Climate Change

Climate Change Possibilities

The topic of climate change and its cause are broad based and popular. And one of our expressions of cause appears to have gone almost unnoticed. The Earth is wrapped in a space blanket of mercury vapor! We all have experienced the effect of the water vapor in clouds keeping the Earth warm at night. What is the heat reflective capability of Hg vapor when compared with water vapor? The mercury burden in the troposphere is estamated to be over 5kt, how much heat can that reflect?

The global mercury reservoir that is circulating the Earth is very large, and additions are estimated to be several thousand metric tons annually. This reservoir has been growing from the start of the industrial age and is out of proportion for the health of the Earth.

According to the EPA technical fact-sheet on mercury "Its volatility accounts for atmospheric concentrations up to 4 times the level of contaminated soils in an area."

For many years we have been reading in the headlines about Earths polar regions warming up faster than the rest of the planet. The UNEP reports in The Global Atmospheric Mercury Assessment: Sources, Emissions and Transport. "Various chemical reactions can return mercury to the elemental form which can be readily re-emitted. By this process, mercury that has been deposited can be re-emitted and continue travelling through the atmosphere from source regions to receptor regions in a series of ‘hops’. This process is known as the grasshopper effect, allowing pollutants to travel farther than might be expected from their usual residence times in the air. One result of this transport is that mercury (like many other air pollutants) may be accumulated in the polar regions, where conditions may be less favourable for re-emission." They also have this to say about the polar region, "High levels of reactive gaseous mercury highlight the polar effect, where concentrations in the Arctic can on occasion be five to fifty times higher than levels measured in Europe and North America."

This is the Earths "Space Blanket". Wrap yourself in an emergency blanket and feel the heat that is reflected back to you. The heat reflecting effect of mercury vapor in our atmosphere apears to be a component of climate change. It is time that we look at the global mercury reservoir from a broader perspective.

"Be part of the future and clean it up."

Martin Lucas Butler