Pollution Causes Lightning to Strike - God Not Implicated

Posted by at Dec 3rd, 2008 in Climate Change

Filed under: News , Climate Change Sure, Mondays can be rough, but in generally it’s getting over “Hump Day” on Wednesday that (supposedly) gives most people trouble. And now it looks like you have one more thing to fret over: getting struck by lightning! Thomas Bell, from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, did a study of lightning strikes using data from the National Lightning Detection Network (the existence of which triggered several minutes of me imagining cool jobs like “Lightning Counter” and “Lightning Strike Data Organizer”). Bell found that there are between 10 more strikes on Wednesdays and Thursday than on the weekend. He saw this pattern in Southeastern states, mainly in the summer. He hypothesizes that pollution from trucks is causing the spike in strikes. There are more trucks on the road in the middle of the week, and the dirty diesel emissions send particles into the air, effectively seeding the clouds. Combined with summer weather patterns, this creates more storms, and BAM! innocent trees, houses and people get struck by a bolt from the heavens. So basically we could save lives — and get nicer summer weather — by walking to the farmers market instead of having smoked salmon trucked across the country. See? It’s all connected. Weather, driving, carbon footprints, pollution and crummy Wednesdays. Gallery: Lightning Strikes Around the World Pollution Causes Lightning to Strike - God Not Implicated originally appeared on Green Daily on Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:59:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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