Tomorrow morning, Alameda is making the front page of The New York Times. Unfortunately, it's not a story of local success [although a local restaurant has fared much better in The Times!]

This news story provides no more information that locals in Alameda didn't already know about a simple scientific experiment transforming into a complicated City Council meeting and a vote to halt the experiment:

The fear and misinformation around geoengineering was on display earlier this year in Alameda, Calif., where scientists sprayed water vapor mixed with sea salts a short distance off the coast. They were testing a device that might someday be used to brighten clouds to reflect sunlight back into space. The Alameda experiment was harmless; the scientists just wanted to observe how the particles moved through the air.

But residents were so worried, they convinced the City Council to shut it down, even though Alameda’s own examination said the experiment posed no danger to public health or the environment.

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To be clear: I think the experiment was entirely reasonable and valid. However as I blogged at the time, I also think that given the messy manner by which the issue made its way to the City Council, the councilmembers were reasonable in finding it difficult to vote to allow the experiment to proceed on city-owned property in that context and moment. I hope the research team has been finding productive ways to move ahead and that the project can return to Alameda in some public form in the future.

What this news story does also add is a national context about how "the conspiracy minded" are currently drawn to geoengineering as a topic around which to cook up intentionally weird claims.

Today it's geoengineering (and also — very unfortunately — vaccines). Yesterday it was fluoride... and 5G towers... and radio-connected electrical meters that were the targets of choice for outlandish unscientific misinformation.

Going forward, this Saturday's climate-change event at Alameda Point looks like a great collaboration between science-minded organizations across Alameda.

Let's hope that the next time this city is featured on the front page of The New York Times, it's for an entirely positive reason.

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In today's other local-turned-national news: The Washington Post also has a piece on Vice President Kamala Harris's employement at a McDonald's in Alameda. Just like this blogger has done before, the WaPo columnist made heavy use of Reddit's r/alameda forum for his reporting...

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Also in The New York Times this week: Alameda's Fikscue made the paper's "America's Best Restaurants 2004" list. Now if only the economics of Bay Area restaurants weren't so awfully hard and the founders could open a full-service restaurant open more than just 2 days a week...

"The Conspiracy-Minded Pounce"... on Alameda