San Juan Capistrano

My daughter and her family – and thus three of my five grandchildren – moved out to Southern California early last year, and we figured that February would be a great time to go see them. It turned out to be a good decision, since we avoided snowstorms in New Jersey … and had nice sunny weather in LA! I had a bit of r&r, and we beat the swallows to San Juan Capistrano this year … & took in some other sites around the region as well.
I hadn’t been out to LA for quite a while (since a 2007 trip for CLSA), and decided to prepare for the trip by reading Smogtown: A Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, an interesting book written by a couple of local journalists that came out the following year. They teased that “Orange County got its name from the color of its atmosphere, not its indigenous fruit,” and included some fascinating historical pictures… as well as a brief description of the complicated pollution trading scam (later described in greater detail by one of the authors) of a former CalTech professor turned ‘smog-credit swindler’ turned shady Philippine gold/West African ‘money repatriation’ entrepreneur.

‘Smogtown’ and ‘Sunsmoke’

Despite such tales, the authors promised in the book’s Preface that it wouldn’t be “a campy, low-brow take on the subject,” which made me think about the last book I had read about LA’s smog – a definitely campy, 1985 pulp fiction novel called Sunsmoke. You might recall that I spent many of the early years of my career doing atmospheric dispersion modeling – and this is definitely the only novel I have ever read written by a fellow dispersion modeler. They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover – but this one comes pretty close, with a nasty smog creature arising from the monitor screen of the early 80’s-era computer. The novel is replete with such moving passages as the following:

“He had been right about the clean air episode. The transport algorithm parameters had been modified. This particular solution scheme, SHASTA, Sharp and Smooth Transport Algorithm, depended on a balance between numerical diffusion (for stability) and antidiffusion (to undo the effects of the numerical diffusion). But the antidiffusion step had been amplified and the chemical composition of smog had been separated as effectively as if in a gas chromatograph.”

Yup, pretty racy novelistic writing… so what’s not to like, huh??