Deep Sixing California’s Prop 65

Byoliveridley

House mulls bill on food label removal – Boston.com:

“This bill would strip state governments of the ability to protect their residents through state laws and regulations relating to the safety of food and food packaging,” the attorneys general wrote.

The obvious target, they said, is California’s Proposition 65, a law passed by voters requiring companies to warn the public of potentially dangerous toxins in food. The law has prompted California to file lawsuits seeking an array of warnings, including the mercury content in canned tuna and the presence of lead in Mexican candy.

Prop 65 is a California Law that requires the state of California to “publish, at least annually, a list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity” and for businesses to post warning labels. Well naturally, it kinda depresses sales of canned tuna if you have mercury warnings on the labels, mmm, lead in my candy, so delicious…

This is obviously not good for the consumer, I undestand that businesses feel the burden of extra labeling, depressed sales, etc, but why should the onus always be on the consumer? If the assumption that it is the consumer’s responsibility to find out that there is mercury in his/her tuna and that the informed consumer will make informed choices, why not make it easier on the consumer to find out and then rely on him/her to make that choice? What are the companies afraid of, exactly?

Update 4:24 PM 3-3-2006

More here,  here and here

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    Lead in Paint, why???

    Byoliveridley

    1940-11_White_Lead_Paint.JPGThis makes my head explode, once again, science is helpless when faced with inertia, and greed. Lead-based paint has been banned in the US since 1978, and if this story is any indication, we’re still seeing the effects of peeling paint. But this bit of research from the University of Cincinnati suggests that not only is lead-based paint being used in more than half the world, it is actually legal.

    Study Supports ‘Urgent’ Need for Worldwide Ban on Lead-Based Paint

    Environmental and occupational health experts at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found that major countries—including India, China and Malaysia—still produce and sell consumer paints with dangerously high lead levels.

    Why would anyone need to use lead-based paint when alternatives have been available for the longest time, the health effects of lead, especially on children, are very well known, and there is no @#$%^&*# reason other than greed and unwillingness to change. What is the point of all these years of research if it makes no difference at all to the bulk of the world’s population? Depressing.

    Guess what, even if lead-based paint was banned today, it’s still going to be on the walls forever. As the paint peels, kids will be exposed, have lowered IQ, and all other kinds of health issues for as long as that house is standing, which in India could be a 100 years.

    Grassroots organizing is probably needed, and if effective, the stuff will be banned in India quickly, the government does move rapidly on these kinds of easy to legislate issues. But, enforcement will be lax, and awareness will lag, which means we are looking at (my rough guess) at least 20 years more of this issue.

    Once again, the absence of a ban and its implementation affects the poor and uneducated disproportionately. The way I see it happening in India is

    1. Some grassroots awareness, media stories, etc.
    2. A furore that lasts about a week, before the next big story comes along
    3. Maybe a government action that will “ban” lead-based paint
    4. The middle class and above are now aware that they can use titania based paints, so, a quick change for them.
    5. Everyone else is still stuck with the lead-based paint.

    And this does not even begin to address what the US is going through now, aging houses, peeling paint, poor people being exposed to dangerous levels of lead.

    The world ain’t very fair…

  • |

    The oceans cannot absorb infinite amounts of CO2

    Byoliveridley

    While North Carolina and most of the South of the US reels under drought like conditions and the local newspaper is filled with all kinds of stories about water shortages, this one sentence, steeped in science-speak has caught the attention of climate scientists and general climate change worriers.

    The third process is indicated by increasing evidence (P =0.89) for a long-term (50-year) increase in the airborne fraction (AF) of CO2 emissions, implying a decline in the efficiency of CO2 sinks on land and oceans in absorbing anthropogenic emissions.

    Huh? What they’re saying is that while increasing CO2 emissions are rightfully blamed for the bulk of global warming, a not insignificant (18% to be precise) percentage can be linked to the fact that the oceans just are not absorbing CO2 at the rate that they used to. The reasons are yet unclear, but the trend can definitely be seen.

    OceanUptake.jpg

    The noise in the data is clear indication that there are many natural factors that greatly influence this uptake. But recent observational studies (not a free paper, look up reference 2, so I won’t link to it) in the North Atlantic are backing up this trend.

    The reasons could be as simple as decreasing solubility with increasing temperature, or with increasing ocean acidity, who knows. But it points in the general direction of our climate models being in danger of underestimating climate change effects.

    What does this mean for climate research? Well, there was a really interesting paper out in Science today (Reference 3, not free!) talking about the uncertainties in climate change estimates. The best guess (95% confidence interval) is between 2 and 4.5 degrees Celsius rise in temperature with doubling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But the probability graph around this estimate is not symmetrical, it has a long tail towards the right (>4.5 degrees). The paper discusses why this uncertainty is not related to model limitations, but is an inherent feature of the way climate change processes work, through non-linear feedbacks and multiplying processes.

    What these observations tell us is that uncertainty in climate estimates is not a bug, it’s a feature and will never go away. Also, all the uncertainty is on the wrong side, meaning we’re always in danger of underestimating climate change. There goes one more excuse for not tackling climate change with all the urgency it deserves.

    We will never predict how bad it will be, we only know it will be pretty bad, possibly worse.

    1) Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks — Canadell et al., 10.1073/pnas.0702737104 — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    2) Schuster, U., and A. J. Watson (2007), A variable and decreasing sink for atmospheric CO2 in the North Atlantic, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2006JC003941, in press.

    3) Gerard H. Roe and Marcia B. Baker (26 October 2007) Why Is Climate Sensitivity So Unpredictable?Science 318 (5850), 629. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1144735]

  • Oceans of Carbon Dioxide?

    Byoliveridley

    Well, possibly the biggest climate change science news of the day, sequestration with a twist. Now if we can only get those friendly little carbon dioxide molecules to march down a couple of miles down to the ocean sediments to sequester themselves! But seriously, it will take a lot of pumping.

    Permanent carbon dioxide storage in deep-sea sediments — House et al., 10.1073/pnas.0605318103 — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

    Stabilizing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 may require storing enormous quantities of captured anthropogenic CO2 in near-permanent geologic reservoirs. Because of the subsurface temperature profile of terrestrial storage sites, CO2 stored in these reservoirs is buoyant. As a result, a portion of the injected CO2 can escape if the reservoir is not appropriately sealed. We show that injecting CO2 into deep-sea sediments <3,000-m water depth and a few hundred meters of sediment provides permanent geologic storage even with large geomechanical perturbations. At the high pressures and low temperatures common in deep-sea sediments, CO2 resides in its liquid phase and can be denser than the overlying pore fluid, causing the injected CO2 to be gravitationally stable. Additionally, CO2 hydrate formation will impede the flow of CO2(l) and serve as a second cap on the system. The evolution of the CO2 plume is described qualitatively from the injection to the formation of CO2 hydrates and finally to the dilution of the CO2(aq) solution by diffusion. If calcareous sediments are chosen, then the dissolution of carbonate host rock by the CO2(aq) solution will slightly increase porosity, which may cause large increases in permeability. Karst formation, however, is unlikely because total dissolution is limited to only a few percent of the rock volume. The total CO2 storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the U.S. coastline is enormous, capable of storing thousands of years of current U.S. CO2 emissions.

  • Clubbing baby seals

    Byoliveridley

    Regarding the recent brouhaha that started with the EU banning Canada’s seal products, I confess to being in two minds about Canada’s sealing practices. Of course, clubbing baby seals to death seems barbaric, but so is confining pigs (intelligent and cute in the right circumstances!) to pens where they can barely move and slaughtering them, so is de-beaking chickens and cooping them up in ultra small cages, so is fattening cows with growth hormones, then slaughtering them. If you have any questions, I give you

    and this:

    and this too:

    Okay, now that you have become part of the meatrix, why is industrial animal farming, which is way more destructive on the planet, the people involved and the animals completely and utterly acceptable while the (admittedly barbaric) “culling” of a small proportion of a wild population of seals is banned?

    Yes, seals are cute, but so are chickens, baby pigs, calves, you name it, I even think most snakes are cute, it’s all optics anyway.

    If you’re against the seal clubbing, you need to be against all current animal farming practiced in all of the Americas, and yes, Europe as well.

    FAQs: The Atlantic seal hunt

    Few facts in this debate go unchallenged. All sides agree on where and when. But the answers to how, why, and even how many aren’t as clear. 

    Even the language is chosen carefully. Hunt or slaughter. Sea mammals or baby seals. Cherished tradition or economic disaster. Cod-eating nuisance or adorable innocent.

    The images of the hunt are even more powerful, and seal hunt opponents know it. Most people find the pictures difficult to watch, but supporters say the same kind of thing happens in slaughterhouses — places where cameras aren’t allowed

  • Best Primer to Climate Change ever

    Byoliveridley

    The Beeb does it again. Best use of simple graphics to clearly explain science.

    Gulf Stream

    1. Surface currents carry warm, salty water from the tropics.
    2. The water cools, its density increases and it sinks to the deep ocean.
    3. The cold water flows back to the equator, driving the “ocean conveyor” which in turn contributes to the Gulf Stream that warms northern Europe.
    4. As ice melts, freshwater dilutes the warm salty water from the tropics.
    5. The water becomes less dense so does not sink as fast, weakening the “conveyor” and therefore possibly disrupting the Gulf Stream.

    Gulf Stream

    Dramatic temperature shifts have happened in the past, driven partly by changes in a major ocean currents.

    A “great ocean conveyor” helps transport heat around the globe via surface and deep-sea movements of water.

    Scientists are exploring whether global warming might slow or shut it down – a scenario considered “low probability, high impact”.

    This could disrupt mostly wind-driven surface currents such as the Gulf Stream, which brings milder weather to Northern Europe.

    Low Probability, High impact indeed, aka the “Hell Freezes Over” Scenario. The Gulf Stream example is one of my favorites, check all the other animation out, it is great.

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