Air pollution
revere | August 29, 2008I used to joke that the only plan the Bush administration had for dealing with air pollution was to put all the free radicals in jail. If you don't know what a free radical is, it is a highly reactive form of a chemical, usually involving an unpaired electron. Radicals often are short lived intermediates in other reactions and can have half lives in the microseconds or less. In any event we're talking seconds. It is free radicals that are formed by ionizing radiation. They quickly react with whatever chemicals are in their vicinity and if that chemical happens to be your genetic material, you…
revere | June 16, 2008Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I'd like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We'll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the principles hold for other kinds of assaults, for example, on public health concerns regarding bis phenol A.
The cardinal point is that the attacks aren't about science. Refuting false statements about whether CO2 is or is not a driver of global warming may seem (and be) necessary, but it is not the…
revere | May 16, 2008At this moment I'm sitting in a Chicago O'Hare airport waiting room reading a news article on MSNBC's website telling me I am in more danger from breathing the air here in the terminal than I would be breathing the air on the airplane when it reaches cruising altitude. This was the conclusion from a just published study done by the National Institute for Occupational Study and Health (NIOSH), the federal research agency on workplace health problems, and two collaborating universities, Harvard and University of Massachusetts. NIOSH has been looking into the environment of the cabin crews, but…
revere | February 27, 2008Chromium is OK when it's on your car bumper but not so OK when it's in your workplace air or your drinking water. That's because chromium, in some of its forms, causes cancer. In fact it is a remarkably good carcinogen. A few years, ago both epidemiological studies and risk estimates done by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggested the lifetime risk of dying of lung cancer for workers exposed at the then workplace limits as about 25%. This is higher than for heavy cigarette smokers. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lowered the workplace standard by a…
revere | January 25, 2008The particles are smaller but the risks appear to be bigger. We're talking air pollution, here, folks. Not so long ago EPA regulations were on the basis of pretty large partiles, ten microns in size. Then a considerable body of work indicated that much smaller particulate matter, size around 2.5 microns were a much better measure of risk. Like a lot of things, though, as our measurements get better we are finding effects, sometimes big ones, with ever smaller particles. A recent study published in Circulation Research and reported by Bloomberg says that unregulated extremely fine particles,…
revere | January 8, 2008Faith-based environmental protection. Why not? The Bush administration isn't using the law or regulations:
Ignoring all legal and technical evidence -- and the advice of his career experts -- [EPA Administrator Steven] Johnson sided with the car industry and rejected the request of California to enforce the state's landmark greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles. (No fewer than 19 other states have already adopted these standards or are considering them, representing about half the U.S. population.) In fact, Johnson took action that his own legal team said was probably illegal.
[snip]
In…
revere | November 19, 2007Air pollution exists in two physical forms: as a gas (molecules) and as particles (usually heterogeneous agglomerations of huge numbers of molecules stuck together). Particles in the air are also called aerosols. Depending upon their size (really their aerodynamic behavior), their abundance and their composition, they can affect our lungs, vegetation or visibility. They can come from anywhere. Sometimes they are formed "in place" by secondary chemical reactions of precursor pollutants. Photochemical oxidant pollution ("smog") is of this type. Sometimes it is of natural origin and can be…
revere | September 9, 2007Flying on an airplane used to be something special. Now it's just another means of mass transit, with all that implies. So our attention is more and more directed to the unpleasant parts of flying, which, for many is the lousy air quality. Modern pressurized airliners fly high -- very high indeed. Stratospherically, literally. When you are up 35,000 or 40,000 feet you are in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere where there is little vertical movement of air (it is essentially a temperature inversion) and high ozone levels. Those ozone levels are a good thing for those of us at on the…
revere | July 27, 2007One of the gross abuses that triggered the Reformation was the corrupt practice of Catholic priests of selling "indulgences," get-out-of-jail free cards for your sins in this world. Since the Bush administration is always willing to learn from history where corruption is the prize, they have come up with a new idea to sell climate change indulgences to a public increasingly worried about how today's sins will punish their grandchildren. This latest Bush administration proposal for offsetting the build-up of greenhouse gases characteristically (for them) doesn't operate on the source side --…