Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Rudy Sulgan)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here. 

Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.

A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.

Scientists are uncovering various ways that air pollution can interfere with the ability of insects to pollinate plants. (credit: Utah.gov)

In the summers of 2018 and 2019, ecologist James Ryalls and his colleagues would go out to a field near Reading in southern England to stare at the insects buzzing around black mustard plants. Each time a bee, hoverfly, moth, butterfly, or other insect tried to get at the pollen or nectar in the small yellow flowers, they’d make a note.

It was part of an unusual experiment. Some patches of mustard plants were surrounded by pipes that released ozone and nitrogen oxides—polluting gases produced around power plants and conventional cars. Other plots had pipes releasing normal air.

The results startled the scientists. Plants smothered by pollutants were visited by up to 70 percent fewer insects overall, and their flowers received 90 percent fewer visits compared with those in unpolluted plots. The concentrations of pollutants were well below what US regulators consider safe. “We didn’t expect it to be quite as dramatic as that,” says study coauthor Robbie Girling, an entomologist at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and a visiting professor at the University of Reading.

Enlarge / Light painting reveals a cloud of particulates on Airport Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PM2.5 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter). (credit: Robin Price)

Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Air pollution is the leading global environmental risk factor," said co-author Francis Pope, an environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who spearheaded the Air of the Anthropocene project with artist Robin Price. "[The project] creates spaces and places for discussions about air pollution, using art as a proxy to communicate and create dialogues about the issues associated with air pollution. By painting with light to create impactful images, we provide people with an easy-to-understand way of comparing air pollution in different contexts—making something that was largely invisible visible."

Light painting has been around since 1889, when Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny, who were investigating the use of photography as a scientific tool to study biological motion, created the first known light painting called Pathological Walk From in Front. In 1914, Frank and Lillian Mollier Gilbreth tracked the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers using light painting techniques, and in 1935, Man Ray "signed" his Space Writing series with a penlight—a private joke that wasn't discovered until 74 years later by photographer/historian Ellen Carey in 2009.