Magic in the air

So every now and then I get a bit of surprise living out here. I see something so unusual and seemingly out of place that I'm left wondering if it was there all along and I just never noticed it before. I had just such an incident this morning while driving to the post office. On the horizon in front of me was something new, a chain of mountains!

It's so odd to suddenly be reminded that I'm living in a basin surrounded by mountains, simply because we almost never see them. From where we are in Newport Beach it's only on rare clear days that we can see the chain of mountains to the north, and that's really shocking because it's not like they are all that far away (only about 40 km). I really wish I had pictures to show how utterly they disappear in the everyday smog. I figure that the only reason that I could see them today was because there is less traffic around the holidays, though it may also have something to do with the storms on the way.

Either way it's a stunning realization that the air is so polluted here that snow capped mountains can vanish. Yet, the EPA does not think that California should regulate the fuel efficiency standards of the vehicles in the state. It really is stunning that the state is going to sue the EPA to allow it to control what everyone knows to be toxic emissions. I just did a quick check of the EPA web page to make sure that the E stands for environment and not economic, because they really don't seem to be acting according to their mission.

And as a chemist I have to say that it's just a little scary to see how this kind of evidence of how much crap is in the air down here. So personally I'm all for ending this magic act of hiding mountains in thick air. I know I can't speak for the rest of the people out here, but I certainly would love to have the mountains actually in view all the time. It's certainly a lot better then an odd brownish skyline.