By Wayne Lusvardi

More scientific evidence is mounting against California Assembly Bill 296, which would fund pilot projects to eventually mandate Cal-Trans paint roads a lighter color to reduce the so-called “urban heat island effect.”

A new study indicates “cool roads,” combined with the inevitably mandated “cool roofs” of buildings, would severely reduce groundwater supplies in urban areas on a cumulative basis.

The “urban heat island effect” is defined as a “higher-temperature ‘dome’ of heat created over an urban or industrial area by hot layers forming at building top or chimney level.” The “heat island effect” disappears by midday when temperatures rise so it technically should be called the “nighttime urban heat island effect.”

“Cool Roads” a “Health Disaster in the Making”

Last week, Dr. Mark Jacobson, a climatologist at the Stanford Engineering School, said painting road surfaces a lighter color would be “a public health disaster waiting to happen.”  He explained that making the air cooler near the ground surface will worsen the dreaded inversion layer that traps pollution.  An inversion layer is created when a layer of hot air traps colder air below in an urban basin typically rimmed by mountains and the ocean.  All that painting roads white, grey or light green would apparently do is bring back the smog levels that Los Angeles experienced in the 1960s.

“Cool Roads” Would Reduce Urban Groundwater Supplies

Now, a new study from Arizona State University indicates that repainting roofs and roads lighter colors would likely lead to about a 25 percent reduction in urban rainfall over a five year cycle — or 5 percent per year.

The research is summarized in the Sept. 7 issue of Environmental Research Letters. The researchers included Alex Mahalov, the Wilhoit Foundation Dean’s Distinguished Professor or Mathematical and Statistical Sciences.  The research was conducted on what is called Arizona’s “Sun Corridor,” composed of four growing metropolitan areas: Phoenix, Tucson, Prescott and Nogales.

The researchers estimated that the expansion of urban development would reduce rainfall by 12 percent and that “cool roofs” would reduce rainfall another 4 percent per year.

The study concluded: “[T]ruly sustainable development will have to consider impacts extending beyond average temperature” to include impacts on rainfall and groundwater hydrology.  In other words, painting building roofs lighter colors would involve a tradeoff of slightly cooler average air temperature for less urban rainfall.

The amount of additional rainfall reduction from “cool road” surfaces was not specifically estimated by the Arizona State University study. But a guesstimate can be made.

Road surfaces are estimated to cover from 14 percent of the land area in Los Angeles and 26 percent in San Francisco.  So the combination of “cool roofs” and “cool roads” might be about a 5 percent reduction in urban annual rainfall.

For example, a 5 percent reduction in rainfall to the huge Main San Gabriel Water Basin in the suburbs of Los Angeles could rob it of its entire “safe yield” each year. Safe yield is “the annual amount of water that can be taken from a source of supply over a period of years without depleting that source beyond its ability to be replenished naturally in wet years.” The investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to clean up local groundwater basins of contaminants may be jeopardized.

Groundwater supplies about one-third or more of urban water demand in a dry year and about half of that in a wet year in Southern California.

AB 296 Based on Junk Science from Wired Magazine

A podcast circulating widely on the Internet shows Adam Rogers, Senior Editor of Wired Magazine, advocating for “cool roofs” to reduce the impacts of “global warming.”  Rogers bases his advocacy for cool building roofs on unscientific observations from a jet flight over industrial areas around Burbank airports.  Such junk science about how to combat global warming has not only been bought by the public but by policymakers such as Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who is the sponsor of AB 296.

It is junk science to believe that cooling the air near the ground surface would reduce air pollution.  It might reduce temperatures, but it would create more air pollution and unhealthy air.  This is because nature has feedback effects.

For example, bring a microphone near a speaker and you get feedback noise. In a similar fashion, feedback effect happens when trying to reduce urban air temperatures. The feedback from cooler air is greater air pollution.

Hot air rises naturally.  By cooling the air at lower elevations, a relatively warmer layer of air traps the cooler air below creating an inversion layer.  And inversion layers trap pollutants resulting in greater smog.

It is difficult to separate cause and effect in climate and drought research. If AB 296 ends up mandating “white painted roads,” the resulting drop in urban groundwater basins would be falsely used as “proof” of global warming as its cause.   The “political feedback” effect would be to attribute any decline in groundwater on industry-caused global warming to justify Cap and Trade as a taxation mechanism.  AB 296 would likely result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that global warming causes urban droughts. And if one disputed this, one would likely be called a “denier.”

Jerry Brown: The Junk Science Governor?

Jerry Brown frequently portrays his opposition as “unscientific” whether it is on issues such as water and the Sacramento Delta or energy and global warming. But it is clear that AB 296 is based on junk science that reputable scientists say would jeopardize human health and urban groundwater supplies.

AB 296 is now on Brown’s desk for signature, having passed both houses of the state Legislature. The question even science can’t answer: Will Brown choose science or junk science?

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

William Shakespeare wrote a farcical play, “Much Ado About Nothing.” California is apparently acting out Shakespeare’s play in Tehachapi where the Lehigh Cement Company plant produced nearly nothing of mercury to the alarm of environmentalists, regulators, and the mainstream media.

Annual Mercury Emissions

The 872 pounds  — or about one third of a ton — of mercury emitted at the Lehigh cement plant in 2010 is:

* 0.005 percent of the world’s total per year;

* 0.001 percent of the total emitted in the world by man;

* 0.25 percent of the total emitted in North America by man;

* 0.17 percent of all the mercury emitted by cement plants in the world.

And mercury in the air doesn’t stay where it is emitted, whether from a cement plant, a wildfire, a volcano or an environmentally protected chaparral groundcover that blankets much of California.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one third of all mercury emissions generated within the United States are deposited within the country.  So take the 0.005 percent of mercury emissions emitted at the Lehigh cement plant and reduce it by two thirds to an even more minuscule number.   Forget the numbers for a moment:  the Lehigh cement plant emits an incredibly tiny amount of mercury into the air compared to global or national emissions.  It is much to do about almost nothing.

Regulators Gone Wild

As chemist Richard Trzupek writes in his book, “Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry,” “When compared to the background mercury from both natural sources of mercury deposition and other global sources of man-made mercury emissions (mainly from China), little is to be gained from a practical standpoint by further reducing mercury emissions from power plants in the United States. Yet the requirements to do so move forward, and the Obama administration has proposed the most draconian cuts in mercury power plants ever considered, reductions that will be enormously expensive to realize, if, indeed, the goals can be met at all.”   Mercury emitted from the Lehigh Cement Plant is much ado about next to nothing.

Trzupek writes there is no such thing as man-made mercury.  “Man does not produce mercury, we relocate it,” he said.   The concern is that the Lehigh Cement Plant is relocating too much mercury to waterways, where fish and other wildlife can retain it.  One of the largest sources of mercury exposure by man is from eating fish.

The concern of the U.S. EPA is that the Lehigh Cement Plant “produced” the most mercury of any cement plant in California and the second highest of all cement plants in the United States.

New Obama ‘Near Zero Emissions’ Mercury Standard

At Lehigh, a coal-fired power plant is used to cook limestone mined from nearby to produce cement; mercury escapes into the air.  In 2010, 872 pounds of mercury were emitted at Lehigh.  Under new rules proposed by the Obama administration, plants will be banned from emitting more than 55 pounds of mercury per million tons of cement produced.  The cement industry says it will cost $3.4 billion and force the closure of some cement plants to comply with the new rules.  The Lehigh cement plant employs about 100 people.

Reflecting what can only be called hysteria or maliciousness, environmental activist Jane Williams has been fighting for years against eight cement plant kilns operating in Kern and San Bernardino counties.  She says that such cement plants are “out of control.”

Tehachapi Mayor Ed Grimes says the air pollution was once “outrageous,” but now is cleaner than it once was.  Grimes has a potential self-interest in his alarmism. He is head of the Eastern Kern Air Pollution Control District.  Grimes alleges that pollution from the Lehigh cement plant is the source of his daughter’s multiple sclerosis.  But the National Multiple Sclerosis Society reportedly says there is no evidence that exposure to heavy metals like mercury cause multiple sclerosis. The cause of multiple sclerosis is unknown but is associated with lack of vitamin D, which can be obtained from natural sunlight or diet.

The Lehigh cement plant was originally constructed to provide cement for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, built by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to provide water to Southern California.

Cement industry spokesperson Andy O’Hare said 18 cement plants could be forced to shut down nationally and 3,000 to 4,000 jobs would be lost because of the Obama administration’s new rules.  O’Hare points out that shutting down domestic cement plants will just transfer those jobs to China, where there are no comparable pollution standards.

Mercury has been found to have been deposited in Antarctic ice over the past 650,000 years, or before industrialization.  Mercury is absorbed from the air by water, rocks, soil and trees.  Human bodies evolved with immune systems that include certain proteins and antioxidants to protect from potential contaminants. There is 200 million tons of mercury in the ocean, but it is not dangerous because it has not been converted to a dangerous form, such as methylmercury.

Selenium, also a heavy metal, is found to have a strong attraction to mercury molecules that protects fish and people against the excess buildup of methylmercury.  Methylmercury is the biologically active and more dangerous form of mercury.

Ironically, in San Gabriel Valley the U.S. EPA is trying to remove selenium from river water as potentially dangerous to animal life.

Mercury is Element for Class Warfare

For the purpose of such an unrealistic public policy as the Obama administration’s “almost zero” or “nearly close to zero” mercury emission standard, one must look deeper.  As U.C. Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky once observed in his book, “Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers,” one must look at what form of social organization is being attacked and what form is being defended.

Ever since the New Deal of the 1930s, jobs programs have been created that lacked a demonstrable public purpose other than the jobs created. With the Obama administration’s new mercury rules, what is being defended is the public sector at the expense of the private sector.

If the jobs from cement production end up being sent overseas, that’s no matter as long as public-sector jobs in America are expanded or preserved.

Another name for this is “class warfare.” And that’s much ado about something.