Pigeons recruited for air monitoring adventure

I’m having a hard time deciding if this is ingenuous, ridiculous, or just amusing. Apparently some people are planning to strap air monitoring backpacks onto pigeons in San Jose California, and then turn them loose in the skies to help monitor the air pollution.
Okay, I’ve decided. This is ridiculous. It doesn’t pass the “sanity” test. Are you really going to get any kind of decent data from a flock of pigeons? Don’t they generally stay very close to the ground? Isn’t 20 an incredibly small number for an area the size of San Jose?
Apparently the backpacks will send data back to base via cell phone text messages. I’d love to get ahold of one of these pigeons in the wild and hack the cell phone. We could send back our own text messages: “We are not your slaves. Pigeons of the world, unite!”