california
kkrisberg | July 3, 2014Crystalline silica, hydrofluoric acid and formaldehyde. Those are just three of the dozens of air toxic chemicals that oil companies have used thousands of times in southern California in just the past year.
The data has come to light thanks to new reporting rules adopted in 2013 by the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which now requires oil and gas well operators to disclose the chemicals they use in oil and gas operations. According to a recently released analysis of the first year’s worth of reported data, oil companies used 44 different air toxic chemicals more than 5,000…
egrossman | June 25, 2014When a widely used chemical is identified as an environmental health hazard and targeted for phase-out and elimination, among the most challenging questions for those involved with using and making such a chemical are: What to use instead? and Will the replacement be safe? The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) report identifying alternatives to the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) illustrates how difficult those questions can be to answer. It also highlights how important it is to consider the entire life-cycle of finished products when looking for hazardous chemical…
cmonforton | June 23, 2014The June 2014 news on UCLA chemistry professor Patrick G. Harran’s website announces his lab’s award of an NIH grant. I wonder if it will be updated with his other news for the month?
Last week, Harran settled criminal charges with the Los Angeles County district attorney (DA) for the work-related death of Sheri Sangji, 23. Sangji was a research assistant in Harran’s lab. She'd only been on the job a few months. She was hired primarily to set up lab equipment, but on Dec. 29, 2008 she was assigned to use tert-butyllithium (tBuLi). The highly reactive liquid ignites spontaneously when exposed…
egrossman | June 4, 2014Where you live may be hazardous to your health. This is the conclusion of several recent reports and studies, among them a supplement to the most recent examination of health disparities by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and an analysis by the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Reform of those who live in communities most vulnerable to hazardous chemical exposures. Together the two paint a disturbing picture of how the neighborhoods in which Americans live and work play a significant role in determining their residents' health. There should be no…
egrossman | May 14, 2014In 2012, the most recent year for which US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures are available, 375 people died on the job in California – an average occupational fatality rate of more than one person every day. At the same time, research by Worksafe and other California labor advocates shows that while California’s workforce has grown by about 22 percent in the last 20 years, the number of safety inspectors for the 17 million people employed in the state’s 1.34 million workplaces has decreased by about 11 percent. This leaves California – which has the largest workforce of any US state…
oracknows | March 28, 2014Dr. Robert Sears has to be one of the most irresponsible pediatricians on the face of the earth, if not the most irresponsible. Many of you might recall that a little more than a week ago "Dr. Bob" posted a borderline unhinged rant on Facebook aimed at his own patients, who, quite reasonably, were calling him about the measles outbreak going on in southern California right now and asking him about the measles vaccine. It was entitled Measles Epidemic . . . NOT!, and his response boiled down to, in essence, "get the vaccine if you're worried, but there's no real reason to worry." He also…
pgleick | February 20, 2014We’ve entered a new era: politicians can now talk loud and clear about the reality of human-induced climate change and the growing threats to humanity. With strong, unambiguous statements by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and a growing chorus of other top-level voices, the wholesale denial of climate science is increasingly relegated to a tiny group of industry-funded voices and their followers (directly mirroring the tobacco story decades ago); confused or ignorant politicians; and those who hope to avoid the difficult policy discussions by…
lborkowski | February 13, 2014After having delivered prime-time telecasts from the Olympic Games since 1988, NBC’s Bob Costas had to step aside due to a pink eye infection. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff opined that Bob Costas did the right thing, noting, “People turning up to work sick is actually a vexing problem for employers that could, by some estimates, cost them as much as $150 billion a year.” Sick employees showing up to work can more easily spread their diseases to co-workers and customers, as well as fellow carpoolers or transit riders.
In Costsas’ case, his initial reluctance to stay home (or in his hotel room) to…
oracknows | January 27, 2014Being a cancer surgeon and researcher, naturally I tend to write about cancer a lot more than other areas of medicine and science. It's what I know best. Also, cancer is a very common area for unscientific practices to insinuate themselves, something that's been true for a very long time. The ideas don't change very rapidly, either. Drop a cancer quack from 2014 into 1979, and he would probably be right at home. Of course, part of the reason is because the "elder statesmen" of cancer quackery today were just getting their starts in 1979. Still, the same ideas keep recurring even as far back…
pgleick | January 16, 2014 Figure 1: Monthly average precipitation showing the seasonality of precipitation in different parts of California, from the iconic California Water Atlas.
California has a “Mediterranean” climate, which means that each year it has a concentrated rainy season, followed by a long temperate and dry period. California’s rainy season typically runs from early October to late March, with very little precipitation outside of these months. (Figure 1 shows the average monthly rainfall for California.) It is now early 2014 and the rains have not come, for the third year in a row. While the …
pgleick | November 7, 2013In the 20th century, water policy seemed easy: figure out another source of water to satisfy some projected demand, and find the money to build it. The money was almost always federal “pork barrel” funding for big water projects, or occasionally state bond financing. The vast number of dams built in the United States (see the figure) is an indication of how extensively this approach was used. But the leveling off of the curve below also shows that traditional dam construction can no longer be considered the only solution to our water problems. Moreover, most major water projects were designed…
lborkowski | September 27, 2013Last year, California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights passed by the state's legislature. Yesterday, he signed a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights that is watered down from its original version but takes the important step of extending overtime protections to nannies and other in-home employees. Domestic workers will earn overtime pay for working more than nine hours a day or 45 hours in a week (higher than the federal cutoff of 40 hours per week). The bill no longer contains the rest and meal breaks from the original version, and it will sunset after three years.…
pgleick | August 19, 2013
Dropping water levels in Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. (Source: Peter Gleick 2013)
It is no surprise, of course, that the western United States is dry. The entire history of the West can be told (and has been, in great books like Cadillac Desert [Reisner] and Rivers of Empire [Worster] and The Great Thirst [Hundley]) in large part through the story of the hydrology of the West, the role of the federal and state governments in developing water infrastructure, the evidence of droughts and floods on the land, and the politics of water allocations and use.
But the story of water in the West…
pgleick | May 10, 2013The Colorado River, recently named America’s most endangered river, supports millions of people in the American Southwest and northwest Mexico and helps irrigate millions of acres of land. It is shared by seven states in the U.S. and Mexico, through a complex series of legal agreements and treaties.
Yet every drop of water on the river is accounted for, used, reused, and transpired away, and today, no water reaches the Colorado River delta in an average year. Quite simply, demands on the river exceed the river’s average supply, and this problem is projected to get worse as populations…
pgleick | March 21, 2013Some thoughts for today: the bad news and good news for World Water Day. [First, I think every day should be World Water Day, not just March 22nd, but hey, that’s just me.]
Stop taking your tap water for granted. Go to your tap, draw a glass of water, and drink it. Then remember that nearly a billion people still do not have reliable access to safe, affordable tap water and cannot do what you've just done.
Stop taking your toilet for granted. Nearly 2.5 billion people (more people than lived on the planet in the 1930s) don’t have safe sanitation.
Do you know anyone who had cholera, or typhoid…
lborkowski | October 1, 2012California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed two bills that worker advocates promoted. The Humane Treatment for Farm Workers Act, AB 2676, required that farmworkers' supervisors ensure the workers have continuous access to shade and enough cool water to drink one quart per hour during each shift; failing to provide water or shade under high heat conditions would be a misdemeanor punishable by fines or jail time.
The governor stated that instead of a new crime applying to one group of employers, the state should "continue to enforce our stringent standards for the benefit of all workers." But…
lborkowski | September 10, 2012Both houses of California's legislature have now passed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights (AB 889), which extends the rights to overtime pay and rest and meal breaks to domestic employees such as nannies and housekeepers. If Governor Jerry Brown signs the bill into law, California will become the second state in the nation to extend these basic workplace protections to domestic employees, who have long been exempted from legislation that protects most of the rest of us. (New York passed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010, and provided a model for the California bill.) Ai-Jen Poo,…
catdynamics | November 9, 2010A missile was, allegedly, fired off the California coast, near Los Angeles monday night, to some consternation.
It was most likely a US Navy launch of a realistic target missile for an Anti-Ballistic Missile test underway over the last few days with the Japanese Navy.
It was, most certainly, despite any denials and claims from the Navy, a US Navy missile, probably being fired as part of an interesting ongoing exercise.
NBC video with video from CBS traffic helicopter.
Notice to Mariners, 45/2010 has a clear warning:
434/10(18). EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC. CALIFORNIA. MISSILES. 1.…
eklemetti | July 9, 2010Mineral King valley in California.
Well, we are in the peak of the summer, so Eruptions will be running a bit of summer schedule while I'm off away from the interweb tubes. First off, from July 11-20, I'll be off in the mountains, doing some much-needed fieldwork with my (first) undergraduate research student. We'll be up in the Mineral King area of Sequoia National Park looking at some old rhyolites and granites - we're talking Triassic and Jurassic submarine and subaerial calderas! We'll hopefully be taking a look at zircons in these rocks to help constrain the timescales of these enigmatic…
eklemetti | July 5, 2010Serpentine (as known as serpentinite), the current (and potentially soon-to-be ex-) state rock of California.
This does not have a direct connection to volcanoes, but it sure is about geology and the science in the news. State Senator Gloria Romero of California has sponsored a bill to change the California state rock from serpentine because, as she claims:
"[Serpentine] contains the deadly mineral chrysotile asbestos, a known carcinogen, exposure to which increases the risk of the cancer mesothelioma ... California should not designate a rock known to be toxic to the health of its residents…