Kit Stolz

Strange days: Winter dryness and smog in Bay Area

For countless years winters have brought to the San Francisco Bay Area wind and rain and green hills and fresh air

Not this year. Not yet.

The main factor in the poor air quality, they said, is the relentless dry weather. Normally, particle haze in the Bay Area increases in the winter as residents burn wood in fireplaces. But those fine particles, which can lodge deep into people's lungs, causing respiratory ailments and heart problems, typically are washed out of the air every few days as winter rains come and go.

This year, however, Northern California is on pace for the driest calendar year since 1850, when records were first kept. So smoke from fire places, combined with road dust, soot from buses, trucks and construction equipment, along with other particles from industrial pollution, all build up, growing worse with every passing hour.

Making things even smoggier, wind levels have been low in recent days.

"It's like living in a terrarium. There's no rain and no winds. So we aren't having the normal cleansing effect," said Lisa Fasano, spokeswoman for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District in San Francisco.

The agency issued a record 11th straight "Spare the Air" alert for Wednesday, making it illegal to burn wood, manufactured logs or other solid fuel indoors or outdoors in any of the nine Bay Area counties.

It's a little scary how dry it is. The hills look half-burnt already, by the sun.

[from the Marin headlands, looking north towards Mt. Tamalpais in Marin Co]

An environmental movement around “the Ambient”

While on the trail in early November, had a chance to read a fascinating essay in The New Yorker plumbing the depths of the informational world we live in today — what smartphones and related technologies mean (or don't) and how they should be regulated (or not).

Included in the discussion was a new book the essayist Evgency Morozov much admired, Ambient Commons, which looks at information as an environment, and argues that "Information deserves its own environmentalism." (Not to protect it from us, but to protect us from being overwhelmed by nowness.)

In the book about "the Ambient," MIT professor Michael McCullough wrote:

A quieter life takes more notice of the world, and uses technology more for curiousity and less for conquest… It stretches and extends the now, beyond the latest tweets, beyond the next business quarter, until the sense of time period you inhabit exceeds the extent of your lifetime.

Like this balance: Not blaming the technology, nor us for using it, but delving into its impact, really trying to understand it. Later in this very thoughtful essay, which – irony alert –is freely available thanks to the Internet, the writer quotes an earlier information theorist and boredom advocate, Siegfriend Kracdauer, who saw the rationalization of private life around work as a menace, and had two antidotes in mind:

What one expects and gets from travel and dance — a liberation from earthly woes, the possibility of an aesthetic relation to organized toil — corresponds to the sort of elevation above the ephemeral and the contingent that might occur within people's existence in the relation to the eternal and the absolute…through their travels […] the shackles are burst, and they imagine that infinity itself is spreading out before them. In trains they are already on the other side, and the world in which they land is a new world for them.

Fortunate souls. But the point being that we must choose — and act — to enter the planetary world, as opposed to living in the world of our creation. It's not a new dilemma, but our distractive tools are shinier, noisier, and bring us streams of information, as opposed to samples. Still, maybe they could help get us out into the world, too, as this competition of pics taken by cellphone users on vacation suggests.

Does fear of earthquake in Delta justify $25 billion project?

Last week California water agencies dumped a 34,000 page project report — on Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the need for twin tunnel project — on an oblivious public.

The LA Times editorialized on the project without stating a clear opinion, but did mention that the city has become much much better at water conservation:

There are those who argue, here as well as in counties farther to the north, that a sustainable water future for Southern California lies in conservation and reclamation rather than in continuing to bring in current levels of delta water.

Today their moderate Sacramento columnist George Skelton scoffed at the central justification for the project.

Brown and the water buffaloes — government bureaucrats, corporate farmers, urban expansionists — are peddling their own rationale for a $25-billion re-plumbing of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

A catastrophic earthquake could topple current levees, flood the delta and cut off much of the fresh water supply to Central and Southern California for months, even years, tunnel promoters warn.

Never mind that there's little historical evidence to support the potential for such a calamity.

"If they have to resort to a lie to justify [the project], then the actual justification must be pretty darn weak," says Bob Pyke, a Bay Area consulting engineer who specializes in earthquake protection and is an outspoken critic of Brown's plan.

{snip]

I bought into the earthquake argument for years until it finally dawned on me that I've lived in Sacramento for several decades and never felt — or heard of — a local serious shaker. Indeed, it's one of the pluses in residing here.

Sure, back in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake interrupted the World Series in San Francisco and collapsed an Oakland freeway and part of the Bay Bridge, we felt some rolling 100 miles away. That 6.9 temblor along the San Andreas Fault killed 63 people. But there was little damage in the state capital.

More relevant to this writing, no levees collapsed in the delta, between Sacramento and the Bay Area. In fact, they didn't even suffer damage. "None at all," Pyke says.

Hmmm. Add this question to the other doubts raised by the project. Such as: When designed as a bond project back in 2007 the cost added up to about $11 billion. Now it's officially $25 billion, and — skeptics charge — probably closer to $50 billion. Further, even earthquake experts such as the USGS question the justification. For instance, as noted at this site a couple of years ago, they no longer see a catastrophic risk of failure of the levees due to earthquake (as Skelton argues in simpler language).

Further, the doubters now threaten to put the matter before the voters, seemingly confident that Northern Californians will not want to give Southern Californians water and Southern Californians will not want to pay higher rates to get water.

Puzzlingly, the LA Times expresses in a general way support for the process, even as the paper decalres that the city has come a long ways in water conservation, but needs to do more.

Los Angeles, especially, has excelled at conservation, using the same amount of water today as it did 20 years ago despite a growing population. We will need to do more — clean up contaminated aquifers, recapture storm-water runoff, increase storage capacity. Those projects and more are necessary parts of a water portfolio.

So the LA Times takes a hands off attitude, essentially, and ducks the possibility that it's agribusiness (according to Food and Water Watch) or the fracking industry that wants this project (according to the California Indian Water Commission).

Adding to the malodorous stew, the bureaucrat that has spearheaded this campaign for Brown, Jerry Meral, recently resigned, after a) declaring that it was "virtually certain" the project would be implemented, and b) declaring that the twin tunnels is "not about saving the Delta…the Delta cannot be saved."

One problem: Supposedly that's what this project is all about — heck, it's called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.

[graphic from a new group called simply Stop the Tunnels]

The pleasure of making sense of the world: May Swenson

Or trying to. To say something simply and well, is a pleasure like no other.

Poetry magazine, a consistently wondrous publication, concludes their December issue, their last issue of the year, with an essay on May Swenson that could not be gentler, nor more sweetly loving.

Example? Simply publishing a stanza that may be one of May Swenson's most charming poems, written late in her life:

The purpose of life is
to find the purpose of life
to find the purpose
of life is
The purpose
Life is
To Find

She finds not just purpose, but pleasure in the finding out.

Tear down Hetch-Hetchy dam? Release a new Yosemite?

Two former attorney generals for the state of California, Dan Lungren, a Republican, and John Van de Kamp, a Democrat, together last week published an editorial calling for Congress to revise the Raker Act that allowed, back in l910, the flooding of a priceless valley called Hetch-Hetchy in Yosemite National Park.

Hetch-Hetchy was deeply beloved by John Muir, who said it was second only to Yosemite Valley itself in terms of beauty. Muir just about killed himself organizing national opposition to the ruination of the valley. He wasn't able to stop it, but the efforts of himself and his allies did lead to the creation of what we know today as the environmental movement.

The prospect of seeing Hetch-Hetchy surface entices. The AGs write:

Hetch Hetchy Valley was once home to a richly diverse ecosystem, surrounded by towering cliffs and waterfalls similar to those in neighboring Yosemite Valley. The Tuolumne River, the source of much of the Bay Area's water, flowed through it unobstructed. Today, most of Yosemite National Park's visitors crowd into Yosemite Valley, unaware of its submerged twin 15 miles to the north. Were the reservoir to be drained and Hetch Hetchy Valley restored, the world would rediscover one of America's great natural treasures and tourist pressure on Yosemite Valley would be relieved.

They also claim that San Francisco would be just fine without its water. The fact that San Francisco voters were consulted on the question and rejected it troubles them not a whit:

A well-financed negative campaign ensured the proposition's defeat, in spite of numerous studies by government agencies, universities and independent groups that have concluded it would be possible for San Francisco to continue to obtain water from the Tuolumne River without storing it in Yosemite. Related reforms in the city's water system, such as the development of additional infrastructure and supply, are also feasible.

Bruce McGurk, who ran Hetch-Hetchy, politely called bullshit on this, um, plan. a point echoed in this story from last year in the Chronicle:

The battle over restoring the Hetch Hetchy dates back to the Reagan administration. Democrats have always smelled a GOP stunt that forces Democrats to defend a dam in a national park and lets Republicans quote John Muir about the splendor of mountains.

President Ronald Reagan's interior secretary, Donald Hodel, first proposed restoring the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the 1980s, when Feinstein was mayor of San Francisco. The George W. Bush administration again proposed a study when Pelosi was House speaker. House Democrats removed funding for the study and blocked an attempt by Lungren to reinstate the money.

"The most powerful person in the House at the time was the speaker," Lungren said. "All I know is when I was debating it on the floor, I got some rather knowing looks from my friends on the Democratic side, and let's just say we didn't prevail."

Harrington said he can't debate Lungren's personal attachment to the park. "But let's face it," he said. "Everybody who has ever talked about going after Hetch Hetchy has been conservative Republicans who love to push it in San Francisco's face."

Which raises a question. Given that this scheme — er, proposal — has already been rejected by Congress and by the voters of San Francisco, why is the LA Times continuing to flog this dead horse?

Maybe to take a poke or two at the environmental hypocrisy — um, choices — of San Francisco?

Had a chance to ask a real expert about this idea. This came after a press conference at the #AGU13 featuring a clever new NASA technology that uses old-fashioned airplanes to fly Lidar over the Sierras, the ASO.

At a press conference here at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco, Bruce McGurk, who for many years ran the Hetch-Hetchy reservoir, scoffed:

"They always make me laugh," he said. "Hetch-Hetchy provides a huge security for the city of San Francisco. The suggestion that they can store their water somewhere else — do they realize that the dam sites are already taken? And the immediate downstream dam, [San Pedro], has already been expanded, is privately owned, and they don't want to store San Francisco's water."

"The other issue is you'd probably have a $3 billion bill to expand water treatment facilities in the area, and then you'd have to operate them. With Hetch-Hetchy, we just add a little chorine and shoot some ultraviolet light at it and it doesn't have to go through treatment. So the water you drank this morning came out of the tap straight from Hetch-Hetchy."

Yes, he said that. And went on to call this um — campaign — "sniping" on the part of "some politicians."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lungren-hetch-hetchy-20131202,0,7512621.story#ixzz2n0gHl0mL

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lungren-hetch-hetchy-20131202,0,7512621.story#ixzz2n0frZYp6

A leaf tells us: Prehistoric ice melting in Italian Alps

Great story from AGU. Officially this is a press release from Ohio State University. But really it's just a great story from Pam Frost Gorder, and deserves attention in its own right.

SAN FRANCISCO—Less than 20 miles from the site where melting ice exposed the 5,000-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman, scientists have discovered new and compelling evidence that the Italian Alps are warming at an unprecedented rate.

Part of that evidence comes in the form of a single dried-out leaf from a larch tree that grew thousands of years ago.

A six-nation team of glaciologists led by The Ohio State University drilled a set of ice cores from atop Mt. Ortles in northern Italy, and described their early findings on Monday, Dec. 9 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

The Alto dell'Ortles glacier, which did not show signs of melting for thousands of years, now appears to be shifting away from a constantly below-freezing state to one where its upper layers are at the melting point throughout the year, said project leader Paolo Gabrielli, research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State.

"Our first results indicate that the current atmospheric warming at high elevation in the Alps is outside the normal cold range held for millennia," he said. "This is consistent with the rapid, ongoing shrinking of glaciers at high elevation in this area."

As they drilled into the glacier in 2011, Gabrielli and his team discovered that the first 100 feet (about 30 meters) of the glacier was composed of "firn"—grainy, compacted snow that had partly melted. Below that, they found nothing but solid and colder ice all the way down to the frozen bedrock.

That suggests that snow was accumulating on the mountaintop and was compacted into ice for thousands of years without ever melting—until about 30 years ago, which is when each year's new deposit of snow began melting.

The researchers know that the glacier had previously remained unchanged for a very long time—in part because of the preserved larch leaf, which they found wedged into the ice well beyond the firn layer, around 240 feet beneath the surface and encased in solid ice. They identified the leaf as belonging to Larix decidua, or the European larch.

Carbon dating determined it to be around 2,600 years old. That means that Ötzi had already been dead for more than two millennia when this particular larch tree grew, though it was not far from his resting place.

"The leaf supports the idea that prehistoric ice is still present at the highest elevations of the region," Gabrielli said.

More here.

The lazy man’s guide to a classic roast chicken recipe

Both the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle gave Judy Rodgers of the Zuni Cafe a warm send-off and reprinted her classic roast chicken recipe, which has won big awards and international acclaim.

Here's the obituary/recipe, and here (below) is an easy version of the chicken recipe for lazy people that still comes out great. Rodgers' version includes a bread salad that to me raises the bar too high for most home cooks, leading them to perhaps not make the chicken recipe, which would be a shame.

So! The lazy man's version:

1) Instead of preparing a chicken as Rodgers recommends, two or three days ahead of time, with salt rubs, etc., go to Trader Joe's and get one of their brined organic chickens. Accept no supermarket substitute; believe me, it just won't be the same.

2) Bring home, dry carefully, just as she says, and then put under the skin, five or six springs of thyme, and perhaps a little oregano and or marjoram. But thyme is a must. Leave out on the counter long enough for the chicken to reach room temperature — a few hours. (You don't have to worry about bacteria, because you're going to cook it at a high temperature, although not so high as to dry it out.)

3) This is the tricky part. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Put a small cast iron pan on the stove, and heat that too over medium, until it's pretty hot.

Wipe the chicken dry and place, breast-side up, in the pan. It should sizzle.

Place the pan in the center of the oven. Listen and watch for it to start sizzling and browning within 20 minutes. If it hasn't, increase temperature progressively until it does. If chicken begins to char, or fat is smoking aggressively, reduce temperature by 25 degrees. After 30 minutes, turn the bird over and roast 10 to 20 minutes. Turn bird again to re-crisp breast skin, another 5 to 10 minutes. Total roasting time will be 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Do it right and it won't stick to the pan, but it's counter-intuitive — dependent on a dry chicken and a hot (but not too hot) pan. What she doesn't mention is that it's really helpful to have a good meat thermometer, such as this Thermapen recommended by experts, to be able to assess the doneness of the bird. You want it to be 159 degrees everywhere — but no more.

Never met the cook, but I learned about originality in cooking from this recipe of hers.

FREEDOM, by Yoko Ono and John Lennon

"Yoko Ono’s films tend to deal with themes of sexuality, intimacy, and the navigation of public life."

"1969’s Rape is" [reports book/rock critic David Ulin] "her most famous work, a disturbing first-person perspective from the eyes of the film crew, who chase, harass, and assault a German woman as she flees through the streets of London. No doubt the film is a commentary on the sudden media onslaught she experienced in the initial stages of her relationship with John Lennon. It’s an incredibly compelling piece."

"It’s also 77 damn minutes long. Since I know you’re all reading this at work, I’ll hook you up with one of Ono’s briefer film experiments. In Freedom, we see a shot of Ono’s chest in a silky purple bra. Faceless, she attempts to unhook the front claps in slow motion to the sound of modulating, electronic drone, (provided by John Lennon, of course)."

"While it’s not unheard of to see a close-up of breasts on celluloid, the speed and sounds of the shot transform a mundane ritual of taking off a bra into a sort of post-modern dirge. The bra is never removed on camera, and the audience is left in a state of anticipation, as the clinical, hypnotic feel of the film belies all the general comfort we associate with breasts, whether maternal or sexual."

Posted today in memory of John Lennon, assassinated thirty-odd years ago on this date.

How the media covered Obamacare vs. Typhoon Haiyan

Amazing graphic from Pew Research:

Advocates (even including myself, I'm embarrassed to say now) have in the past blamed the media for not rasing the global warming question — repeat, question — when it comes to vast storm disasters, such as Typhoon Haiyan.

Look at that graphic and you realize that in the American media today, coverage is analysis. And in most cases, with notables such as NPR and the NY Times excepted, that's what you get — the scope of the damage, and pictures, with long-range causes left undiscussed.

And the amount of coverage is politcial. even in cases of disaster, sadly.

Looking at you, Fox News.

(Or actually — not.)

Internet saint of the day: Joan Didion

In the Roman Catholic calendar, virtually every day is a feast day in honor of this saint or that, famous or not, and in a strange sense it's similar on the Internet — every day belongs to some famous secular saint or sinner.

Today, Julie Cart of the LA Times reminds us that her heroine Joan Didion turned seventy-nine, an excellent excuse to brush up on some of Didion's most striking insights, and read some wonderful (and sometimes familiar) quotes via Into the Gloss.

The first sentence of this passage is very famous, in Hollywood at least, but rest shows Didion's toughness — her refusal to retreat from the facts.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Love this pic, too, via David Ulin:

Bonus quote for reporters:

“My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.”