These early, city-level efforts to mitigate atmospheric soot laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement in the United States. By the late 19th century, the palls of coal smoke hanging over industrial cities galvanized early civic reformers, who fought urban smoke pollution as an unsightly nuisance, an economic inefficiency, and a public health concern tied to respiratory illness and increased mortality ( 2, 3). Starting in the mid-19th century, cities within the US Manufacturing Belt-such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh-experienced sharp rises in atmospheric soot due to their reliance on regional supplies of highly volatile soft, bituminous coal for manufacturing, domestic heating, and railway transportation ( 2). These findings build toward a spatially dynamic emission inventory of black carbon based on direct environmental sampling.īlack carbon, the light-absorbing component of soot, is a complex carbonaceous aerosol that results from the incomplete combustion of organic matter, such as fossil fuels ( 1). Our findings suggest that current emission inventories based on predictive modeling underestimate levels of atmospheric black carbon for the early industrial era, suggesting that the contribution of black carbon to past climate forcing may also be underestimated. The precipitous drop in atmospheric black carbon at midcentury reflects policies promoting burning efficiency and fuel transitions rather than regulating emissions alone. Following this peak, black carbon levels were positively correlated with coal consumption through midcentury, after which they decoupled, with black carbon concentrations declining as consumption continued to rise. Our data show that black carbon levels within the region peaked during the first decade of the 20th century. Using photometric reflectance data of >1,300 bird specimens drawn from natural history collections, we track relative ambient concentrations of atmospheric black carbon between 18 within the US Manufacturing Belt, a region historically reliant on coal and dense with industry. Current estimates of black carbon emissions for the early industrial era have high uncertainty, however, because direct environmental sampling is sparse before the mid-1950s. More recently, black carbon has been identified as a major, ongoing contributor to anthropogenic climate change, thus making historical emission inventories of black carbon an essential tool for assessing past climate sensitivity and modeling future climate scenarios. Atmospheric black carbon has long been recognized as a public health and environmental concern.
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