Just a few points on this:

1. With global warming comes extended insect ranges and life cycles. Last summer was long and dry and many insects had extra life cycles - the oak caterpillars had a population explosion, for example: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=4814

Trying to stop that by spraying is a little like trying to stop the San Andreas fault from moving by bracing it with concrete and rebar. In some cases, farmers are going to have to switch crops or find some resistant varieties.

2. The effectiveness of aerial spraying is highly questionable. If farmers do start having an infestation problem, they should use targeted actions - like spraying from the ground in their orchards.

3. As a biochemist I can tell you that Checkmate is like fresh spring water compared to what gets spread up and down the Central Valley and along our coasts and roads each year - and you'd probably be better off bathing in Checkmate than you would rolling in the muddy flats behind the ex-military base at Moffat Field. We apply millions of pounds of extremely toxic pesticides every year - aldicarb, captan, chlorpyrifos, paraquat, and a hundred others - for the details, see http://www.panna.org/

Their 1998 report had this to say:

"There is good reason to be concerned about the continued annual use of hundreds of millions of pounds of chemicals on our farmlands,roadsides, forests, and homes. Research over the last 20 years has demonstrated that pesticides can cause cancer, sterility, birth defects, and damage to the nervous system. The steady increase in the use of carcinogenic pesticides— up 127% between 1991 and 1998—is especially disturbing in light of the concurrent increase in age-adjusted incidence of cancers associated with pesticide exposure— childhood leukemia, brain tumors, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, testicular cancer, and some forms of breast cancer."

"In an era of progress in protecting air and water from industrial emissions and cleaning up industrial hazardous waste sites, such skyrocketing trends in pesticide use contradict our nation’s stated goal of reducing toxic emissions. Lack of leadership in promoting protection of public health and the environment is evident at both the state and national levels. In particular, there is no concrete commitment to pesticide use reduction either nationally or in California."

Little has changed since then. Pesticide applications are a far greater concern as far as health goes than Checkmate - but aerial Checkmate application is a government pork scam - ineffective at best, harmful at worst, but of much less importance than the pesticide issue. Our real challenge is going to be switching California agriculture from the industrial scorched earth model to a large-scale organic model.

I agree that there are pesticides that are more toxic than Checkmate. However, these are rarely sprayed directly over residences. I was going to add a comment to the Sfgate article by AG K. , but there does not appear to be a place to do so.

In my discussions with people on Tuesday on another SFgate article comment section, it appears that people are unconvinced by my argument that we don't know precisely how toxic the Checkmate spray was that was applied over Santa Cruz in November 2007. It occurred to me that maybe I was not being precise enough in my analysis of my paper titled "Why The Low Application Rate Of The LBAM Spray Is Not Reassuring". See: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/27/18488919.php?show_comments=1

I went back over the numbers in my paper and came up with the following: Taking into account the total uncertainty of both the spray application rate (+/- a factor of 10) and Methyl T Ammonium Chloride Toxicity (+/- a factor of 82), it seems resonable to describe how much of the 95% confidence interval in the derivation of a TLV/TEEL is taken up by concentrations of MTAC which could be toxic to humans in the regions of the spray zone where the actual application rate of the spray exceeded the intended application rate by a factor of 10. The fraction of the confidence interval in this case is 40%. It is not entirely proper to directly say that this means that there is a 40% probability that the spray is toxic, based on what little we do know, but the distinction is minor and academic, in my opinion. So for AG K. to say that the spray has been demonstrated to be safe, or has very low possiblility of being dangerous, is pure hogwash. Unless he releases the actual concentrations of the chemicals in the spray, we will never know weather his analysis holds any water or not.

Note that you could in theory redo this analysis for the other 9 chemicals in the mix. If you did that, then trying to say the spray is safe would be like trying to flip a coin 10 times and have it always come up heads. Simillar results happen in real experiments, such as where in a lab a rat is fed an LD1 (1% die) level of one chemical along with an LD1 level of another chemical, and then both he and all the other rats fed the same doses all die (ie LD100).

Also, this analysis assumes the spray was applied at a rate of 80 grams per acre. As I discuss in the paper, it appears that a water dilution, possibly containing surfactant, may have been applied at a rate of 18 kg per acre. This would of course make it necessary to do a rewrite, if we could ever get the CDFA to release the concentration and chemical name of the surfactant.

Elections are great, if you can afford the $200 entry fee to the democracy school. AGK is still winning the PR war with too many people in his declaration that the "pheromone" is safe. Acitivist motivated changes in law often happen after the facts on the ground have changed, not usually before. Women's lib happened in the 70's but we still don't have the ERA, even though the facts on the ground are moving in the proper direction. Pasadena sent up their police helecopters to try to block the path of the malathion spraying vehicles, but to no avail. Will a local ordinance or city charter amendment really stop the feds from spraying? It would be great if you could find a federal judge who would agree with you.

Ooops... The time stamp on Bonobo's post put my last comment before his/hers. It should have gone after.

How'd this one get by the Cali Proposition System?

Try to fight this with science and stats on their turf- the regulatory system? Nope. Why put faith in dysfunction:

Here's the thing: it is federally backed, so the environmental mvmt is in for a big surprise when they learn their efforts through the regulatory system will be in vain and the spray WILL be done

THE BEST [AND ONLY] WAY to fight this type of nonsense is through local control efforts like the (Global Exchange and the Daniel Pennock Democracy School).

Facts are facts. Toxicity depends on concentration as well as exposure. In the case of the Checkmate LBAM sprayings, both were infintessimal. The CDFA collected dispersal information in each spraying--finding a documented median of 135 particles/average 114 per sq. ft.(original spray objectives were 800-900 particles per sq. ft.) from dispersal of 17 grams per acre of Checkmate (75% of which was water. The highest measured concentration was 809 particles per sq. ft.

Given that Checkmate LBAM may generously be called a skin irritant, the exposure of any individual in the spray path could not possibly constitute a potential risk dosage.

Robert Dolezal
California Association of Nurseries and Garden Centers

Not long ago, Scientists were sure that man could not travel faster than 60mph. Its not the conclusion this Robert Dolezal gets that bothers me, its his level of confidence that he is sure and he is correct. Than attitude alone discredits his work. The top scientists always qualify that their results are within what we know today and only within the perspective that they took, which may later be proven incomplete or just wrong.

The amount of checkmate that each person was exposed to in the spray zones in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties was millions of times greater than what they are exposed to from the natural moth pheromone. And even the Department of Pesticide Regulation admitted that the ingredients and the full checkmate product are toxic. So even though the amount per acre was small, it was still millions of times greater than natural moth pheromone that people are typically exposed to.

I would like to ask Robert, who pretends to know science, exactly how much of the toxic checkmate would in fact be a problem. Also, how many particles of it that we can't even see does it take to start a tumor growing or begin the process of creating cancer in a small child.

There is not a single drop of natural moth pheromone in Checkmate. Checkmate is a poison, acknowledged so by every report of government agencies. Checkmate does not exist on this earth naturally. Because he says it is just a small amount, a small amount compared to what? A similar small amount of plutonium can take out a major chunk of the entire earth.

One of the store owners in Santa Cruz announced he had 200 phone numbers of friends in the area. It took him months to call each one, but he said that nearly 50 of those 200 got sick after the spray. And what is so convincing is that almost half of them didn't even know they were sprayed. He told them the date of the spray when he called them and only then did they realize the connection with their illness and the spray.