So many barrels of ink have been spilt describing  and so many big cutaway diagrams published of a previously obscure piece of heavy industrial, the  BP blowout preventer that couldn’t and was raised from the dead wellhead Saturday. One therefore can hardly wait for the company and its contractors to pull it apart and figure out why its brutal blind shear rams and other heavy duty valveworks didn’t obey orders.

For now, we’ll take what we can get. In the news is BP’s in house report on the spill’s apparent causes. It includes 25 recommended ways to slash the chances of such a thing happening again. The press release (see grist) says the recommendations are “designed to prevent” such things recurring. Prevent, huh? Like, never happen? One must recall the name the industry puts on that big lump of steel mentioned at the top of this post. It’s not a blowout push-the-button-and-cross-your-fingerser.

BP takes blame and shares it at the same time. Plenty of reporters looked at the 200-page report and the good ones made a few calls.

Stories:

• NPR – Scott Neuman: BP Report Blames Multiple Companies for Gulf Spill ; Richard Harris: audio report. Harris says it could easily have been prevented, no BOP necessary, if the engineers and operators had just watched their gauges more carefully.
• Washington Post – Steven Mufson, Joel Achenbach: BP releases reports on gulf well blowout ;
• Financial Times: Backlash greets BP’s internal report ;
• USA Today – Jessica Durando: BP: ‘Sequence of failures’ caused Gulf oil spill ;
• AP – Harry Weber (video report): BP Report Places Blame Everywhere ; written story Weber plus Michael Kunzelman, Dina Cappiello: BP report blames itslef, others for oil spill; One must read this for the quote from a lawyer set to sue BP.
• Guardian (UK) – Damien Carrington: BP oil spill report lists series of failures – mostly by others – that led to disaster ; Regardless of how the blame game ends, this calls the report an “astonishing catalogue of failures and errors.”
• Wall St. Journal – Tennille Tracy : BP Outlines Steps to Prevent Future Spills ;
• … plenty more, we’ll update this tomorrow.

IN THE MEANTIME – about those microbes and the elusive giant remnant plumes lurking in the deep. More signs the spill is pretty much over. If this were fiction, a morality tale, it wouldn’t end this way. Let’s hope it does.

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Microbes are eating BP oil without using up oxygen ; A second shoe to earlier news, a new government report reinforces hopes that microbes, aided by dispersant added to the plume as it emerged at the seafloor, have made the oil go sort of poof. It may have been luck, but some tell Borenstein the dispersant application may have his a “sweet spot” of high efficacy. Borenstein balances that with enduring doubts that this can end so cleanly as that.
• Houston Chronicle – Matthew Tresaugue: Feds find no dead zones caused by BP’s oil spill ;
• New Orleans Times-Picayune – Mark Schleifstein: Gulf oxygen levels are lower, but not deadly, in wake of spill, researchers report ;

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill: BP Press Release (includes link to full report);

....pic source http://tinyurl.com/2dnkhob

This morning, as you can also see one post down in Paul Raeburn’s take on a “science writing renaissance” discussion on line (to which I also plan to post a thought or two), finds a flurry of introspection among science writers re our craft. Here is more.

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First brightener for the day is a droll look by Richard A. Kerr at a NASA public affairs effort to be subtle and calm. It concerns results pertinent to the old Viking Landers and to the reliability of their  tools for detecting biology on Mars 34 years ago.   Kerr, a staffer at Science Magazine, has it at AAAS’s ScienceInsider, a haven for “Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy.” It’s about a spurt of “news” over the weekend on discovery that the chemical analysis set-up on those old landers had a weakness. If given certain perchlorate-rich soils the system may have been  blind to any life in it. For instance, a re-run of the same analytic procedure recently missed entirely the microbes in soil from Chile’s Atacama Desert.  For the tracker’s part, I have to say I glossed past these stories that Kerr addresses yesterday. I’d seen press release first and thought ho hum, let’s look for something more lively than this. Kerr’s look at it is sly. Quite crafty is his observation about NASA’s effort to distribute the test results while explaining they provide no reason to think there is life on Mars after all. Any such hope was torpedoed, he write, by a simple mistake: the release “had ‘Mars’ and ‘life’ in its first sentence.” Need one point out the irony of NASA’s public relations establishment, for decades among the most effective boosters (occasionally hypersonically so) of achievements, however small, by people in NASA or only remotely associated with it, now stymied by a story that it could not tamp DOWN?

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In a way, Kerr went upstream from the news to look at the process that led to its going public. Which leads us to a proposal made at a UK meeting, Science Online London on how the web is changing science. Participant Alice Bell posted, at her blog, her contribution to a panel session that included the likes of Ed Yong, commandant of the popular blogsite Not Exactly Rocket Science. Bell’s idea is to foster, in new media and old, more attention to the way science occurs and to its internal politics and tensions – “upstream” from the published results and tidy-seeming conclusions that are more commonly all that the public sees of it. She notes that long-form traditional journalism has always taken readers and viewers into the process of science, but there’s never been a whole lot of that. One wonders whether there is much audience for more upstream engagement by the public – it’s hard enough to get the wider public to pay attention to dramatic scientific outcomes – but public advocacy groups and other narrow audiences could do us all good if they had more windows on the headwaters of science. For that matter, Bell would like a more public upstream exposure of science journalism itself. A wiki newsroom?

For one thoughtful reaction to Bell’s post: science communications professor and pundit Matthew Nisbet uses it as a launching pad for ideas on how the new science journalism might effectively go upstream. His thoughts are serious, and one ventures to say, that makes them particularly challenging in journalism. Which is to say, when one is dead serious one may seem, to most of the public, a bit, uh, boring.

It is unclear what public would devour a heavy diet of such insights as are to be netted upstream. He describes standard news fodder and form as the “individual hero scientist (or team) struggling against the complexity and uncertainty of a problem.” To augment and enrich the stew, he yearns for “a broader, more thematic view of science not as a collection of a few individuals and personalities, but as an institution … embedded within a social and cultural context that is shaped by norms, economic factors, ideology, and culture.” Well, yes, that’d be great. It could be a syllabus for a fine upper division or graduate semester-long seminar in sociology. And there is a small if elite audience of movers and shakers (eg, congressional staffers and NGOs) that would look at such reports keenly. But it hardly seems stout competition for sports, murder, war, celebrity nonsense, corruption in private and gov’t agencies, cures for vile illnesses, and such science sensations as occasional hints of life on other planets that already scrap for the attention of the average citizen.

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Meanwhile, the convergence of media continues. At The Guardian, a bastion of legacy news reporting including serious science coverage, its writer Alok Jha a week ago introduced a “new Guardian science blogs network” and announced a science blogging festival to boot. The newspaper’s science writers have in essence opened their existing sci blog site to selected outsiders.  Contributors are to include, with the parenthetical remarks added by me,  Brian Switek (a paleontology whiz),  Jenny Rohn (cell biologist and night-owl netizen), Ed Yong (prolific sci writer, crazy-curious, hits to all fields), Deborah Blum (Pulitzer winner, prof. at Wisconsin, twittermaniacally swell person interested in yucks and yuks), Dorothy Bishop (neuroscientist and foe of idiocy in journalism), and Vaughan Bell (psychology mega-twitterer). A week in, it is clear from the site that it has a good deal more contributors than that.

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To wind this up, Jha in his intro to the Guardian’s new site highlights a most impressive statistic that I for one had missed (or don’t remember from) when it first came out in May. According to a Pew Research Center study, science news fills only 1 percent or so of the news hole in traditional press. But a whopping 10 percent of blogs are largely or all about science. That’s remarkable. It doesn’t say what the collective audience is for them, but the number of postings and the verbiage (and work by myriad science writers of many stripes, paid and unpaid) is large.

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- Charlie Petit

Blogger Bora Zivkovic alerted me via Facebook to an interesting post by Sheril Kirshenbaum (left) on her Discover Magazine blog, The Intersection. She asked her Facebook friends what they thought about the future of science writing, and she reprints their comments in her post, entitled “The Science Writing Renaissance.”

Take a look at the discussion, and the additional comments that the post attracted.

I was happy to see the discussion, because I think we are in the midst of a science-writing renaissance. I posted the following on Kirshenbaum’s page:

I think science writing is booming. I’m not sure whether it’s better to compare it to the California gold rush or the Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres to anybody who would go out and grab it. There seem to be opportunities to write, blog, and report everywhere. Before the Internet era, people used to sneer that freedom of the press belonged to him who owned one. A press, that is–an expensive piece of equipment, virtually always owned by white males. Now, we all own a printing press, and we have a much larger potential audience than even William Randolph Hearst had at his peak. If you borrow a computer and use the free wireless at Starbuck’s, the cost of a press is zero. The only thing that stops any science journalist from producing solid reporting for an audience of 10 million people is his or her own ingenuity.

It’s also true that salaries are not booming the way opportunities are. But journalists have always started by working for years for next to nothing, until they could claw their way into a job that actually paid a wage, but usually involved working lousy hours on a beat that no one cared about. It took a lot more clawing to get a job on the city staff, or as a specialist.

And it’s no different now. Write. Find a way to cover your rent. And if you’re good, and passionate, and persistent, you can drop the other job and make a living at this. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be starting a new teaching gig. I’m optimistic that the students will find jobs. The printing presses are out there, waiting to be used.

- Paul Raeburn

An idea that ancient history of a grand sort is buried in the Amazon’s soggy soil, one that has bobbed up and down over the years (see, at bottom of this post, the source of the illus), rose to the surface again this week. The Washington Post’s Juan Forero, filing from Peru, reports on the persistent group of maverick archeologists pretty sure that in millenniums past, the seemingly inhospitable rain forest was home to thriving, complex societies.

It’s a compelling story. Properly, Forero allows skeptics of the idea a fairly extensive riposte. But his language makes it clear he’s pretty much sold on the idea that towns and even cities spread through the forest long before Columbus sailed. He lists not only teams from Brazil and other nations of the region, but more from American, German, and Finish archeologists who assert that complex canal system, widely-spread agricultural operations, moats, causeways, and other centrally-organized societies once thrived, but built mainly with perishable wood rather than monumental stone, where now only new settlers or traditional hunter-gatherer groups eke by.

One hopes it’s true while suspecting that Werner Herzog has it right, the Amazon is a devourer of people – a place for dragging steam ships up river or drifting madly down them in search of conquest or natural resources, but not for self-contained civilizations barely out of the stone age.

Pic source Xenophilia.

- Charlie Petit

First off, the second story in the section. John Noble Wilford does a top-drawer job turning a husband and wife’s frequent sojourns to oases west of the Nile into a visit by his readers to the Egypt of 3,500 years ago. Wilford is a very capable story teller, but this rendition of recent archaeological discovery seems particularly well crafted – going from vignette to a wide story that builds brick by brick to its conclusions. I do have one question – was it really necessary to bring up the world’s top promoter of hisself and his nation’s ancient splendors, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities?  Sometimes I have suspected it is a law in the land of the pharaohs that press not be permitted to report on relics and ancient kingdoms without getting his name in it. But by happenstance I read a story today that is about Old Egypt and archaeology and does not mention it – on the AP wire by Paul Schemm. He reveals a Roman-era town in Egypt, under excavation, and introduces readers only to regional officials of the antiquities department. So, it’s legal to leave out his excellency the honorary Dr. Hawass. But maybe not politic.

The section lead is a disappointment but not for lack of sensible reporting. Denise Grady brings readers up to date on Bisphenol-A,or BPA, the plasticizer that (along with phthalates) is under fierce scrutiny, It is a possible endocrine disruptor and estrogen mimic that could, many fear, alter the development of sex characteristics in newborns and children. The disappointment is that the story tells us, at greater length than usual, that the evidence is circumstantial. Thus, up to date today is same as yesterday. Suggestive, yes; conclusive, no. We read more on the bothersome precautionary principle, and read the names of prominent people of widely different opinion. I should not, in truth, be disappointed. Had Grady found new arguments or evidence that point solidly to a solution to the FDA’s regulatory pickle, this would have been on the front page.

For satisfying, old-fashioned debunkery, read Benedict Carey’s story on how people learn, and on how wrong they are about how they think they do it best, and on the persistence of what amount to old wive’s tales and, as he puts it, “empty theorizing” on what’s the best way to study so that the info sticks. A lot of school children, it appears, are being ordered to hit the books by parents who then sabotage the effort by dictating well-meant rules on how, where, and when to do it. Carey’s passage on “neural scaffolding” is an object lesson on how to explain a complex phenomenon with great economy and impact.

Other notable headlines:

• Kenneth Chang: Researchers Create Nanostructures, and Whip Up a Recipe, Too: A diversion, on edible nanostructures. Chang names more molecules, faster, than one usually finds in the lay press.
• Laurie Tarkan: Topical Gel Catches Up With Pills For Relief: About rub-on stuff that contains NSAIDS for pain relief. Nice job of turning a personal incident into a useful health story. It has a hole in it – does one best rub these prescription-only (in the US) salves where it hurts? Or do they work about the same no matter where they get into the bloodstream? See, I have this achy hip and wonder where to slather some of this gel … if I can get some somewhere.
• Tara Parker-Pope: Tasty Vegan Food? Cupcakes Show It Can Be Done ; Amazing how interesting a trivial story can be….

As usual lots more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Has science just discovered that the multiverse is us? That our very own universe is not only one of many, but it connects directly to other ones with very different physical laws and we can sense the borderlands via a tiny gradient in the visible cosmos?  It depends – but over the last week a trickle of stories has spread news that an arcane, but quite vital and mysterious, pillar of physics may work differently in other places with a variation that itself varies by what direction one looks. Thus the fine structure constant that is the protagonist in this tale, aka alpha in equations in physics, may be a variable.

Avid followers of physics news, as well as just about every serious physicist, know that the constant’s constancy has been debated for years. Now fresh data, with an asserted statistical accuracy of 4 sigma that means chances are slim it’s just noise in the system, have perked up the conversation.

Initial reports in media triggered, it appears, by pre-publication of the paper at the on line arXiv site (link in Grist below):

• Economist, Aug. 31  (no byline, as is its way): Ye cannae change the laws of physics / Or can you? ; First out and best dressed, with a keen summary of what the constant is and why it matters. Dunno why the outbreak of Scottish Gaelic in the hed, but it gives it the air of a wizardly declaration.
• PhysicsWorld – Hamish Johnston, Sept.2: Changes spotted in fundamental constant ; Explained for the cognoscenti who read this specialty outlet’s news.
• Science News – Ron Cowen, Sept. 3: Changing one of nature’s constants / If correct, new finding could upend physicists’ view of universe ; Particularly solid on the maybes and caveats – these data, on tiny effects seen in things very far away, are a bit too squishy for some.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano, Sept 3: Astronomers: Quasars upend fundamental physics constant ; Dan pulls one quote, with proper attribution, from the PhysicsWorld story.

Yesterday, Sept. 6, an astronomy meeting in Portugal issued a press release on the paper (in Grist below). This was followed by other story or stories, but whether this is due to the release are was in the works anyway is not clear:

• ABC Science (Australia) Stuart Gary, Sept 6: Meaning of life changes across cosmos ; Makes no stab at all at explaining what the fine structure constant, alpha, is. And in a stretching of the term, he calls the arXiv paper-sharing site a physics blog. Is that correct by any definition of ‘blog’? The story overall seems hasty – what’s he mean writing that in one direction the universe seems to be growing, and in the other, shrinking? If he meant the constant does so, fine, but that’s not what he wrote and perhaps should have re-read more carefully.

This is exciting news, but awfully nebulous in the literal meaning of clouds in space as well as metaphorically as in fuzzy. Because consequences of over-reporting it – nobody gets hurt – are so small, reporters are in a sense free to emphasize the far end of responsible speculation.

Let’s back up. This constant is necessary to calculate how electric particles interact – including the energies of electronic orbitals in atoms. It is famous because physicists can write down its value in terms of other constants, but they have no idea why it has that value. It’s a philosophical conundrum that has led many scholars to pace the floor. There is, for one, its anthropic angle.  If its value were not pretty darned close to what it is, fusion reactions in starts would be quite different (such as, no production of carbon), and maybe there’d by no fusion at all. No stars, no us, not much of anything. Hence, it is key to serious discussions of the fine-tuning problem and the anthropic principle, the one that has no explanation for why the universe seems delicately and inexplicably perfect for eventual evolution of life.

The news is from a team of astronomers, led by one in Australia, that for years has said the fine structure constant appears to be slightly larger, judging by detailed spectra of gases pierced by quasar light getting here from more than 10 billion light years away, looking into the northern celestial hemisphere. Now,using data from another telescope looking the other way, they report it gets smaller in that direction. Not by enough to make fusion run much differently, one gathers. But it is enough to raise eyebrows.

I in my layman’s stupor am betting on systematic errors in the two telescopes that gathered the data, but am hoping for new physics.

Grist for the Mill:

arXiv paper ; Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

I got some surprises, after glancing through the feeds and deciding to glance at news from the Phil. Inquirer. There Tom Avril has a story that at first glance looks like a solid but somewhat stolid report on energy innovation in the city’s Navy Yard redevelopment project.

First thing is seeing a quote from a source, “It’s not rocket science,” it says, evoking a yawn. Then comes the second half, “It’s actually a lot more difficult.” Ka-bum!. That’s notable for more than turning a cliche on its head. Here’s a story on adding efficiency to our way of life that does not reassure readers that, if we just had the willpower, reducing our carbon footprints  will be a win-win snap. No, it will demand effort and some initial disruption and sacrifice.

Then he introduces some tidy examples of very clever thinking that the greening project entails. They include phase-change cooling systems, and how toad skin may inspire more efficient air conditioning. Now, I already knew that when I run my car’s windshield defroster at the same time that I turn up the temperature, I force it to run the air conditioner and heater at the same time. That’s an energy hog that probably cuts mpg measurably. But I hadn’t thought about the same, bass ackwards way that buildings stay warm and keep humidity in bounds. That’s where toads come in.

This is a pro’s job on what could have been a tedious boostery story on local businesses and agencies painting themselves green. It’s not as though it is a hard-hitting investigative piece. But it does help one learn a few things.

- Charlie Petit

At AP one finds Seth Borenstein providing an explainer for big, if now weakening, Hurricane Earl whirling north just a little seaward of the US east coast. One thing to wonder, before reading it, is whether he brings up global warming and, if so, how it’s handled.

Answers: Yes, and just fine.

His story, as far as I can tell with no meteorology expertise, provides a clear explanation of the weather peculiarities in play. They include  a low pressure trough that formed just right to prevent Earl from the usual hard-right turn of such storms that reach Bermuda’s neighborhood. We learn about “fish storms” and why this may not be one and instead is on a fairly rare course.

He does not venture to call this a global warming storm. And he doesn’t quite embrace another trope – saying it is consistent with global warming or a sign of what will come, turning a storm story into another global warming story. I mean, most of us have already bought GW as a dreadful challenge to mankind. But he does tie together two separate factors that are in play. First, those peculiarities that are keeping the storm track close and, if things had been slightly different, could have sent it ashore in states that don’t get many hurricanes. Second, that the mid-Atlantic is getting warmer. So while the east coast may not worry about being hit more often by hurricanes or their fading remnants, warmer waters easily foreseen in virtually all global circulation models under greenhouse forces ought to keep them more dangerous to more northern latitudes than has been the norm.

It flows along naturally from that, he writes, that some day other factors combined with this (he doesn’t say it, but one recalls wind shear over warmer seas) may make dangerous hurricanes less frequent in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

One thing that hit me on seeing the map that AP ran. It shows the projected path headed straight at the Maritimes in Canada, shooting right up the Bay of Fundy. Holy cow, a hurricane there!? Isn’t that something? Not unprecedented, but still…

Borenstein doesn’t pay that attention. It does get coverage in Canadian media. At the Canadian Press, Melanie Patten reports yep its aimed at Nova Scotia and yep right up Fundy’s gut. But by then it ought to be, we read here, a Category 1 and fading fast. A serious storm so close the shutters and take the boat out of the water but no monster. Maybe the water is not warm enough. Yet.

- Charlie Petit

Isn’t that a pretty picture? The circle of beads has been dubbed the string of pearls. At its center is the expanding debris of Supernova 1987A, the most intensely studied supernova, and quite possibly the most intensely studied single anything in the sky other than the Sun, in the history of astronomy. Roughly160,000 years after it blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and 23 years after the signal of the closest supernova in recorded history reached Earth’s telescopes and neutrino observatories, it’s still making news.

The string of pearls is not news – they are knots of stuff that the progenitor star spat out long before it blew up, and for several years now have been lit up as shock waves from the explosion reach them. Farther out are additional rings showing the intersection of the blast with other material, also not newly found. But the image is arresting and helps dress up news in Science from an international team led by a U. Colorado-Boulder man. The team says the newly spiffed up Hubble Space Telescope has yielded fresh info on how the giant original star disassembled itself and sent violently expanding shards and layers of itself racing and rebounding into the rarefied interstellar medium – including into its pre-blast burps.

The report is not itself a major revision or advance in supernova theory. But it does underscore the astounding details that this event has given astronomers who previously had little but theory to tell them what happens when a giant star burns its last shred of fusable element – silicon – and undergoes the greatest irony in astrophysics by collapsing and exploding at the same time.

Oh yeah – this is the journalism tracker, so I’d get to journalism. Some reporters, and it’s hard to be surprised, seem unsure what is the news here.

Stories:

• NatureNews – Rhiannon Smith: ‘Lost years’ end for backyard supernova ; A savvy piece, telling a story of research process and progress without regarding the specifics as particularly more astounding than what 1987A already showed to astronomers.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Supernova blast wave could shape galaxy evolution ;  Ms. Chow recounts what supernovas are, very briefly, and that they throw heavy elements into space where they get incorporated into new stars, planets, etc. She writes little on what SN 1987a has added. Odd usage too – she reports the supernova was “first discovered” in 1987. An editor ought to have lined out the “first” as redundant. She also writes that it has been “studied for more than ten years,” a peculiarly constricted time span. It’s heaviest scrutiny came immediately after that discovery.
• Sky & Telescope – Kelly Beatty: Hubble Revisits Supernova 1987a ; A focus on one new discovery – that reverse shock waves, sort of like those waves that race back out to see from a steep beach – are making their way back toward the original explosion site.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: ‘Rock star’ spewed guts after emitting vast pearl necklace ; Once again varnishing his underlying enthusiasm for making  science a public amusement with lots of tweaky references to boffins (he even calls Science a “hefty boffinry mag,’ Page zips through this news quick. He may better have gone more slowly in describing the synthesis of heavy elements in supernovae. It’s true the strew them, but they don’t themselves, as he writes, make all of them. Manufacture of those beyond iron is in fact largely a job for Type II supernovae, as was this one, but lots of other  elements  beyond H and He,  up to iron, are constructed by the normal fusion burning sequence in heavy stars.
• Wired News UK – Duncan Geere: ‘Star guts’ pour out of decaying supernova ; A small niggle here. The team is not “at” CU Boulder; it’s members are all over including in Europe. In a short space Geere neatly connects this supernova with the process that provided our solar system, and out hemoglobin, with iron, oxygen, carbon…).
• Boulder Daily Camera – Brittany Anas: Hubble gives astronomers a glimpse of ’star guts’ ; She tells readers that the string of pearls will, a home town astronomer expects, ‘grow and glom together” with time, a spritely phrase.

Grist for the Mill:

Paper Observing Supernova 1987A wih the Refurbished Hubble Space Telescope ; CU Boulder Press Release (source of the ’star guts’ term in several accounts) ; HubbleSite Press Release ;

Other recent 1987A, gen’l supernova stories:

• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Supernova Explosions Offer Potential Spin on Life’s Origins ; about the chirality of biological proteins.
• Cosmos (Australia) Kate Heness: 3D map of supernova reveals wonky innards ;

Ancient Grist for the Mill:

This news dredges up many memories for me. In 1989 I rented a house near Santa Cruz and spent two weeks at a workshop at UCSC that noted supernova guru Stan Woosley hosted. I went there for the late, lamented magazine Mosaic that the NSF once published. As noted at this site before, thanks to friends of its now-retired editor,  Warren Kornberg, the articles are on line. If you have time and want to know how much was already known about 1987A shortly after it went off, here’s how I saw it. Warren sure let his reporters write long.

- Charlie Petit

A few weeks ago, while I was on vacation, the San Jose Mercury News’s Paul Rogers sent me the link to a piece he considers pretty important. It is about revoking Proposition 32, now law, which would happen if another Proposition -  23 – on the November ballot passes. This measure, sponsored mainly by the Velero and Tesoro oil refiners of Texas, would suspend California laws and regulations compelling industry and the citizenry generally to emit less fossil carbon in coming years – returning to 1990 levels by 2020. They would stay suspended until California’s economy returns to robust health. Rogers’s story says that passage of the law would force changes far beyond any narrow set of rules on emission cuts, endangering the state’s ability to increase alternative energy and efficiency generally.

I was looking for reasons to use it, even though his well-reported story is a little old. It comes along this week with several stories from national outlets saying about the same thing:

• PBS – Spencer Michels: The Rundown/ Double Play for Global Warming ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Daniel B. Wood: Will Texas oil firms succeed in undoing California greenhouse gas laws? ;

- Charlie Petit

Just one popular media reporter, far as I can tell,  has so far perked up at news that an often-cited trophic cascade in Yellowstone Park, one embraced by partisans of reintroducing wolves to the area a few decades back, may not have happened.  At the Bozeman Chronicle, Daniel Person explains it without once foisting the term “trophic cascade” on his Montana readers (I think he might better  have slipped it in, just for edification).

It’s not a long story but important for public update on what had become a minor scripture among groups hoping to see wolves restored to as much as possible of their original range. It goes like this: wolves, by culling elk and making the rest of them skittish, are keeping the hefty browsers out of confined areas where they have a hard time seeing the lupine carnivores  in time to get away from them. Such places include narrow riparian corridors, ravines, and other places where, reportedly, aspens and other native vegetation are again thriving in the manner of the time prior to wolf eradication. This in turn means more habitat for a panoply of other plants and wildlife. So researchers said.

This week in the journal Ecology however other researchers, with the US Geological Survey and University of Montana, report that the effect may be real but is much smaller than had been supposed. It would, they suggest, take a lot more wolves than now range the mountainous region to shift elk browsing very much. They say it’s number of elk, not a climate of fear, that controls how many aspen saplings they kill.  None of the aspen groves that were nibbled to nubs in the last century by burgeoning elk, he reports, have regenerated.

This is fascinating for both scientific, or range management, reasons and for political ones. There probably are powerful rewards to having more wolves in the Montana-Wyoming-Idaho area than there are now, and certainly not fewer of them. But perhaps the simple cause-and-effect vision of a verdant, restored aspen ecosystem is in fact oversimplistic. The news got spread widely, via press release as seen below in Grist. My bet is that other outlets, perhaps weeklies and others plus specialty publications and blogposts, will circulate it further.

Person appears have some of his history incomplete. He dates the wolf-elk-aspen hypothesis to a paper published in 2007 that “fleshed it out.” But it was in circulation (and influential) well before that – as in this abstract from the December, 2001 issue of Biological Conservation. I recall first hand, from an interview in 2006 for a story on another topic, that one of the co-authors of the 2001 paper, Yellowstone wildlife biologist Roy Renkin,  was already sure that other factors – drought maybe – had confounded the data.

*UPDATE – other media coverage has arisen:

• BBC – Mark Kinver : Wolf re-introduction fails to stop elks eating aspens ;

Grist for the Mill: USGS/Ecological Soc’y of America  Press Release ;

Other wolf news – That federal judge’s ruling taking wolves away from state authority and putting them back under protection of the federal Endangered Species Act, continues to get heavy regional attention.

• Missoulian – Rob Chaney: Wolf, grizzly bear cases set back progress, biologists, managers say
• Idaho Mountain Express – Katherine Wutz ; Agency: Manage wolves more aggressively/ Sterilization, gassing of pups proposed ;
• Clark Fork Chronicle: Baucus presses for state control over wolves ;
• Public News Service – Deb Courson: Wolf Depredation Funding Shift Becomes a War of Words ;
• AP – Ben Neary: Wyo. not inclined to act on wolves ; That’s unless shooting them on sight is considered action.

- Charlie Petit

One finds a funny little juxtaposition in The Times in the UK when paying the small fee to read its Eureka science magazine today. First, it is getting a tremendous reaction, in number of stories if not their heft, in other outlets by reporting the bejeezus out of the part about God in Stephen Hawking’s upcoming book, The Grand Design, co-written by Caltech physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow (pub. date next week). Thanks to the infinite possibilities of M-theory, it appears, the world’s best known physicist declares there is no reason to invoke the almighty in explaining how our universe popped into existence. Wm of Ockham implication: No god, upper case or not. It has to do with top-down back-tracking of the history of the universe, gravity, and with the offshoot of string theory called M-theory (m is for membrane).  Of course, little could be more banal than a physicist saying the universe arose with help from no god. But this is Hawking, a secular divinity of sorts, so it gets attention.

First the irony, then the substance. Right there on the table of contents loudly hawking all the reasons this world best known physicist refutes divinity and ramifications therefrom is another story with the deadpan headline: CERN’s search for “God particle’ hit by £215mbudget cuts. So Hawking says there’s evidently no god. But God remains for eternity a top go-to term for souping up a science news headline.

Even after paying the daily pass to The Times, I can’t find the excerpt on line. I don’t have a review copy of the book. Apparently it’s not to go digital for anybody till Sept. 6. For now, the magazine itself provides it to subscribers the pulpy old fashioned way.

Before getting to all the exterior press this peek at the book generated, get a load of what Times reporters wrote to greet it ( They open for me, but I have this one-day cookie in my system that may be the reason why. I hope they do so for the rest of you):

• Hannah Devlin: Hawking: God did not create the Universe ;
• Mark Henderson: A theory of everything but God ;
• Hannah Devlin: Chief Rabbi leads fightback against Stephen Hawking ; That’d be Rabbi Lord Sacks. And he tells Times readers that “Science is about explanation. Religion is about interpretation…The Bible simply isn’t interested in how the Universe came into being.” So much for the 7 days of Genesis. The story is pretty good all in all, getting into such niceties as the god of the gaps.
• Jonathan Sacks: Even great science tells us nothing about God; This one does a better job explaining why the Bible does not concern itself much with how creation happened.
• Ben Miller: Dial M for Mindblowing ; Nice lede: “…bad news this week for anyone hoping to get their head around string theory: things have moved on. These days there’s an even more complicated bit of jiggery-pokery called M-theory…”  Yes, and never mind that M theory was new 15 years ago but not now.
• Ruth Gledhill: Stephen Hawking is the voice of reason on religion;

OTHER MEDIA REACTION:

• Guardian (UK) Adam Gabbatt: Stephen Hawking says universe not created by God ; It includes a public poll, of the usual media form in which science is not necessary to report results. But at last look, 87.5 percent of self-selected pollees agree gravity trumps god; 12.5 percent agree that God thinks Hawking is not necessary. Those results, one thinks, would not be echoed among Americans.
• Telegraph (UK) Laura Roberts: Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe;
• New Scientist – Craig Callendar: Stephen Hawking says there’s no theory of everything ; This is not a direct response to The Times, but to the book. Callendar, a philosopher of physics, asks the germane question – why does Hawking regard the wobbly, still-gestating M-theory hypothesis as enough to confidently explain ultimate mysteries of existence?
• AP : Hawking says God not needed for creation ; A shorty.
• NY Daily News – Michael Sheridan: Stephen Hawking in “The Grand Design’: God did not create the universe ;
• Reuters – Michael Holden: God did not create the universe, says Hawking ;
• BBC – William Crawley: God, Hawking and the Universe ; A religion writer does a little exegesis on media headlines over the news.
• MSNBC CosmicLog – Alan Boyle: Hawking says God’s not needed. So? ; I think Alan has a review copy. He also quotes a line in the book that apparently means something to Brits but not to me. I had to look up the meaning of  “blue touch paper.” More important, Boyle dissects several passages of the book, sharing more of its logic than a mere gravity-plus-math-means-no-god summary.
• AFP: God did not create Universe: Hawking ;

Dept. of the Quibblish: Several accounts quote the book as saying discovery of extrasolar planets in 1992 is key to understanding why invocations of godly creation are intellectually empty. Why do Hawking et al say 1992? That was the year of the pulsar planets. Real planets they are, but outlandish. Regular planets, potential analogs to Earth and orbiting other sunlike stars, came to light in 1995. None of the refs I’ve seen explain why pulsar planets are important to the rejection of a necessary god. Things resembling our solar system I can swallow. There are overlaps in the dynamics of the two types but I’m stumped.

- Charlie Petit

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