Blogging from A to Z: Red Red Wine ... Is Absolutely Fine!

During April, I'm participating in the Blogging from A to Z challenge -- one alphabet-themed post per day, starting with A is for Aruba Aftermath and ending with Z is for ... I don't know yet what Z is for, I'll figure it out when I get there.

(source: I found this image all over the internet, including here and here)

Nothing I like better than sitting in the cockpit drinking a glass of wine to celebrate the sunset. Unless it's drinking two glasses of wine, with friends.  Scary stories have been circulating recently about arsenic in inexpensive California wine.   The whole "crisis" encapsulates all my frustrations about working in application of science to public policy a decade ago.

Please don't buy into this wine scare silliness. This is such junk science.  There's so many things wrong with the story, I'm not sure where to start.  So I'll start with the most basic.

First, they are using the wrong standard.  The levels of arsenic that they are reporting as potentially problematic are based on drinking water standards. Those standards are calculated based on drinking the recommended 8 glasses of water per day, every day of your life, for 70 years. But that's water. It makes no sense to worry about arsenic at that level in wine, because we'd be talking about someone who drinks 3 bottles of wine (13 glasses!) Every.Single.Day. That's how much wine you'd have to drink for arsenic at the drinking water level to potentially hurt you. But of course if you're drinking 3 bottles of wine per day, you've got much bigger problems.  You'd die of cirrhosis of the liver long before you had problems from the arsenic!  Canada understands this; their standard for arsenic in wine is ten times the US drinking water  standard.  The concentration of arsenic in highest wine noted in the lawsuit is well below the Canadian standard.  In fact, it's only about half the Canadian.  The European standard for wine is even higher, twice the Canadian.  (source)

Second, there are other scientific problems. There are different forms of arsenic and their toxicity varies greatly.  "...most simple organic arsenic compounds (such as methyl and dimethyl compounds) are less toxic than the inorganic forms and that some complex organic arsenic compounds are virtually non-toxic..." (source) The articles about the lawsuit don't say which variety they have tested for, or whether they separated them at all.

"A large source of total arsenic comes from the food we eat. However, most of the arsenic in food is in an organic (carbon containing) form which is much less harmful than the inorganic arsenic found primarily in groundwater. Some foods also contain inorganic arsenic but the main exposure to inorganic arsenic is normally from consuming water." (source) 

I'm pretty sure grapes are a food, so presumably they have the less-dangerous organic form of arsenic in their juice, while the drinking water standard is set to protect against the more-dangerous inorganic form.  (edited to add: This article at least mentions the organic/inorganic distinction, but they don't quantify how much is inorganic except to say "unacceptable."  What does unacceptable mean? Unacceptable to who?  What is the actual concentration?  They should state it.  Unless they can't, because the number isn't scary enough.)

Third, another scientific problem is that there are many things we don't understand about arsenic metabolism.  We know that some populations are more sensitive than others. People in Bangladesh, and high in the Andes, drink water with arsenic concentrations one hundred times the US limit with no apparent ill effect. (source) This may be because of genetic predisposition on the part of these people, or a kind of adaptation as their bodies learned to deal with the arsenic, but either way it hints that it will be complicated to develop a single number for a standard to protect everyone.

Fourth, wine gets its flavors from the complex terrior, the climate and the chemistry of the soil the grapes grow in.  Which means if you plant the same grapes in a different place, you get a different wine. Arsenic occurs naturally in soil and water, more in some geologies than others.  (source) Then it gets taken up in the plants grown in that soil and watered with that water.  It's unjust to imply that the companies' sloppy (or nefarious!) practices are to blame for its presence in their product.  But it does make good media sales, to point to a villain.

Fifth, the guy filing the lawsuit is far from a disinterested party here.  He could gain financially by fomenting this scare...a lot.  He owns a food-testing company, so there's a major problem with conflict of interest there; my favorite article summing up the problem explains.  (source) One of my contacts in the wine industry stated that this guy who brought the suit has done this kind of thing before.  In fact I'm surprised he was even judged to have legal standing to file a suit, since neither he nor anyone else has ever proved, or even claimed, that they were actually harmed by arsenic in wine. (source)

And with all that, a lot of politics went into setting the US and state drinking water standards at the level they are. I was the person supervising the scientists who were doing to research to develop those standards back around 1998-2002, so I've got the inside scoop.  Bottom line: pour yourself a glass of (nice California red) wine and relax about this issue. Unless you've got some unusual sensitivity or underlying condition, this is not a problem, ever.

Reflections on Hydrology from a Life Afloat (insanely long post)

Last week I gave a talk for a group of retired USGS hydrologists and geologists (actually, we were supposed to do the talk as a team, but Dan had cheered himself hoarse at the Eastport-Annapolis tug of war over the weekend and had no voice).  Less than a transcript but more than speaking notes, here's approximately what I said.

Sunrise on Factory Creek, near Beaufort, SC

Hi, I’m Jaye Lunsford and in the course of my science career I worked or supervised examples of all areas of USGS hydrology: ground water, surface water, water use, water quality. Etc.  After retirement, I learned that I could stop working as a hydrologist but I could never stop being one. Dan and I live on a sailboat and took a winter trip via boat to the Bahamas.  I’m not going to do a travelogue or talk about good food and interesting people, even though we encountered many of both.  I want to talk about some science tidbits along the way and how our hydrology background illuminated all we saw and did.

Water, water everywhere?

The world is heading for “water bankruptcy” in the next few decades, according to this article that came out of the Davos forum last week. This prediction is even scarier when you read that it’s going to come true just based on the way we use water now, even in the absence of climate change predictions. So what does that have to do with living on a boat?

There are only so many ways to get your drinking water when you live on a boat. Some high-end boats can desalinate their own from sea water, using expensive high-maintenance technology that only works if the source water is very clean. Some others catch rain water. Still others, including virtually all the marina liveaboards I know, have water tanks on their boats that they fill from garden hoses or taps on their docks.

No matter what system people use, the hassle involved in monitoring and refilling our tanks makes us much more aware of water use and waste than we ever were before. When we lived in a house on land, we turned on the tap, the water flowed, as much as we needed, clean and nearly free. Even though water here in the marina is still virtually free, the hassle factor changes our mindset completely. I’ve mentioned before that in summer, each boat slip has its own water tap. But these taps would freeze in winter, so “winter water” consists of one tap at the end of the dock, in a special hose that sits deep under water below the freeze level, tied to the dock with a rope. You pull the tap up from underwater with the rope, then call the marina to turn the water on, fill your tank, then they turn the water off and you lower the tap back underwater again. The tap is about 100 feet from our boat, too far for our garden hose to reach, so we team up with other liveaboards, chain all our hoses together, and fill everyone’s tanks in a “water party” on a warm weekend day once or twice a month. The more water you use, the faster you empty your tank, and the more often you go through this exercise.

Strathy lives aboard with his young family in Canada and writes a blog titled We Live On a Boat; he would find our inconvenient winter water system an upgrade. In one recent post he mentions as an aside that “We also consume much less than the average four person family, simply because we don’t have an unlimited supply. For instance water; I have to haul all our water to the boat in jugs during the winter. Because of that, I keep a very close eye on every drop that comes out of our taps and can really turn into the soup-nazi if I think for a second that my water is being wasted. (NO WATER FOR YOU!!!)” Hauling jugs of water for a family of 4? Over the ice-covered docks in a Canadian winter? Wow!

So exactly how much water do we use? Statistics indicate that the average household in the U.S. uses 100 gallons, per person, per day. In the West, some cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas use as much as 200 gallons per person per day, as shown in figure 19 of this report. Some of that goes to watering the lawn and washing the car; still, indoor water use is 70 gallons per person per day, broken out as shown here on EPAs website. On the boat, we decrease our household fresh water use by using sea water to flush our toilet, and take our clothing to the laundromat, so we use less water than the land-based, but by EPAs numbers, we would still expect to use 35 gallons per person per day. Our water tank is considered “large” by standards of a boat our size, and we don’t have to be quite as rigorous as Strathy, but if we didn’t do something toward conserving, we’d be doing the garden hose dance every two days. Yikes! I’m not going to list a series of “how to conserve water” tips (other folks do that better, here or here) or wax enthusiastic about the joys of Navy showers (turn on the water, wet yourself down, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water, rinse off), but think about it, okay?

(originally published February 1, 2009)

Of Jellyfish and Plastic Bags

If you google "beaches" and "jellyfish" together, you get articles from the Med to Australia about resorts inundated with these stinging blobs. Here in the Chesapeake, NOAA publishes predictions of the likelihood of encountering sea nettles, based on water temperature and salinity: http://155.206.18.162/seanettles/ People are reduced to swimming in Lycra skins or in small areas fenced off with fine mesh nets. And much of the population explosion is due to overfishing the jellyfish's natural predators, sea turtles and tuna and other similar large fish.

The poor sea turtles! If that wasn't bad enough, when they do try to get a jellyfish meal, they can be far too often tricked by an imposter in the form of a plastic bag. We tried a little experiment:

We tried to see if we could make a plastic bag look like a jellyfish by putting it on the end of a boat pole and swirling it around in the water.

Here's a jellyfish we photographed in Mill Creek last month.

And here's our best attempt with the plastic bag.

Okay, it wouldn't necessarily fool me, but then, I'm not swimming in the murky water, either. And if nothing else, it was the starting point for some great conversation on the dock!

I doubt this was what the City of Annapolis had in mind when the plastic bag ban was being discussed last year. I hate seeing plastic bags caught high in trees or pasted to fences, and we've seen them, and mylar party balloons fallen back to earth, 50 miles off shore in the emptiness of the Atlantic. On the other hand, I'm not particularly a fan of such things as bans, it seems to me awfully like trying to regulate common sense. We bring reusable cloth bags to the grocery store (when we remember). Whether we do paper or plastic is so much about how we can reuse the bags after they've carried our stuff home. Paper bags so rarely work in our boat life - they are heavier, bulkier, and besides - you can hardly use them to pack your wet swimsuit home from the pool!

Click on the monkey's fist to read others bloggers on this topic.