Yesterday saw a California-led Climate Change political two-fer on Capitol Hill. Rep. Henry Waxman of California opened hearings into whether the Bush administration has been unusually strenuous in distorting science and making life rough on scientists in its employ whose conclusions don’t fit policy. The answer to that is probably duh, but Waxman wants the inside dope. And on the Senate side, another Californian, Barbara Boxer, presided over a session — featuring senators themselves — to share ideas for toughening US actions that might ease climate change. (Less than appropriately, the events started during a bitter cold snap in DC.) Some stories stitched the two events into one account.

WAXMAN HEARING STORIES:

NY Times Cornelia Dean reports testimony from several witnesses who describe heavy-handed editing of their reports; she writes that criticism of the White House is so deep among legislators that “even the Republicans on the panel had little good to say”; Chicago Tribune William Neikirk puts the hearing into the broader context of the latest U.N. IPCC report being mulled in Paris; Reuters Deborah Zabarenko puts up high the Union of Concerned Scientists testimony that a survey of 150 scientists found 435 instances of political meddling in the last five years; Los Angeles Times Richard Simon focusses on White House stonewalling on requested documents and Waxman’s angry plaint, backed by the committee’s top Republican, that the papers, after all, are not state secrets critical to national security.

WAXMAN PLUS BOXER HEARING STORIES:

AP H. Josef Hebert says Waxman witnesses, overall, describe a White House that “micromanaged” things and “closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public” and, over in the Senate, gives play to Oklahoma’s Republic Senator James Inhofe once again saying global warming is hooie — but only after Sen. Hillary R. Clinton says “This is a problem whose time has come”; Washington Post Juliet Eilperin leads on the Senate Hearing and one description of it as “open mike night” for lawmakers to declare their worry over climate change. She is also among those quoting Waxman’s comment in the House that while anybody can have an opinion, “We don’t have the right to our own science”, by which science in this context is presumably a surrogate for reality; SF Chronicle Zachary Coile‘s account leads by calling the two hearings, collectively, an escalation of the climate change clash between the Legislative and Executive branches. He has a revealing quote from Idaho Republican Larry Craig, arguing that the US should be forgiven its greenhouse emissions because they merely reflect an enviable lifestyle.

Also See: NPR Elizabeth Shogren (w/audio link) on the Senate session.

Grist for the Mill:

Union of Concerned Scientists Press Release;
Roger Pielke Jr., a Univ. of Colorado climate researcher often called an iconoclast for sitting in the middle of the “debate” sourly pooh poohing both sides, testified and also runs a blog, called Prometheus, where he put his own take, here, on the hearings;

The blog Real Climate has links to some of the streaming video, C-span archives, and such on the hearings, here.

Lots of outlets are running openers to this Friday’s official unveiling in Paris of the IPCC’s summary report on the scientific evidence for global warming’s cause. USA Todays’ Patrick O. Driscoll and Dan Vergano have a moderately sized but punchy package today, with a well-done, classic,  “hockey stick” graph of the recent, soaring temperatures. That global warming is happening and fossil carbon and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the driver, one US authority tells them, “is a total global no-brainer.” The hockey stick graph, from IPCC data and not entirely from Mann et all for the cognoscenti of such things, does not easily paste into this blog. It is interactive and worth a look. It is at the link below. Greenpeace hung the banner on the Eiffel Tower earlier this week. The tower will, reports say, have its lights briefly shut off to mark the report’s publication.

Read it;

The big science news in the last year or so on Gardisil, the Merck vaccine against HPV that should markedly reduce cervical cancer rates, and on its approval by the FDA for girls age nine and up, has largely been supplanted by politics. This includes efforts at state and local levels to get the vaccine out there as a preventive, and fears from some quarters it will promote promiscuity and, more important, interfere with parental authority over youngsters’ health care. It’s faded somewhat from the scenes that this site’s radar is tuned to detect but an update is in order.

The AP’s Liz Austin Peterson, writing from Austin, has a hard look at Merck’s lobbying efforts. The company stands to make billions of dollars if the vaccine goes into wide use among school age girls. Her story is constructed as an investigation into a drug company’s effort to skew public health policy. How one reacts probably depends on one’s social philosophies. The company seems to be making no effort to hide its activities. Most of Peterson’s sources appear to come from the conservative side of the spectrum but as journalism the piece seems to stand up fine. Even if one believes wide use of the vaccine is a good idea, a thorough look at the drug company’s lobbying is legitimate reporting.

The Baltimore Sun’s Laura Smitherman similarly examines the nexus of legislative moves by states with Merck’s efforts. Both Peterson and Smitherman report that an organization of female legislators, called Women in Government, is getting money from Merck.

Other outlets are mainly following progress of bills to encourage or require the vaccine’s use in girls.

Examples:

Kansas City Star David Klepper; Indianapolis Star Staci Hubb; Seattle Times Marsha King with a political roundup and vignettes of specific families; AP Dave Collins with a state-level political roundup, filed from Connecticut; Medical News Today Catharine Paddock;

See Also: CanWest News Serivce Sharon Kirkey on a Canadian advisory committee’s recommendation that the vaccine be given every girl 9 to 13 years old.

Alaska for one place, and climate change more generally, will be in the spotlight this spring as the two-year International Polar Year gets underway, reports the Daily News’s George Bryson. It starts in the spring. One University of Alaska glaciologist tells Bryson it will be “the March Madness of science.” This is the fourth one, we learn. Prevous IPYs were in 1882-83 (improved navigational charts were the priority); another in 1932-33, a third in 1957-58 (part of the International Geophysical Year); and now this one. Some sixty nations are to take part in 200 studies, including 50 in Alaska. Climate change will be an inevitable focus of many of them.

The earlier IPY’s were heroic, epochal efforts. An unaddressed question in this account is, given today’s intense and steady research at high latitudes, how much net impact the IPY can have. One can speculate it provides focus and more international collaboration — but how many projects under its umbrella would have occurred anyway?

Read it;

Grist for the Mill: IPY website at Univ. Alaska-Fairbanks, IPY main website.

A floater is not merely a crime novel’s New Yorker face down in the harbor. It may also be a bit of debris drifting about in the eye’s vitreous humor. Big ones, reports the AP’s Matthew Barakat, can go beyond trivial annoyance to impediment – or at least, so says a laser surgeon he interviews. This story is pure consumer health reporting, a pool too vast, and too slight in new science, for The Tracker too often to wade for fear of drowning — ie, becoming a floater of sorts. But the inherent interest and oddity of this one, the seeming common sense of blitzing the occasional bloobie that disrupts vision enough to drive a person to distraction, and the timeless theme of the maverick going against the shared sentiment of the majority, combine into a decent story.

Barakat appears to present the case for judicious lasing of the occasional bit of eye flotsam without producing a mere, unpaid ad for the doctors who do it. Most striking, the surgeon who is his primary source, if he is to be believed, is not out drumming up business recklessly. He says he only does the big floaters – refusing people who come to him complaining of little ones because such people will never be satisfied.

Read it;

British researchers, working largely with the National Geographic Society, say they have found temple-like structures, a village of huts that may have been used for seasonal events, and general new evidence of the society that built Stonehenge in England some 4,600 years ago or so. Maybe party pads, too. One researcher tells the Washington Post’s Marc Kaufman the new work “clarifies the site’s true purpose.” It seems to have a lot to do with ceremony that included used of other, wooden henges.

The LA Times’ Thomas H. Maugh II writes that it appears the locals who put up Stonehenge were not just a lot of somber priests in Druid-like robes but a “raucous, hard-partying group.” One source tells him — and perhaps other reporters listening in on the press teleconference — that the recent excavation at a place called Durrington Walls “is either the richest site or the filthiest that we have ever found for this period…people were here to have a really good time.” The NYTimes’s John Noble Wilford reports an opinion from one researcher that Stonehenge may have been a serious place for burials, while the nearby center could be where the celebratory wakes occurred.

Other stories: Reuters Patricia Reaney; AP Randolph E. Schmid; Boston Globe Gareth Cook; Telegraph (UK) Nic Fleming with interesting detail, such as an ancient road 90 feet wide; The Guardian (UK) Maev Kennedy; Voice of America (audio link) Jessica Berman; National Geographic News James Owen with, natch, extensive links to photos, etc;

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Geo. Soc. Press Release;

There have been several, failed efforts by researchers over the years go knock holes in the prion hypothesis for spongiform encephalopathies, including some doubting the very existence of infectious, distorted proteins. Thus, word of another at first elicits a yawn. But this one is worth watching. At least two news accounts describe a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reporting viral particles associated with a Mad Cow disease-like condition in mice. Yale University researchers and others behind it say they haven’t disproven the prion idea. But the work, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s John Fauber two days ago, calls it into question and provides, one researcher says, “a very strong alternative.” The pic, from Yale, shows “viruslike particles” in an infected cell.

The LA Times’s Jia-Rui Chong reports it also, today. The Yale team suspects that the odd proteins called prions are actually the side-effect of a viral infection. The scientist calls that “the simplest, most parsimonious point of view.”

Other researchers are of course skeptical.

Grist for the Mill: Yale U. Press Release;

NASA revealed in a press teleconference Monday that the Hubble Space Telescope’s recently most glamorous and productive instrument, its Advanced Camera for Surveys, has quit.

On Saturday a fuse blew in one of its power feeds. Other detectors can keep working. Part of the survey camera’s function may be restored but full restoration is out, it says here. Shuttle astronauts installed the instrument in 2002. It has had trouble before. But it also gathered the most detailed photo ever made of extremely distant galaxies as they were when the universe was young, the “Hubble Ultra Deep Field” in 2003.

The NYTimes’s Dennis Overbye says the telescope now is “partly blind” but, as do most accounts, notes that the camera was designed to last five years. It nearly made it. If a shuttle servicing mission comes off as hoped a year from September, a newer and even better set of instruments will go on board the telescope. Nobody that The Tracker saw says this in reports, but if NASA boss Michael Griffin had not restored the Hubble service to the shuttle schedule he’d probably be feeling some heat about now.

Other stories:

AP Alex Dominguez; LA Times Thomas Maugh II says the ailing instrument was “by far the most popular camera” on Hubble, with most research proposals focussed on it; Houston Chronicle Mark Carreau; Baltimore Sun Dennis O’Brien who notes that another, still-operating camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, has taken many of Hubble’s most famous pics — so the telescope is hardly worthless even with its bum advanced survey camera; Reuters Deborah Zabarenko; SpaceNews.com Tariq Malik;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release;

The US Interior Department took gray wolves living near the Great Lakes off the endangered species list this week, and proposed doing the same for those living in the Northern Rockies. The AP’s John Flesher reports that about 4,000 wolves are in the former population now, and about 1,200 are in the Rockies. A deputy Interior Secretary tells him the decision marks a success, “a comeback of the wolves.” Some protections remain in place but, as reported recently, Idaho’s governor has vowed to slash his state’s wolf population immediately, via hunting permits, when overarching federal protection evaporates. Many, but not all enviros, Flesher reports, support the Great Lakes delisting and more fear it’s too soon in the Rockies.

Other stories:

McClatchy Newspapers Bob Von Sternberg has a two word lede: “they’re back”; Twin Cities Pioneer Press Dennis Lien says the decision caps “a remarkable comeback”; Detroit Free Press Kathleen Gray; Salt Lake Tribune Joe Baird with a stress on enviro resistance; Daily Inter Lake (Montana) Jim Mann including a good sense of the discomfort many in the Rockies, including ranchers, feel about having lots more wolves. Hunting seasons are in the works, Wyoming is a hangup; Jackson Hole Daily Cory Hatch with more on state tiffs over the proposal;

Grist for the Mill: Interior Dept. Press Release; Center for Biological Diversity Press Release;

Late Addition (Jan 31):

Detroit Free Press: Outdoors columnist Eric Sharp provides insight into why wolves aren’t likely to become big game in the Great Lakes area soon, and why things are so different out west.

Other Wolf News: Wolves to return to Scotland? BBC has a report on just such a proposal, from wildlife researchers writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society. In an accompanying story, BBC tells the story of the last wolf killed in Scotland, in 1700.

Michael Pollan, the UC Berkeley journalism faculty member and king of the locally-grown food movement, has a lucid piece in the Times’s Sunday magazine. The Tracker was chary about reading it, having just eaten a not-tiny steak. But Pollan concedes he sometimes carves into a bit of beef, too. He starts right off with the most sensible summation of good eating advice one might find: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He says he should stop there before getting into confusing detail — and the section on omega fatty acids is a bit murky — but this overall is an excellent example of the well-reasoned polemic.

The gist is not news: foodlike substances, puffed up with all sorts of nutrional supplements and other label come-ons from the food industry, have displaced actual food from most tables (and from fast food trays). The result: fatter, sicker people despite all the extra vitamins, roughage, and no-transfats extolled in the ads. Food, the kind our great grandparents ate, is becoming a rarity for too many. Pollan’s perspective gives the topics a punch few writers could equal.

He is no nut. He doesn’t go off on trace pesticides, organic dogma, terror of GMOs, or anything remotely like the prattlings of vegetarian zealots and other ideologues. He follows the science pretty well and does not have a high opinion of most food-related journalism. He laments the ability of the food industry’s lobbyists to fuzz and distort government nutrition guidelines. He uses the term “nutritionalism” to good, scathing effect. It’s a long piece, swamping efforts at further, quick summary, so…

Read it;

Elsewhere on the foodlike product beat:

USA Today Bruce Horovitz with the latest on McDonald’s search for a non-trans fat oil for its french fries; Washington Post Karen Pallarito on progress and frustrations as area schools try to foist real food off on the kids. One idea: “Fresh Fruit and Veggie Friday”; Wash. Post’s Rick Weiss tackles the burning issue: can a cloned animal be labeled organic?

The Dispatch’s science editor Mike Lafferty describes the hunt for lake shipwrecks by a team of researchers whose main tool, a side scan sonar system, has revealed ghostly images of more than two dozen of them. Lafferty’s hed: “Spying on ghosts.” His story has historical photos of some of the ships, and the online version connects to a tour, which Lafferty narrates using GoggleEarth tools, of some of the sites. It’s a good read.

Read it; sidescan sonar graphic; multimedia tour;

To slip from the third person coyness of The Tracker, Charles Petit, meaning I, has a recently-rare thing — a byline — and the lead ScienceTimes piece and sidebar today. A chance phone call, while hunting for a way into the remarkable changes in western US forests wrought by Mountain Pine Beetles, led to a senior US Forest Service entomologist, a man about to retire, with an unexpected angle. He described the peril facing a little known but critical species of timberline trees, whitebark pines, in the Rockies, and the beetles that are newly attacking them. Most intriguing was their pertinence to, of all things that seem too tough and too resourceful to be bothered much by climate change, grizzly bears.

The spread of the beetle, its range extended and its reproductive rate revved up by regional warming, has been getting considerable attention in the intermountain western US and Canadian press of late. The issue of ecosystem changes and long term impacts on grizzlies seems likely to have another jump in coming month if, as most expect, the Department of Interior lifts Endangered Species Act protections from the Yellowstone region’s grizzly bear population.

Read it; On-scene Sidebar; Online slideshow and interview with the researcher is here.; ScienceTimes’s David Corcoran includes it in his weekly podcast.

See Also:

Billings Gazette Jan. 18 Mike Stark with an update on the beetles, mainly in Yellowstone Nat’l Park; Mayerthorpe Freelancer (Canada) Melissa Hemelin Jan. 24 on mountain pine beetles’ advance into Alberta, with a good bit on the insects’ biology; Greeley Tribune Rebecca Boyle with a good summary of the beetles’ surge among lodgepole pines in Colorado. She can’t seem to bring herself to write “global warming,” mentioning only drought and “other factors.”