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Again, I’m posting from blamy balmy* Coweta County, Georgia, not chilly Fairbanks—but for this post I thought I’d offer the current conditions up there as background for the content.
The caption for the picture reads:
Smoke billows out of downtown smokestacks on a cold early-February afternoon. Due to Fairbanks consistently failing air quality regulations, the Department of Transportation is funding a multi-million dollar study on local air pollution.» Air pollution concerns spark study, possible measures
(The headline and link in the above goes to the associated news article.)
At the temperatures Fairbanks tends to have during the winter, those towering plumes—which appear dark only when backlit as above (and the big plume is in fact directly in front of a sun already heavily filtered by the photographer’s equipment)—consist overwhelmingly of moisture condensation, not smoke. There are particulates embedded in the emissions, but mostly what comes out of these smokestacks is air that is so much warmer than the atmosphere, that it contains far more water vapor than the ambient outdoor temperature can support.
But of course it is better for Teh Narrative™ to mislead readers by calling it all “smoke.“
There’s a reason people up there refer to their local daily newspaper as the News-Minus.
*Had eye trouble this evening—though “blamy” does seem like it might be an appropriate adjective for Coweta County these days after all…
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