California Termites and the Atmosphere

California is famous for its picturesque sunsets, year-round mild weather, excellent surf, and largely progressive politics, including forward-thinking greenhouse emission policies. This week on Sea Change Radio, however, we learn about a less pleasant claim to fame for the golden state. Today we're speaking with two scientists from Johns Hopkins University who are working to uncover the mysteries behind a dangerous greenhouse gas: sulfuryl fluoride. One such mystery is why so much of this harmful atmospheric compound originates from Southern California. Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller walk us through changes in termite-eradication practices, how termites are not all alike, and what needs to happen in the nation's most populous state and elsewhere to solve the problem. Narrator | 00:02 - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise. Dylan Gaeta | 00:20 - These sort of policies mandate emissions reductions of greenhouse gases across the board, but in all of these cases, sulfuryl fluoride isn't included in that list of greenhouse gases that require emissions reductions. So in, in that sense, it's sort of slipping through the cracks or under the radar, and are greenhouse gas emissions accounting. Narrator | 00:40 - California is famous for its picturesque sunsets, year-round mild weather, excellent surf, and largely progressive politics, including forward-thinking greenhouse emission policies. This week on Sea Change Radio, however, we learn about a less pleasant claim to fame for the golden state. Today we're speaking with two scientists from Johns Hopkins University who are working to uncover the mysteries behind a dangerous greenhouse gas: sulfuryl fluoride. One such mystery is why so much of this harmful atmospheric compound originates from Southern California. Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller walk us through changes in termite-eradication practices, how termites are not all alike, and what needs to happen in the nation's most populous state and elsewhere to solve the problem. Alex Wise | 01:35 - I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Dylan Gaeta and Scot Miller Dylan is a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins School of Environmental Engineering, and Scot is an assistant professor there. Scot, Dylan - welcome to Sea Change Radio. Dylan Gaeta | 01:57 - Yeah, thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. Alex Wise | 02:01 - So, Dylan, you are the lead on this study that is just getting published entitled, California Dominates US Emissions of the Pesticide and Potent Greenhouse Gas, sulfuryl fluoride. Explain the genesis of your research and why people should be aware of this. Dylan Gaeta | 02:23 - I hadn't heard of sulfuryl fluoride until I, until I came to Hopkins and started my PhD here. And this was around 2020 and I started working with Scot. And so Scot had been in contact with a colleague from the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratories, who was sort of at the end of his career and had started looking at this gas around 2015. NOAA started, no, no, global Monitoring Laboratory started making these measurements and sort of pass it on to Scot as to say like, well, I'm out of time to, to look at this myself, but maybe this would be a good, um, topic to look into further. And so, so I, um, we started digging into where the SC is emitted in the world and like what, what, what it's used for, um, how it's been accumulating in the global atmosphere. Um, and when we started looking at those measurements, we sort of found, um, a sort of striking lack of information about the global distribution of this gas and where it's being used and what it's being used for and where, how much is being emitted in different parts of the world. And so what we did in our research study is that we, we used atmospheric measurements that were collected by our colleagues over at the, the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory. And we started and we used those atmospheric measurements to,