Tag: Environmental Science

Taking a hike? Remember, it’s deer tick season

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Newswise — KINGSTON, R.I. – Sept. 30, 2022 – If you’re a hiker or just love the outdoors, fall is probably your favorite season. Temperatures are cooler but still warm enough, days are still long, and for the most part, bugs are less of a pest.

But as you get ready to head out, University of Rhode Island entomologist Tom Mather wants you to know something: This is also the season for adult blacklegged ticks, or deer ticks. They’re exploding on the scene and more than 50% carry the germ for Lyme disease. But luckily, unlike in the tick’s nymph stage, the adults are large enough to see.

“What people need to remember is there’s a seasonality to most of nature, including ticks,” says Mather, director of the Center for Vector-Borne Disease and the TickEncounter Resource Center. “Every type of tick has a slightly different season. In this case – adult blacklegged ticks – their season is October and November. That’s when they first come out. They’re at their freshest and their hungriest.”

Mather, aka the TickGuy, is a veteran of almost four decades of hunting and researching ticks, and educating and helping the public protect itself from the blood suckers. But, he says, many people mistakenly think tick season ends when fall hits.

“Most people are quite surprised,” he says. “You could do a survey: Most people think ticks die when it gets cold. It’s a surprise that October and November are actually the fifth and sixth ‘tickiest’ months of the year.”

The tick situation in Rhode Island and New England this year has been moderate, Mather says. Summer’s drought probably curtailed nymph-stage ticks and may have prevented many of them from getting the blood meal ticks need at each stage of their lifecycle (larva, nymph and adult).

“That could mean there will be fewer adult stage ticks. But we’ve been surprised in the past,” he says. “I struggled at many of my regular sites to find nymphs this year. But there were a few sites, especially along the south coast, that had an exceptional number of nymph ticks.”

Adult blacklegged ticks are just now starting to become active in Rhode Island, in just the past week, crowdsourced reports of adult deer ticks have come from Ontario, Vermont, Massachusetts and West Virginia, according to data collected from the TickEncounter’s TickSpotters program. TickSpotters allows people from all over to upload photos of ticks that they’ve picked off themselves or their pets and get a quick tick ID check and a risk assessment, while the crowdsourced information provides data to assess tick population trends.

“The first one we got through TickSpotters was Sept. 23 from way up in Vermont,” Mather says. “We haven’t seen any in Rhode Island just yet, but I’m sure they’ll start coming any day now.”

While there are about nine species of ticks encountered in Rhode Island, and across the U.S., the most prevalent are blacklegged ticks (or deer ticks), lone star ticks and American dog ticks. Their lifecycles overlap somewhat, with stages of each most active at different times.

For example, May, the “tickiest” month of the year, has the greatest diversity of ticks. Adult deer ticks that didn’t feed in the fall may still be active, along with deer tick nymphs, and adult dog ticks and lone star ticks being most active. Lone star tick nymphs are also around in May. But their seasons come to an end. Late August and September are pretty quiet when it comes to ticks, and that lulls people into thinking tick “season” is over, Mather says.

But then–WHAM. By October, it’s mainly adult blacklegged ticks that people have to worry about. About 85% of TickSpotters’ submissions from around the country during October and November are for adult blacklegged ticks.

And those adult deer ticks you encounter in your trek through the woods started their lifecycle in spring of 2021. The larvae hatched that June – from eggs laid by adult ticks that fed the previous fall and that survived through the winter. After being active in July and August, the larvae detached from their host, made it through the winter and became nymphs this past spring.

Nymphs fed in May, June or July, detached, and through a process called molting, transformed into this fall’s adults. One out of two (or more) adult stage deer ticks carry the germ for Lyme disease – compared with about one in four of the nymph-stage deer ticks earlier in the year. The reason is, the adult stage has had two opportunities to feed and pick up the germs for Lyme from rodents, mainly white-footed mice. They can also pick up germs for babesiosis, anaplasmosis, a relapsing fever disease, and Powassan virus.

Adult blacklegged ticks will be active this fall until the temperature stays consistently cold – not disappearing at the first hard frost. The first frost usually comes between Oct. 10 and 20, says Mather, and after that the numbers of adult ticks actually soar until about Thanksgiving.

“By then, it’s getting routinely cold enough to keep them from being active,” he adds. “It has to be sustainably cold because if it is below freezing overnight but 40 degrees the next day, these ticks will be out.”

Until the cold weather sets in to stay, the center’s TickSmart webpage has numerous ways to help you and your pet stay safe from ticks – including how to prepare to go out into nature, what to do after to check for ticks, and how to remove them.

Along with the website, TickEncounter is taking prevention to the woods to give you on-the-spot tips, or “just-in-time” learning, as Mather calls it. Starting in the summer, about 400 signs – “Warning: Tick Habitat” – have been distributed and posted at trailheads. Signs have gone up at Rhode Island Land Trust trails and in communities such as North Kingstown and South Kingstown.

The signs have a QR code to give people venturing into nature immediate information – such as three things they can do right there at the trailhead to reduce their chances of bringing home a tick. (There are also stickers being distributed that provide a QR code with tips to protect your pets.)

“You can have tick expert advice ‘just in time’ telling you exactly what you probably need to know right now – if you just scan the code,” Mather says.

Get more information about TickEncounter’s newest campaign and “Be Ready For Ticks” when you step outside this fall.

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University of Rhode Island

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October 7, 2022
Climate change does not cause hurricanes, but it is very likely climate change caused Hurricane Ian to be more destructive

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While towns across Florida and the Carolinas are cleaning up in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian and the death toll climbs, several high-profile climate change skeptics are questioning the connection between the hurricane and human-caused climate change.

“Blaming any one individual hurricane on man-made climate change is just the absolute height of absurdity,” tweeted conservative pundit Matt Walsh, in a post that was shared over 20,000 times. In another tweet posted on October 3rd, climate skeptic Peter Clack (whose claim has been the subject of a previous fact check) says, “A hurricane is not climate change. Nor is rainfall, storms or winter snow. They are all just the the weather. This concept of weather has been hijacked by a global warming frenzy, that has been relentless for 33 years. We must see a return to common sense.”

Scientists concede that any direct links between climate change and one weather event are difficult to prove. However, the consensus is that these extreme weather events are being exacerbated by climate change, making them more intense. Therefore, this claim is rated “half true.”

“It is true that climate change does not cause hurricanes,” says Andrew Dessler, director of Texas Center for Climate Studies and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, “However, we can say with very high confidence that the hurricane was more destructive due to climate change.”

Hurricane Ian dumped an enormous amount of rain on parts of Florida. Radar estimates and ground observation rainfall shows well-over one foot of rain fell in just 12-24 hours across a swath of the region. In some of the hardest-hit areas such as Placida and Lake Wales, this exceeds the rainfall rates for 1-in-1,000 year flood events, according to NOAA data.

“We are 100% sure that the storm surge was more damaging because it was riding on a higher sea level,” adds Dessler, “We are very confident that global warming is also causing more rainfall from hurricanes because warmer air holds more water. Finally, we have some confidence that climate change is increasing the intensity of hurricanes, so this hurricane may have had stronger winds than it would otherwise have had.”

“You need to look at trends,” warns Kim Prather, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry at University of California, San Diego. “And there is definitely an increase in the number of major weather related disasters occurring over recent decades.”

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October 7, 2022
Climate change does not cause hurricanes, but it is very likely climate change caused Hurricane Ian to be more destructive

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While towns across Florida and the Carolinas are cleaning up in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian and the death toll climbs, several high-profile climate change skeptics are questioning the connection between the hurricane and human-caused climate change.

“Blaming any one individual hurricane on man-made climate change is just the absolute height of absurdity,” tweeted conservative pundit Matt Walsh, in a post that was shared over 20,000 times. In another tweet posted on October 3rd, climate skeptic Peter Clack (whose claim has been the subject of a previous fact check) says, “A hurricane is not climate change. Nor is rainfall, storms or winter snow. They are all just the the weather. This concept of weather has been hijacked by a global warming frenzy, that has been relentless for 33 years. We must see a return to common sense.”

Scientists concede that any direct links between climate change and one weather event are difficult to prove. However, the consensus is that these extreme weather events are being exacerbated by climate change, making them more intense. Therefore, this claim is rated “half true.”

“It is true that climate change does not cause hurricanes,” says Andrew Dessler, director of Texas Center for Climate Studies and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, “However, we can say with very high confidence that the hurricane was more destructive due to climate change.”

Hurricane Ian dumped an enormous amount of rain on parts of Florida. Radar estimates and ground observation rainfall shows well-over one foot of rain fell in just 12-24 hours across a swath of the region. In some of the hardest-hit areas such as Placida and Lake Wales, this exceeds the rainfall rates for 1-in-1,000 year flood events, according to NOAA data.

“We are 100% sure that the storm surge was more damaging because it was riding on a higher sea level,” adds Dessler, “We are very confident that global warming is also causing more rainfall from hurricanes because warmer air holds more water. Finally, we have some confidence that climate change is increasing the intensity of hurricanes, so this hurricane may have had stronger winds than it would otherwise have had.”

“You need to look at trends,” warns Kim Prather, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry at University of California, San Diego. “And there is definitely an increase in the number of major weather related disasters occurring over recent decades.”

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October 7, 2022
Police: Ex-grad student kills Arizona professor on campus

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TUCSON, Ariz. — The University of Arizona has released the name of a professor who authorities said was fatally shot on campus by a former graduate student.

University President Robert Robbins identified the victim late Wednesday as Thomas Meixner, who had headed the school’s Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences.

“This incident is a deep shock to our community, and it is a tragedy,” Robbins said in a statement. “I have no words that can undo it, but I grieve with you for the loss, and I am pained especially for Tom’s family members, colleagues and students.”

Police said Meixner was shot Wednesday afternoon inside the Harshbarger Building, which houses the hydrology department.

Meixner was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A few hours after the shooting, state troopers stopped a former graduate student, 46-year-old Murad Dervish, in a van about 120 miles (193 kilometers) northwest of the Tucson campus, university Police Chief Paula Balafas said during a news conference.

Dervish was being held at the Pima County jail awaiting his initial court appearance. It wasn’t immediately clear what charges he might be face or whether he has a lawyer yet who could speak on his behalf.

According to campus police, a female called 911 at around 2 p.m. Wednesday asking for police to escort a former student out of the Harshbarger Building. Balafas said someone recognized Dervish “and knew that he was not allowed inside the building,” although Balafas didn’t explain why.

Officers were on their way to the building when they received reports that a man shot and wounded someone before fleeing, Balafas said.

The building is near the university bookstore and student union, and campus alerts instructed people to avoid the area, which was under lockdown.

Classes, activities and other campus events were canceled for the rest of the day. Classes resumed on Thursday, but Balafas said the building where the shooting happened might remain closed.

When asked how well Dervish and Meixner knew one another, Balafas said she didn’t know.

Meixner earned a doctorate in hydrology and water resources from the university in 1999 and joined the faculty in 2005 before becoming the department head in 2019. He was considered an expert on desert water issues.

Various faculty members and former students took to social media to praise Meixner as a kind and brilliant colleague.

Karletta Chief, director of the university’s Indigenous Resilience Center, said she met Meixner when she was a graduate student in 2001 and he was new to the faculty. While she was not one of his students, her research in hydrology led to frequent collaborations. The last time she saw Meixner, who was a big supporter of Native American and indigenous communities researching water issues, was a week ago at a seminar his department co-sponsored.

Chief said she emailed Meixner and several others in the hydrology department after the shooting, and that she was devastated to learn he was the one who had been shot.

“It’s just unimaginable that anybody would have any direct anger toward him. He was completely the opposite of that. He was just so kind and positive and always wanting to help,” said Chief, who noted that Meixner never mentioned to her if there had been any trouble with a current or former student.

Meixner was also generous outside of campus, Chief said. He once gave money for a marathon that she ran to benefit the Lymphoma Society.

“He shared that he was thankful for me doing this run and he was a cancer survivor,” she said.

It was 20 years ago this month that a disgruntled University of Arizona nursing student shot and killed three nursing professors before taking his own life.

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October 6, 2022
Climate change made summer drought 20 times more likely

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Drought that stretched across three continents this summer — drying out large parts of Europe, the United States and China — was made 20 times more likely by climate change, according to a new study.

Drought dried up major rivers, destroyed crops, sparked wildfire, threatened aquatic species and led to water restrictions in Europe. It struck places already plagued by drying in the U.S., like the West, but also places where drought is more rare, like the Northeast. China also just had its driest summer in 60 years, leaving its famous Yangtze river half its normal width.

Researchers from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists from around the world who study the link between extreme weather and climate change, say this type of drought would only happen once every 400 years across the Northern Hemisphere if not for human-caused climate change. Now they expect these conditions to repeat every 20 years, given how much the climate has warmed.

Ecological disasters like the widespread drought and then massive flooding in Pakistan, are the “fingerprints of climate change,” Maarten van Aalst, a climate scientist at Columbia University and study co-author, said.

“The impacts are very clear to people and are hitting hard,” he said, “not just in poor countries, like the flooding Pakistan …. but also in some of the richest parts of the world, like western central Europe.”

To figure out the influence of climate change on drying in the Northern Hemisphere, scientists analyzed weather data, computer simulations and soil moisture throughout the regions, excluding tropical areas. They found that climate change made dry soil conditions much more likely over the last several months.

This analysis was done using the warming the climate has already experienced so far, 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit), but climate scientists have warned the climate will get warmer, and the authors of the study accounted for that.

With an additional 0.8 degrees C degrees warming, this type of drought will happen once every 10 years in western Central Europe and every year throughout the Northern Hemisphere, said Dominik Schumacher, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland.

“We’re seeing these compounding and cascading effect across sectors and across regions,” van Aalst said. “One way to reduce those impacts (is) to reduce emissions.”

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Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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October 5, 2022
195 ways to help California’s painted ladies

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Newswise — By documenting hundreds of new nectar plants for painted ladies, scientists have renewed hope these charismatic butterflies may prove resilient to climate change.

Every spring, swarms of the colorful butterflies can be spotted in Southern California as they make their way from western Mexico to the Pacific Northwest to breed. Some years, the number of migrating butterflies is in the millions.

Additionally, California is home to resident painted lady populations that require food sources year-round.

Though they are a major North American butterfly species, there is a lack of baseline data to quantify a decline in painted ladies. However, scientists believe they are being negatively affected by hotter, drier weather and habitat loss.

“The lack of rainfall in Southern California likely impacts the butterflies’ ability to move through the state, potentially decreasing nectar sources and causing them to die without reproducing,” said Jolene Saldivar, UC Riverside ecologist who led this effort to identify new painted lady nectar plants.

“There’s so much to be learned about these butterflies before drought and climate change damage them irreparably,” Saldivar said. This study, which identifies 195 new nectar plants for the species, is now published in the journal Environmental Entomology.

To obtain this result, the UCR team sorted through more than 10,000 images of painted ladies in California shrublands, supplied by community scientists through the iNaturalist website. Any images in which the butterflies did not have mouth parts extended and were not obviously feeding were omitted from analysis, as were any images of caterpillars.

The newly discovered nectar sources may offer Southern California gardeners wanting to support the species a wide range of options.

“Much of what we identified could responsibly be planted during a drought,” said Erin Wilson-Rankin, study co-author and UCR associate professor of entomology.

Of the top 10 most frequently observed plant species, seven are native to California. These include yellow-flowered rubber rabbitbrush, blue wild hyacinth, common fiddleneck, Fremont’s pincushion, black sage, wild heliotrope and desert lavender, which belongs to the mint family.

These butterflies also readily feed on showy ornamental plants common to California landscaping, such as lantana, butterfly bush and rosemary, as well as flowering weeds.

“It’s an uber generalist insect, not picky at all,” Saldivar said.

Painted lady caterpillars consume plants, but they are not known to eat any agriculturally important species, nor are they known spreaders of any illness. They serve as good sources of prey for insects, spiders, birds, wasps and reptiles, and mature butterflies can pollinate some of the many plants they visit.

“It might be getting tougher for painted ladies in some places, but these butterflies will feed on what flowers are available — even a few plants in a window box could help them,” Wilson-Rankin said.

Saldivar says she believes the results of this paper may encourage community scientists, whose contributions to knowledge should be celebrated and promoted.

“Adding a photo and a little information to a community science website or through an app on your smartphone might seem minor, but in the big picture, it helps inform us about ecological processes we’d otherwise be very challenged to learn about,” Saldivar said.

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University of California, Riverside

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October 5, 2022
Marine phytoplankton gets by with a little help from its bacteria friends

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Newswise — A phytoplankton almost as old as Earth — about 3 billion years compared to the planet’s 4.5 billion years — still holds secrets, including how it can survive starvation in the most nutrient-deficient oceans. Synechococcus is the most geographically diverse of three phytoplankton species contributing a quarter of the oceans’ primary production, appearing in both frigid polar waters and warm tropical seas.

Now, researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), may have discovered who to thank for the phytoplankton’s persistent existence: heterotrophic bacteria.

In a series of multi-year experiments, the team found that Synechococcus and the bacteria that feed on them may have an inherent tendency toward mutualism and will undergo significant changes to encourage each other’s survival. The marine algae Synechococcus and its associated heterotrophic bacterial community have an inseparable close relationship.

Their findings were published on Sept. 30 in Science Advances.

Previous studies include one in which the phytoplankton and its bacterial community thrived for more than two years without any external nutrient support. According to Prof. ZHANG Yongyu from QIBEBT, these results hint at microbial interactions that may sustain long-term Synechococcus growth, but only in controlled and consistent experimental circumstances.

However, unlike laboratory culture systems, the ocean is not static and experiences changes in environmental factors such as nutrients. “This study was carried out to understand how changes in environmental factors, such as the availability of external nutrients, will influence the mutualistic relationship between the Synechococcus and heterotrophic bacterial community,” said corresponding author Prof. ZHANG.

Mimicking the change in marine environment, the researchers supplied sterile inorganic nutrients to the established mutualistic coculture of Synechococcus and a diverse bacterial community from their previous study. The two-year-old stable and mutually beneficial relationship buckled but did not break.

“Our findings suggest that the availability of external nutrient sources disrupts the established mutualism, leading to the collapse of Synechococcus health,” said co-first author Shailesh Nair, postdoctoral scholar at QIBEBT. “However, once the external nutrients were exhausted, over the next 450 days, Synechococcus and heterotrophic bacteria gradually re-established their metabolic mutualism under long-term coexistence that revived Synechococcus health.”

Through genetic analysis and tracing the nitrogen in the system, the researchers determined that the bacteria facilitated nitrogen fixation, converting nitrogen for use in buoying the phytoplankton, which triggered the re-established mutualism.

“During the process, bacterial community structure and functions underwent tremendous adjustments to achieve the driving effect, and the bacteria’s cogeneration of nitrogen, phosphorus, iron and vitamin B12 sustained Synechococcus‘s prolonged healthy growth,” said co-first author ZHANG Zenghu, associate professor at QIBEBT.

These findings suggest that Synechococcus and heterotrophic bacteria may have an inherent tendency towards mutualism, which can be re-established after environmental interference. This natural, recurrent trait of Synechococcus and heterotrophic bacteria may exhibit their co-evolutionary adaptations in nutrient-deficient environments for survival.

While the researchers said they believe this study answered the longstanding question about the tenacity of Synechococcus, they now have several more questions they plan to answer.

“Does this inherent mutualistic relationship apply to other algae as well?” ZHANG Yongyu asked. “Can we boost algal growth by artificially constructing algal-friendly microbial communities? The potential regulation of algae-bacteria interactions may offer a novel way to increase algae-driven marine carbon sequestration.”

The study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the CAS Center for Ocean Mega-Science.

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Chinese Academy of Sciences

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September 30, 2022
Wind turbines recoup the energy required to build them within a year of normal operation

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There may be two sides to the debate about certain aspects of wind power, but the amount of oil they use is not one of them.

Despite the numbers, memes continue to make the rounds on social media claiming the technology is worthless because of the costs to produce them, and the oil required to lubricate its gears.

For example, one Twitter post reads, “the turbine has to spin continually [sic] for 7 years just to replace the energy it took to manufacture.” See other similar posts here, here and here.

The fact is that wind turbines recoup the energy required to build them within a year of normal operation, according to researchers, earning these claims a rating of False.

Jack Brouwer is a professor of mechanical & aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the director of UCI’s Advanced Power and Energy Program and the National Fuel Cell Research Center.

I refute the claim that “wind power is inefficient and unnecessarily expensive.” Data regarding wind power costs has been published by many organizations, for example by the International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA) as presented below, which show that wind power costs have been dropping very significantly in the last decade and are becoming competitive with fossil fuel combustion power generation prices on an energy basis (note current prices for onshore wind less than $0.05/kWh and for offshore wind less than $0.10/kWh). And these prices are likely to continue to decline into the future as the market size and turbine sizes continue to increase. Regarding the inefficiency claim, wind turbines can convert wind energy into electricity at efficiencies in the range of 20-40%, but efficiency is an inconsequential metric that should not be used to determine the value of wind power since the input wind energy is renewable and available at zero cost, which is very different from the efficiency metric as applied to fuel generation for which fuel must be purchased.

Stephen C. Nolet, Principal Engineer and Senior Director, Innovation & Technology at TPI Composites, Inc. has this to say…

There are “notionally” many studies that have offered different conclusions (depending on the bias of the author). However, the consistent response I have seen which always contains a range of time (based upon turbine and siting conditions) report that the embodied energy of the installed turbine (which includes the entire energies in materials, transportation, erection and projected O&M over the life of the turbine) is returned in operation between 4 – 7 mo (120 to ~200 days).

Mark Bolinger, an engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has this to add…

“With proper maintenance, wind turbines should be expected to operate for 20 years or longer (industry projections these days are more like 30 years), which means that over their lifetime, wind turbines repay their energy debt many times over.”

“Wind is one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation that exists today.”

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Newswise

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September 16, 2022
Herschel Walker’s claim on how China’s “bad air” would move over to America is grossly inaccurate

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At a campaign event in Georgia, Herschel Walker, the former NFL star who is running for Senate and endorsed by President Trump, shared his thoughts on the “Green New Deal” and efforts to curb climate change with government policy. Walker suggested that U.S. climate efforts were pointless because “China’s bad air” would simply move over into American “air space.”

“We in America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world,” Walker begins at about the 24 mark in the video of his speech. Under the Green New Deal, he said, the U.S would spend “millions of billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. … Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.”

“So what we’re doing is just spending money,” he continued. “Until these other countries can get on board and clean what they got up, it ain’t going to help us to start cleaning our stuff up. We’re already doing it the right way.”

We find nearly every aspect of this claim to be completely inaccurate. Walker’s description of how air circulates around the world is not correct, nor is the simplification of his assessment of “clean air” and “bad air.” The United States does not actively “clean” air now or under the proposed “Green New Deal.” The “Green New Deal” is a nonbinding resolution introduced in Congress in 2019 that lays out a broad vision for how the country might tackle climate change over the next decade in order to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. It didn’t pass the Senate vote. The Green New Deal does not address traditional air pollutants nor does it propose to spend “millions of billions of dollars cleaning our good air up.” Facts on the “Green Neal Deal” can be read here.

“Bad” air does not take over “good” air or vice versa. Yes, some forms of air pollution can travel to other places. Near-surface pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, can be lofted to high altitudes where strong winds can transport high concentrations across oceans to other continents. However, greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, are responsible for climate change. These greenhouse gasses accumulate in the Earth’s atmosphere on a global scale as a result of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, which traps heat and warms the entire planet. Also, to suggest curbing pollutants from its local source is pointless because some other locality’s pollutants will take over is missing the point. These harmful air pollutants affect local residents the most. Read more about the harmful effects of air pollution here, here and here.

As reported by Jessica McDonald at Factcheck.org

“Each of these gases can remain in the atmosphere for different amounts of time, ranging from a few years to thousands of years,” the Environmental Protection Agency has explained. “All of these gases remain in the atmosphere long enough to become well mixed, meaning that the amount that is measured in the atmosphere is roughly the same all over the world, regardless of the source of the emissions.”

“There can be enhanced concentrations near point sources and urban areas, but the levels of atmospheric CO2 over the US aren’t drastically different than over China,” Davis said in an email, referring to carbon dioxide. He noted that in April 2020, carbon dioxide levels over China and the U.S were within three to four parts per million of each other.

In other words, there is no American “good air” or Chinese “bad air.” When it comes to greenhouse gases, everyone ultimately shares the “air” — and the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is increasing. This is raising the global average temperature, which is also causing other effects, such as sea level rise, ice melt and more extreme weather.

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July 22, 2022