Popular Mechanics’s Andrew Moseman has out a list of five climate change studies that, while they got a lot of circulation, make overbroad claims or have otherwise gotten unmerited attention within the wider public. His primary source is a solid one: Gavin Schmidt, the NASA climate modeler who is the leading light at the influential blog site Real Climate. Schmidt is high on the list of bad people kept by those who deny climate change as our fault, particularly bad, or as something worth spending money to stop. The list is a reasonable one to these eyes, too. The highlighted news events plausibly have indeed received attention beyond their merit over the long haul.

Not here is clear explanation, item by item, whether the asserted hype was largely by media, by p.r. handlers who promoted the studies as news (which doesn’t get media off the hook if they bit on it), or by the researchers themselves.

More important is that the roundup’s purpose, as it explains itself, is also not entirely clear. Knowing Schmidt’s history, his worry clearly is that weak or oversold stories, even if they tend to raise the kind of alarm that climate change deserves, only make the public more cynical if they don’t hold up. Thus they backfire against the larger truth that they may, in tone, reflect. But the hed is ambiguous. It can easily be taken as fronting a list of exemplary, overblown studies that typify the whole field. Nor does Moseman clearly portray Schmidt as the anti global warming crusader (and hero or villain depending on which extreme of the climate opinion spectrum one consults) that he is. Moseman only says Schmidt “concurs with the consensus view that the planet’s temperature is rising due largely to human activity.” That is bland and far short of what might be a more apt description of Schmidt: He is among the most outspoken and influential advocates of fast, firm, and extensive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid planetwide calamity.

One worries that the list of hyped stories - nearly all of which suggested, in public telling, that mankind is fooling dangerously with the climate - is comfort to many readers who prefer to think the whole greenhouse effect fuss is some kind of fraud. That clearly is not Moseman’s intent but still … one worries.

-CP

-CP

All of a sudden it seems that the news is full of big transparent cylinders and ponds teeming with algae. They transform CO2 and sewage or other cheap feed into methane, feedstocks for petroleum-like biofuels, and ethanol fuels while adding little or no greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. The appeal is easy to understand: they convert sunlight into an inherently storable, energy-rich substance and, if set up right, don’t demand huge water resources and can be put in sunny areas unsuitable for ordinary agriculture. The idea has been around for decades. What is new is a flow of private investment joining money from DOE, practical innovation, and the prospect of an actual business demonstration for the stuff.

This week’s big algae energy story came with announcement of a pilot plant that a Florida company called Algenol, in alliance with Dow Chemical, plans to put up in Texas. Its main aim is to take CO2 from a chemical plant, add a few more nutrients and a lot of algae, and put the watery broth inside sunlit tubes big as sewer pipes. Out will come ethanol. The eventual aim is to use it as feedstock for production of plastic. Initially it will be sold as fuel. Per acre it is supposed to be far more productive and efficient than conversion of corn to ethanol. One must acknowledge that this pilot appears to be hardly the greenest thing on Earth. The chemical plant gets its CO2, presumably, from fossil-based sources. And once you burn the ethanol, right into the air it goes. At least it does double duty before oonching higher the overwarming of our world. And, in principle, if they make plastics from the ethanol, the carbon winds up “sequestered” in plastic consumer goods, or destined for the landfill or recycling or who knows what. Nowhere in the immediate coverage are any such big-picture aspects addressed, alas.

Stories:

• NYTimes (Jun 28) - Matthew L. Wald: Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide into Fuel ;
• Reuters (Jun 30): Dow and Algenol Partner for Algae-Based CO2-to-Ethanol Pilot Project ; Includes a common and unfortunate way to describe size, saying the carbon footprint is “80 percent smaller” than that of corn ethanol. That forces people to stop a tiny moment to be sure what it means (which is: it is 20 percent as big as corn ethanol’s injury to Earth).
• Dow Jones (Jun 30): Algenol, Dow Chemical Partner For Algae-To-Fuel Pilot Plant ;
• Popular Science - Adrian Covert: From Algae to Ethanol to Plastics ;
• Fort Myers News-Press (Jul 1) Dave Breitenstein: Bonita Spring-based company elaborates on pullout ; Details on the energy politics and red tape that drove the pilot plant out of Florida ; This follows Breitensteins’ Jun 29 story, Lee County business to grow in Texas ;

Other Algae Energy News:

• Arizona Republic (Jul 2) Ryan Randazzo : ASU seeks funding to become green-energy powerhouse ; This biz-section story stops well short of describing how, in terms of basic energetics, algae stack up against solar cells etc. But it is closer to useful that the lot listed above, putting all kinds of solar energy (which algae reactors use) in some context.
• Carlsbad  Current-Argus (NM, Jul 1) Tom Schneider: Algae biofuels project goes commercial ; Is this right? It says here that with 5000 acres of algae bioreactors, New Mexico will satisfy half its diesel fuel requirements. The source, one notes, is a Congressman. No word what nutrient and CO2 source will flow through the reactors either.

And Finally, energy from Algae AND Jatropha trees:

• Palm Beach Post - Susan Salisbury : $20M biofuel plant near Delray planned ; Another biz story in which the fundamental importance of the news is hard to discern. The new plant combines mass culturing of algae with oil derived from the jatropha plant. Several universities and a national lab are in on it.
• AP (Jun 26) Hilary Lehman : Jatropha becomes big biofuel buzzword ; Finally a story with more than a whiff of sensible reporting. Not much on algae, but it takes some of the sheen off the hype of recent years over jatropha oil as a petroleum substitute.
• Jatropha’s star already was falling a bit. Last month a Dutch report concluded that its oil yield depends so heavily on heavy irrigation and fertilizer that its advantages over other biofuel sources fades. One good summary is a Financial Times blog June 10 by Kate MacKenzie: Jatropha may be a water hog;

About four and a half years ago in the NYTimes Matthew L. Wald wrote of Galena, a tiny Alaska town, and its ambitions for reliable energy that does not require importing a lot of oil or burning the local coal or the fickle winds or a sun that doesn’t shine during the long winter. The hamlet’s elected leaders were in serious negotiation instead for a small (10 megawatt)  reactor from Toshiba, a tidy and highly automated thing roughly on the scale of what runs an atomic-powered submarine. It’d run for 30 years on one fuel load. So they say.

The Tracker does not remember reading any updates on that until the last few weeks. The potential of small nuclear reactors, sometimes called atomic batteries, seems to be getting a continued, serious look up there. Most recently, again at the Times, its “Green Inc.” writer Stefan Milkowski reported Tuesday that the Toshiba plan in Galena is perking along, and that the sizeable city of Fairbanks is listening to a developer’s proposal to put in a larger, but still small, reactor. This latter one is a “power module” offered by  Hyperion, a New Mexico outfit that has never installed such a thing. But Hyperion has been working on its design for some time. It also is advance-marketing them to, among other outfits, Canada’s oil shale mining companies that need a lot of process heat to get the tarry stuff loose from the sand in which it lies.

If it happens, it won’t likely happen soon. Nuclear Regulatory Commission permits, Milkowski reports, may take even longer for these novel little ones than for more familiar, giant nuclear power facilities.

Alaska media have been reporting these developments, too. Prominent among stories there:

• Fairbanks News Miner - Christopher Eshleman (June 15) : Man proposes nuclear power plant near Fairbanks ;
• Fairbanks News Miner - Christopher Eshleman (June 16): Federal regulations might slow nuclear plant near Ester ; Good example of a second-day story to put the first day’s news in calm perspective ;
• Fairbanks News Miner (Op-Ed) Dan Swift: Coal’s only alternative: nuclear ; Author is an emeritus professor at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute.

Related Stories:

• Christian Science Monitor (Dec 29, 2008) Mark Clayton: Backyard reactors:  Firms shrink the nukes ;

Grist for the Mill: Hyperion Power Generation, Inc. ;

True Confession on Skewed Energy Policy Tracking: Keeping tabs on a small nuclear effort such as this is easy - I have not, by contrast, even tried to put a lasso around the immense, mostly political, daily coverage of the big and messy cap and trade bill headed for the Senate with White House and Democratic Party blessing, or the equally big and messy, nuke- and fossil-rich energy proposal with which Congressional Republicans have countered.  Ditto for such things as the long-delayed, Supreme Court-propelled  EPA waiver permitting California and other state’s to set CO2 standards even tougher than federal regs demand. Those are vital and major turns in environmental policy. The stories however are not only widely circulated but, I tell myself, carry few surprises or novelties for most readers of this site. The accounts from Alaska do.

 Lately, just about the only news that the Air Force’s stealthy F-22 Raptor do-everything air superiority fighter has made is as a bouncing, political football. It’s really expensive. No other country can deal all that well with America’s older jets as it is so the Pentagon itself isn’t so sure it needs a lot more of them. But its manufacture creates jobs and brownie points for members of Congress with pertinent districts. Lobbyists are all over the place. Anyway, a few weeks ago a photo of one broke out of that news cul de sac. It shows one of them flying fast, maybe low, and certainly right over the US aircraft carrier John C. Stennis in the Gulf of Alaska. A Navy photographer fingered a shutter button. It captured the aircraft looking like a supersonic silver and white stork with stark petals of condensation jutting wide like vaporous, extra wings. The picture has gone all over among airplane buffs.

Yesterday LiveScience released editor Robert Roy Britt’s tidy explainer. It has something to do with a Prandtl-Glauert singularity. Military jet and rocket people, who see such things all the time, sometimes call them shock collars or shock eggs. Nice job to see a chance for an enjoyable science tale with no real news but with timeliness. (And if one looks up Prandtl-Glauert, Wikipedia promptly nods in agreement with Britt’s tale).
Not that the picture is worth a lot of inches, but The Tracker does want to know more.  For instance, are we sure the plane was supersonic? I tend to believe it - words like Prandtl-Glauert singularity are persuasive and Wikipedia has a pic even better in some ways than the F-22 one. But it’s not easy to go supersonic near sea level and the altitude isn’t given. Plus, one sees trails and blooms of evanescent condensation coming off wings of clearly subsonic jetliners with their flaps extended. What’s that about? Maybe it’s just a low-pressure phase change, like clouds in the lee of a mountaintop? And what about those persistent white plumes trailing from the wingtips? What effect is that? The transonic regime clearly doesn’t extend very far from the plane. Hmmm. Maybe I should shut up and just appreciate a nice snap, eh?

-CP

 Oh what the heck, time for some really diverting science.

A routine video inspection of the sewer pipes beneath city streets turned up several icky pulsating blobs. They look….alien. Icky anyway. It made it to video on line, went viral, was quite a sensation. A sewer monster, for sure.

The News & Observer’s Josh Shaffer has the story, and the explanation. Such things, he reports, can get big as watermelons.

Want to see it? There is video at Channel 14, Carolina News14 ;

Pic: No, not in Raleigh. This is a very very rare bipedal sewer lamprey. By John R. McConnell, source ;

-CP

A thinking person’s first question, upon hearing from a scientific expedition just back from Myanmar, might be “Wow. What can you say about life in a nearly closed-off country with such a strange and cruel clique of absolute, astrology-addled dictators?” But no, accounts say all the scientists came back with is another missing link, ho hum, is that it?

The news does merit some interest for academics. It is that fossil teeth and other remains uncovered by the team imply that 38 million years ago in Southeast Asia there lived a possible ancestor of modern anthropoid primates, a group that today includes mankind and such apes as chimps, gorillas, and orangs. One US member of the team, from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, told the AP’s Bangkok based reporter Michael Casey that the find suggests that while Africa saw the radiation of such animals into those seen today, it was only because a common ancestor from Asia had migrated into Africa to set the stage. It thus would help refute suggestions that the entire progression from monkey-like animal to us occurred in Africa. Thus it may add one piece to the puzzle and the pageant of human origins, but does not much alter those pieces already in place.
Casey handles the story calmly, making no effort to trumpet old bromides about missing links or paradigms shattered and, heaven forbid, “this changes everything” as was absurdly declared by publicists recently for the German primate fossil known as Ida.

Not so circumspect is The Independent’s science editor Steve Connor, who runs it for his UK audience under the head “Rival fossil challenges ‘missing link.’” He  boldly declares this new handful of teeth dethrones Ida and has “far better claims to the crown” as missing link between man and the rest of the animal kingdom. Jeez….oh c’mon. That’s a made-up crown, “missing link” is an empty vessel for news, and even on its own terms the new Myanmar fossil appears to provide ambiguous evidence.

Discovery Channel’s Jennifer Viegas relays the news, too. She also makes reference to a separate spot of news, missed a few weeks ago by The Tracker, that a University of Pittsburgh research believes that the physical characteristics of modern humans imply a closer relation to Orangutans than to African great apes. That, one thinks, is awfully hard to square with genetic evidence. For more on that, see for example, Nat’l Geographic News - James Owen: Orangutans May Be Closest Human Relatives, Not Chimps.

The press release from the Carnegie (see Grist below) primes the pump heartily - asserting in its headline that the new remains challenge the role in our ancestry of such primates as “Ida.” That’s good, but it also seems to endorse the validity, until now, of Ida’s missing linkitude as newsworthy. (One must add that Ida is indeed a magnificent specimen for its age and preservation).

Grist for the Mill: Carnegie Mus. of Nat. History Press Release ;

Early yesterday The Tracker noticed a good gallery of pictures of rockets, real and imagined, that New Scientist put up along with some reporting on NASA by David Shiga. All sorts of launchers, new and old and big and small, are there. It looked like fodder for a post but time ran out. Today, no excuse. A few other reporters have also landed with accounts of ferment in and outside NASA as the U.S. takes a deep breath and ponders the right future for Americans in space, wearing spacesuits with flags on their shoulders. The goal of a moon base by 2020 or so, with Mars to follow, and whether budget or equipment - or logical justification - to do it are in the pipeline are all getting review.

Rockets are dramatic and provide a sexy angle for the larger issues of strategy and mission balance for the world’s premier space agency. Advocates for the existing Constellation program developed by the Bush administration, and for other strategies are making their cases. Much of the news seems to arise from a June 17 meeting of the independent Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee , chaired by longtime gov’t aerospace adviser Norman Augustine, in DC.
Other stories:

• AP - Seth Borenstein : NASA manager pitches a cheaper return-to-moon plan ;  He focusses on one alternative to the Constellation program’s new Ares family - a space shuttle stack but with no space shuttle. Not as powerful as an Ares V, not a new idea either, but plausible and much cheaper, it says here.
• Fast Company - Kit Eaton: Will NASA Reinvent Its Lunar Rocket Program? ; Same topic, with more feature style.

An animation of the shuttle-derived vehicle in action is on YouTube and reveals that even NASA depicts sound in outer space. Plus, at a site called Universe Today, writer Nancy Atkinson ties the news up rather handsomely and throws in some evidence she gathered from “several NASA twitterers” that the possibility of imminent change may delay the test launch of an Aries 1-X rocket. And over at NASA WATCH, Keith Cowing comments on the new-old idea for a shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle.

Grist for the Mill: A site called Tall George has a polished, visual summary of the Constellation Project’s architecture and many samplings of other concepts.

  How many times has every reporter thought, upon publishing a piece of apparently new news and then getting a few phone calls or letters with additional info: This is great! But too late! Wish I’d known this before deadline.? It comes to mind upon getting an email the other day, shortly after having posted on a clever-sounding idea for a buoyant, free-standing elevator tower of immense height. Built from pressurized sleeves of hydrogen or helium, it might plausibly hoist heavy payloads to the stratosphere or even to low earth orbital altitude. The CBC’s Quirks and Quarks had that story (earlier post here), attributing the idea to a group at Canada’s York University. A few other outlets had also recently covered that team’s progress.

A fellow named Nelson Semino wrote to us, “…I believe you like some other have been a bit late with this news … please visit http://spaceshaft.org.  The first publication of the theory was the 2nd Space Elevator conference in Luxumbourg, December 2008, prior to that I planned to participate at the 2007 Space Elevator games but financial shortcomings made it impossible for me to do so.”

One surmises that Mr. Semino had not the resources to develop the idea as fully in some regards as have the Canadian researchers highlighted at Quirks and Quarks. Perhaps - almost surely when one thinks about it - others previously have mused or even calculated upon the idea that building, in essence, a vertical airship fastened at one end to the ground might, if large enough, support a platform on its nose protruding into orbital space. And just maybe one could have lifts in its core to put big heavy things up there without the noise, fuss, bother, pollution, and cost of rocket propulsion (except of course to go sideways from the top and achieve orbit). His website is rather detailed, and is gracious in acknowledging that the Canadian professors have in some ways advanced the ball. There appear to be differences, such as whether to use a lighter-than-air gas in the thing or to have rigid chambers at lower internal pressure, hence less density, than surrounding atmosphere.

He also, it must be noted, claims a patent. Now, would not any reporter covering the new and seemingly singular idea for a giant buoyant tower want to have been able to point to a history of similar ideas? All of a sudden, the story would have depth, dimension, and a lot more personal interest. I don’t even know where Mr. Semino and the rest of this collaborators live, but his email appears to have come via Amsterdam. I am glad that he wrote.

(The other thing one would like to know: has somebody with the proper credential made a few calculations and concluded that such ideas just won’t work? That’d be interesting too)

-CP

George Johnson, as many long time readers of the NYTimes know, is a Santa Fe-based writer of grace and deep curiosity about the natural as well as the made world. He provides, on p. 1 but below the section’s fold a fine display of his relaxed but punctilious approach to story. But one infers, while speculating, that it ought to be read while keeping in mind a common dilemma of reporting. Which is, just because one’s protagonist is the most charming, engaging, imaginative person one has recently met does not mean he or she has the facts straight. It is a Scientist At Work piece, about an archeologist with a maverick, not quite outre, unifying hypothesis tying together pre-Columbian ruins from Mexico to Colorado that happen to be nearly on a straight north-south line. It is engaging but, as Johnson keeps saying, while most in the field read of it avidly, they aren’t buying it. Yet its author is so bold and confident that … well, one can almost feel the conflicts caroming like scattershot in Johnson’s cranium as he balances what is enjoyably stimulating with what is persuasive.

The lead story, with a big picture of two fireflies backed up against one another real friendly-like, is a detailed piece by the exuberant Carl Zimmer on the scintillating love and evolution puzzles to be found among these insects. The Tracker had absolutely no idea that half a dozen different species might be blinking in one American meadow simultaneously, or that there are thousands of kinds of them around the world. This also is largely a scientist-at-work profile, of a woman transfixed by glow bugs since grad school. One thing confused: Exactly how can it be simultaneously true that adult fire flies never eat, and yet (as we’re told three paragaphs later) one species eats other fireflies? An answer to do with defensive toxins is implied but it threw me for awhile.

Other notable headlines:

• Amy Lee: Tibetan Monks and Nuns Turn Their Minds Toward Science ; Terrific account, not of any specific science, but of science as a way of thinking. Plus, it seems that Tibetan monks usually get all the ink. Nice to read about the nuns.
• Kenneth Chang - Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh ; So imagine you’re at this big meeting of bona fide fossil scientists and they decide to take a field trip to a Biblically-inspired museum of deep time, where the staff meets them with agreat friendly hello. You’d go along, right? So did Chang. Nice story, with no surprises except perhaps that it stayed rather friendly.
• Donald G. McNeil: New Flu Vaccine Approved - for Dogs ; An unusual context for describing some flu basics.  Also, another reason why it is cruel that dog breeders came  up with pug-nosed varieties.
• Abigail Zuker MD - BOOKS/ The Puzzle Of Spaces That Soothe ; Conversation fodder. Almost fringe medicine, too. Why do some environments - just by their color and composition, settle the mind, maybe ease healing?

Plenty more. Whole Section ;

The Gainesville Times’s  Melissa Weinman on Sunday reported what one might guess from instinct or first principles, but apparently nobody had reason to think about it. It surprised a University of Georgia researcher when it popped out of some statistics he gathered on tornadoes in the US Southeast. In and around Atlanta, he found, if the latter half of a year is dryer than normal, the following spring’s tornado season is almost always light. Now he and colleagues will see if the pattern holds for other areas as well. It is in Environmental Research Letters. The Tracker doesn’t know his fugacity from a latent heat sink, but this seems to make some sense - thunderstorms arise from convection and condensation in moist air, so dry soil might mean less moisture for the updrafts. Or not. Just guessing.

This news has another wrinkle in the media. That striking image to the upper right was taken in Wyoming early this month during an exercise called VORTEX2 sponsored by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. On the Washington Post’s site is  long and admirably detailed write-up of that by enviro writer and weather blogger Andrew Freedman. He joined researchers for the field study, no doubt hoping to be there when they came across some dreadful F-awful funnel lofting cows as it darted from the black skirt of a supercell billowing over the western plains. No such luck. The pic is the ONLY tornado the effort, with its fleet of storm chasers, captured and Freedman was there. It was, he writes, the most intensely observed tornado, scientifically speaking, ever.  But overall the spring tornado season in the Great Plains may have been the sparsest in at least half a century. Freedman cites the Georgia study as a pertinent, possible, partial explainer, too. Really partial. Last year was rainy in parts of the western U.S. that VORTEX2 prowled so as a data point, it may be problematic.

Freedman provided a dramatic photo album from VORTEX2 in an earlier post. Give me California and earthquakes any day. Just thinking about being in the way of one of those twisters gives me the vapors.

*UPDATE: A prominent daily writer of science news tells The Tracker that he looked into the story and, consulting with a climatologist of note, demurred because of a strong hunch that while there may be true correlation between drought and tornado, it reflects neither cause-and-effect nor mere coincidence. A stronger possibility is that both are succumbing to the influence of the El Nino - Southern Oscillation in the far Pacific. ENSO clearly tilts the odds back and forth on drought all across the US. There also are suggestions it changes the likelihood of tornadic collision among air masses. So, in places drought may precede or accompany fewer tornadoes but that does not mean it is the cause. It’s like - um, well, the Fourth of July brings more sunburns from going to picnics and watching parades. It’s a day when more Americans eat hot dogs. But that does not mean hot dogs cause sunburns. And for both cases, only more research can say for near-sure.
Grist for the Mill: U. Ga. Press Release ;

-CP

Any science reporters - or those just interested in the state of the craft - with a smidgen time on their hands ought to check in this week on line for doings at the World Conference of Science Journalists, sponsored by a whole slew of organizations including the World Federation of Science Journalists. The preceding link goes to a page that, at its top, links to a news feed including twitter info.

The Tracker just filled out the meeting’s survey on science journalism for those making a living, or part of a living, at it. It’s not painful, and asks some reasonable questions whose answer statistics I look forward to seeing. It doesn’t take long and is open to all whether you’re there or not.

Anybody blogging the meeting and thinks his or her offerings are can’t-miss, let me know via the suggest stories link up top and I’ll take a look.

-CP

 In yesterday’s Inquirer science and enviro writer Sandy Bauers presents about as easily read and memorable an example one might like on how to chop a somewhat technical and obscure chemical pollution problem into manageable bites. She starts it off with personal recognition of the exasperations of worryng over carbon footprints. She then says there’s another for her, and you too dear reader: the nitrogen footprint. She mixes local references to why it ought to matter with a few big-picture asides - such as reference to something The Tracker did not have on the radar, the International Nitrogen Initiative. She inflicts nothing like that diagram to the upper right. But she mentions overfertilized lawns, ag runoff, NOx and other airborne fertilizing species that rain onto the landscape from the collective exhaust of coal and other fossil fuel combustion, and  eutrophic impacts in waterways. A few things that disturb The Tracker aren’t in here so much, such as the shifts from wildflowers to grasses as that airborne stuff we make settles into the soil. But nearby crabs in a tailspin are. Nitrogen, she writes, is a good thing. But if it runs amok, “…it turns evil.”

Readers who know the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway may wonder how it is we can mess things up much by distributing a bit more of it. So a sentence or two mentioning the difference between relatively inert N2 gas, and more problematic, N-rich molecules like ammonia, oxides of nitrogen, etc., would have been good. It’s a column - a format with only so much room.

Grist for the Mill: Int’l Nitrogen Initiative ;

Speaking of Philly, another (blog) on the Inquirer’s site provides a different way to handle an enviro issue. Bauers uses a style akin to a friendly chat across the backyard fence. But in his Attytood column blogger Will Bunch, on the same day has a more in-your-face assault against forces resistant to eco regulations. He takes on a Rush Limbaugh, and salutes Paul Krugman’s furious column the other day in the NY Times. Its theme: “Treason against the planet.” Wonder which column will change more minds?

Pic - source ;

-CP