative energies, technology that will work for the US forever?

Alternative and Renewable Energies

Back at blogcentral today, working very hard on producing some utterly useless data (shown above). So far the past two days, 14 hours in the lab, zero chucks of useful data. I am told this is how the isotope cookie crumbles on a daily basis, so I had better get used to it.

Anyway, I wanted to discuss what exactly “alternative energy” and “renewable energy” means because I think the media often muddles the two expressions, and the definition is lost in the resulting fracas.

An alternative energy source is one that comes from a non-fossil fuel source.

A renewable energy source is one that the fuel or energy source is rejuvenated quicker by natural processes than we consume the fuel.

Let’s look at a few examples of energy sources and try to categorize them in terms of the definitions above.

Coal

Alternative: Coal is not an alternative fuel, as it is a fossil fuel.
Renewable: Coal is not renewable. Even though it is slowly regenerated, it is produced on a timescale much slower than we consume it.
Environmental Impact: Coal burning is a leading cause of emission of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, and nitrogen bearing compounds to the atmosphere. The process of mining coal is also quite damaging to the environment, and generally to human health.

Natural Gas and Oil

Alternative: Natural gas and oil are not an alternative fuels, as they are fossil fuel.
Renewable: Natural gas and oil are not renewable.
Environmental Impact: Natural gas burning and oil consumption are the leading cause of emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Burning of natural gas and oil produces also generally produces volatile organic compounds and releases nitrogen oxides to the atmosphere. The process of extraction is damaging to the environment, and is expected to become moreso when we extracting oil shale and tar for oil.

Nuclear Energy

Alternative: Nuclear energy is an alternative fuel since it does not consume fossil fuels.
Renewable: Nuclear energy is not renewable. Uranium and plutonium ore are a limited resource.
Environmental Impact: Nuclear waste is an obvious concern. Retrieval of uranium and plutonium for refinement by means of strip mining can be quite damaging to the environment. Accidental releases, contrary to public opinion, from nuclear power plants are not a legitimate concern given significant advances in nuclear technology over the past 30 to 40 years.

Biofuels

Alternative: Biofuels are alternative fuels as they are not fossil fuel derived. Ethanol produced from corn should be considered a fossil fuel as significant quantities of fossil fuels are required to produce it.
Renewable: The major draw of biofuels is that is renewable. To be truly renewable in the long run, sustainable farming practices must be developed.
Environmental Impact: Varies strongly from biofuel to biofuel. Biofuels include wood, ethanol from corn or sugarcane, manure and vegetable oils. Some are relatively low impact, others like corn based ethanol are environmentally irresponsible and cause significant harm.

Solar

Alternative: Yes. Solar power is an alternative to fossil fuel.
Renewable: Yes. So long as there is a sun, we have solar power available.
Environmental Impact: The major challenge with solar power is improving the technology of converting sunlight to useable energy. Short of conversion of natural terrain to solar farms, the impacts of solar technology on the environment is minimal.

Hydro-Electric

Alternative: Yes. Hydro-electric is an alternative to fossil fuel.
Renewable: Yes. So long as there is a rain and the tides, hydro-electric power available.
Environmental Impact: Varies from application to application. The use of hydro-electric dams can impact rivers and lakes. The use of tidal dams or tidal turbines is somewhat less damaging.

Wind

Alternative: Yes. Wind is an alternative to fossil fuel.
Renewable: Yes. So long as there is a sun creating heating thermal imbalances on the Earth, we have wind power available.
Environmental Impact: Wind power is the most promising alternative energy source because wind is abundant and cheap. The challenge is placing wind turbines in the appropriate location. Chris J brought up some interesting thoughts regarding the viability of wind turbines in an urban environment that I will address in a future post.

Hopefully that clears up the difference between an alternative energy source and a renewable energy source. Next time we’ll pick up with alternative energy production in urban in the New York environment. We’ll try to tackle the question, what are the challenges and opportunities associated with each type of energy?