A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

@HelenBranswell @sleepfreeparent @DavidM_yeg @driusan

I think that what we have at the moment is one paper that shows a spillover in late 2023 from birds to cows:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.01.591751v1

But data that the virus can go back and forth between cows and birds:

https://virological.org/t/preliminary-report-on-genomic-epidemiology-of-the-2024-h5n1-influenza-a-virus-outbreak-in-u-s-cattle-part-1-of-2/970

I agree that what we know to date is a spillover event, with mammal to mammal transmission from there. It would be folly to assume that's the end of bird to mammal transmission, though.

@ScienceCommunicator

I think you misunderstood what I'm saying. I'm not saying the majority of people would even slap up solar panels and buy an EV. I'm saying that's the END GOAL. That's what people are told to aim for at the pinnacle of their environmentalism.

It's both an education problem AND an inconvenience problem. Once they're educated on what must ACTUALLY be done, they're usually not interested.

@ScienceCommunicator

The NY Times has over 9 million digital subscribers. Even "small" papers, like the Denver Post, claim to reach 6 million unique monthly visitors. In 2020 NPR claimed that nearly 35 million unique visitors went on NPR.org.

1,142 people follow me on Mastodon. What I say on social media is irrelevant.

Michael Mann is, I would assume, the most well known climate scientist. Around 12,000 people follow him here on Mastodon with almost 65,000 followers on X.

It's a drop in the bucket to the reach of news organizations. If it's not being covered, relentlessly, by "mainstream" news sources, no one will know.

Scientists don't control the narrative. Even large organizations like the USDA or CDC put out a press release that gets one mention in media sources, for one morning's news cycle, and then gets lost.

@ScienceCommunicator

If I'm working at, say, a National Lab, and I have important information to share. I get that to reporters. Have I done my job? If not, what else could I do? I don't control the narrative after it leaves my lab.

@ScienceCommunicator

I've seen polls like that, but then when asked specific, inconvenient things they can do about it, less than 10% of people say "yes" they'd do that. It's not really their fault, though. They've been told if they put out their recycling bin, slap up some solar panels and buy an EV they'll have done their part to save the world. Most people just don't know the whole truth.

A kind of odd article came across my timeline this morning, and it seems to fit here, so I'd like to point it out.

https://www.newsweek.com/drinking-water-warning-hempstead-new-york-1903989

Hempstead New York's Mayor is sounding the alarm about 1,4-dioxane in their water. He's also tying it to the EPA's new PFA requirements in asking for the federal government to buy them a new water treatment system. To be clear, I know of no reason that PFAs and dioxane would be tied together. PFAs are fluorinated, that's what the "F" tells you in PFA. Dioxane is C4H8O2. I know of no process, off hand, that uses both. They are both pollutants, but that's as far as they go in the same category.

What's really odd to me here is that the EPA has a thing called the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule (UCMR). Every few years they pick another set of chemicals and test water across the country for those chemicals.

UCMR 3 was from 2013-2015 and I distinctly remembered two things about it. One, dioxane was on the list. Two, New York had a very high incidence of dioxane being over acceptable limits. If New York wasn't top in the nation, it was at least pretty close.

So I looked up UCMR 3(https://www.epa.gov/dwucmr/occurrence-data-unregulated-contaminant-monitoring-rule#3), downloaded the data, searched it for Hempstead, and counted it up. Hempstead had 30 tests for dioxane over those two years and 25 of them tested high. Some of them ridiculously high.

Now I wonder. Did Hempstead ignore it for the last decade and now sees an opportunity to try to get the federal government to pay for their water treatment? Is that why they're mentioning it in the same breath as PFAs now? Or did they do something, and it wasn't enough?

The article just leads to more questions than answers, and the take home message here is that your water is almost certainly contaminated with tons of crap that people know about, and tons of crap that people don't know about. The only way to protect yourself is to clean it yourself.

Reverse osmosis is probably your best bet to get stuff that you know about and don't know about out of your water. While it's said to not be 100% effective for dioxane, if you had one, single point, method to use, that would still be it.