BBC – Sarah Mukherjee: Climate ‘threatening UK species’:

New Scientist – Catherine Brahic: One in six European mammals on the brink;

CBC (Canada): Researchers to track movement of Arctic ice island (huge ice shelf portion that broke from Ellesmere two years ago).

Scientific American – David Biello: Hot Potato: Global Warming Threatens Spuds and Peanuts (it’s about the wild, genetically valuable ancestors and kin of cultivars).

Scientific American – Nikhil Swaminathan: Viagra May Give a Boost to the Jet-Lagged; This is a far more eye-grabbing, probably far less useful jet lag story than one by Jane Brody in today’s NYTimes, on melatonin.

AP:

Lynn Brezosky: Group: Border fence threatens wildlife;

Brett Zongker: Smithsonian accused of altering exhibit (yep — climate change, Bushies, etc).

Brock Vergakis: Utah joins pact to reduce gas emissioins;

Reuters:

Will Dunham: Gel made from patient’s blood speeds healing;

Timothy Gardner: World CO2 output to rise 59 percent by 2030: US;

Alister Doyle: UN urges world to slow extinctions: 3 each hour;

Denver Post – Ann Schrader: Baby stegosaurus tracks;

The American Geophysical Union has it scheduled for a press conference Wednesday at its meeting in Acapulco, but it’s hard to keep under wraps news of a giant elephant-frying explosion of a comet in the sky just 13,000 years ago or so.

The thing, a super-Tunguska blast, may have hit the atmosphere over N. America’s fading, ice-age glaciers with a flash and a “hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere,” writes Robin McKie, science editor at the UK’s Sunday Observer.

Fur and clothing people of the time wore would have caught fire, it says. Any mammoth, mastadon, and the like that survived might have starved in the subsequent blight. People, being more resourceful, made it through. Again, so it says.

The main evidence is a sprinkling of tiny diamonds in sediments of this age from 20 sites, presumably cooked up from the comet’s debris during its inital hot, high-pressure detonation under the stress of atmospheric entry. The analysis is led by researchers at the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara and elsewhere.

-CP

Other stories: BBC (source of the pic, but the guess here is that such a blast would be a dispersed, multi-focal event);

LATE ADDITION (may 22), New Scientist Heather Pringle reports it at length. More may come after Wednesday’s briefing.

Grist for the Mill: Text of the AGU’s advance notice to the media follows:

Investigations of a buried layer at sites from California to Belgium reveal materials that include metallic microspherules, carbon spherules, nanodiamonds, fullerenes, charcoal, and soot. The layer’s composition may indicate that a massive body, possibly a comet, exploded in the atmosphere over the Laurentide Ice Sheet 12,900 years ago. The timing coincides with a great die-off of mammoths and other North American megafauna and the onset of a period of cooling in Northern Europe and elswhere known as the Younger Dryas Event. Speakers will discuss numerous lines of evidence contributing to the impact hypothesis. The nature and frequency of this new kind of impact event could have major implications for our understanding of extinctions and climate change

As a rising tenor of urgency — darn near panic in some quarters — permeates energy and climate discussion, the SF Chronicle‘s Carrie Sturrock finds a longer view at Stanford University. In a useful protrait of one major research university’s fistful of climate studies, Sturrock describes where the money comes from and such studies as electricity from photosynthesis that are spending it. One source tells her plenty of entrepreneurs and agencies worldwide are pouring money into quick, partial fixes. The time frame at Stanford is ten to 50 years out. The pic is nice mainly because its genuine workboard is so real (high res here) … and so different from a typical moviemaker’s imagination of scientific scribblings (TV’s “Numb3rs” show does well on that score even if the paces of the plots are implausible).

Arguments about science policy often include outright rejections, by learned people, of conclusions researchers assume were settled. USA Today‘s Dan Vergano finds some scientists who are making a discipline of “resistance to science.” Among his better lines: “Resistance to science is nothing new, of course. …Today, we don’t toss scientists on bonfire. We have congressional hearings.” The pic asks whether a ball rolling through a curved pipe tends to go straight or keep curving on exit. The Tracker surmises most people would like neither offered answer — they’d lean to “A” but prefer the ball continue more or less straight down on the page (following centripetal force). But A’s right.

The Chinese news agency Xinhua reports the nation’s first lunar orbiter, Chang’e I, is to be sent into lunar orbit in the second half of this year. The account is notable for its forthright declaration that the beneficiary, as much as or more than science, is the Chinese military. China’s space agency director tells the agency “Modern war relies heavily on information and high-tech, supported by space technologies.” Shades of the early space race between the US and USSR. Later, it says here, will come a lunar lander, rover, sample returns, and human expeditions.

-CP

Other China moon stories:

The Register (UK) Lucy Sherriff manages to get in a little joke (then spoils it with an explanation); New Scientist; Reuters;

Other China-related space news:

SciDev.net (Africa) Abiose Adelaja, Christina Scott: A Nigerian communications satellite, NIGCOMSAT-1, launched this month is a boost for business, it says here. The agency enterprisingly gets some skepticism in from Nigerian scientists. They are upset that the nation outsourced so much of the job to China’s space agency.

The AP does not even have a byline on this piece it released over the weekend: Report: Warming Imperils State Flowers. The source is the National Wildlife Federation. According to research gathered by the enviro group, the northerly march of natural ranges could mean the extirpation from the wild, in 18 states, of their state flowers. Many also may lose their state trees. The lede: “Imagine the sunflower state without sunflowers.” That’d be Kansas, its flag in the pic, a sunflower put high.

The truth seems likely to be shakier than implied. It is easy to keep sowing seeds, or starting seedlings off in pots. The prospect however of states losing their official flowers to climate change — save those given a gardener’s boost — is potent. It’s too bad that, as it seems, no enterprising reporter thought it up on his or her own.

-CP

Grist for the Mill: NWF “Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming”. This is a pdf of a 40-page, impressive-looking document. See p. 28 for state flower material.

It is difficult for The Tracker to imagine how much, in the past year or two, the NY Times must have published on energy and climate news, features, thumb suckers, profiles, columns, essays, op-eds, multiple series (what is the plural of series anyway?) and such. The past weekend and today continue the barrage.

The biggie is James Traub‘s long profile and encounter with Al Gore, in the Sunday magazine.

It captures the man’s anger, his melancholy, and his sense of vindicated prophesy. Most hopeful line: Gore says the rate of social change is nonlinear. The Tracker’s intuitive catastrophe theory sense (wild ass guess alert!) is that a furious public about-face is almost upon us, nonlinearly.

Almost the whole Sunday magazine is green — calling itself “The Architecture Issue” with multiple pieces on efficient new building designs. The rendering is of the super-enviro (so the developer says) Bank of America tower rising in NYCity.

Others included, on Sunday, another “The Energy Challenge” installment from the biz section. Matt Villano went to Hawaii for a look at the islands’ notable move toward biofuels. Why, with Brazil’s example, has it taken the sugar cane growers so long to start planning some ethanol distilleries out there?

And today, for calibration of the US predicament, Somini Sengupta reports India’s electricity crisis. India is throwing up nukes, wind farms, biofuel plants, and so on. But most new power is from coal-fired plants. Yet the nation is so short of electricity hundreds of its shiny glass high-rises belch diesel smoke to run “backup” generators.

The Week-in-Review section has a piece that punctures the “czar” monicker given to managers of US policy pickles. Hmmm — does the Times have a czar to coordinate all its energy and climate coverage? A committee? It looks coordinated. Could all this ink be but an emergent property of complex, nonlinear events?

-CP

AP:

Marcus Wohlsen: California’s Wayward Whales on the Move (plenty of other outlets have the story too).

Tara Burghart: Swarms of Cicadas Emerging in Midwest;

Linda A. Johnson: FDA set to OK period suppression pill;

Reuters:

Wendell Roelf: South Africa battles alien fish; Trout included.

Alister Doyle: Polar bears at risk as warming thaws icy home ;

LATimes – Louis Sahagun: Rare birds living on the edge at park (lead Bell’s vireo at Hansen Dam rec. area) ;

Cleveland Plain Dealer – Molly Kavanaugh: Fish-killing viral hemorrhagic septicemia spreads in Great Lakes ;

Honolulu Advertiser – Christie Wilson: Whale tracked for 34 years (a humpback);

Milwaukee Journal Setinel – Dan Egan: Lab results show virus in Lake Winnebago fish ;

NY Times – Pam Belluck: From Beaches to Pine Barrens, a Study Puts Values on New Jersey’s Natural Assets.

The KSJ Tracker’s server has been very slow in recent days. Just wanted to let you know that we’re aware of it. We think we have fixed the problem for the time being, but we’re looking to migrate to a new server with greater bandwidth and greater processing power. Thanks for your patience.

-BR

Hawaii’s Kilauea has been hogging the lava news lately, erupting continuously for nearly a quarter of a century. But the biggest volcano in the islands remains massive Mauna Loa. The Advertiser‘s Jan TenBruggencate, with a new study in the journal Science as ammo, reports that a swelling along the shield volcano’s Southwest Rift Zone looks like the place where fire and volcano goddess Pele will get busy next. The newspaper story gives a tidy summary of the volcano’s eruptive history, the hazards if this rift opens up, and the uncertainties of the new analysis.

The study uses topography data gathered by radar-equipped satellites, including Canada’s Radarsat-1.

-CP

Grist for the Mill: AAAS Science summary;

Other Hawaii Volcano Headlines:

Honolulu Advertiser – Christie Wilson: Lava delta lost 23 acres in latest collapse (includes an impressive pic, hi res here.)

Other Volcano headlines:

Anchorage Daily News – Alan Bailey: Volcano energy may help meet needs;

Longview Daily News – Andre Stepankowsky: 27 years after blast, volcano dozes (Mount St. Helens);

Reuters – Heri Retnowati: Indonesia considers new method to halt mud volcano; (cement balls apparently aren’t up to the job).

The oceans are supposed to sop up, or buffer, a lot of the CO2 from fossil fuel burning. Hence it’s no good news if one big such carbon sink, the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica, is flagging. In Science magazine an international team from the UK, Germany, US, Australia, France, Japan, and South Africa say it appears so.

Alan Zarembo at the LA Times reports that the discovery may signal a start of a “vicious cycle” by which slower oceanic CO2 absorption accelerates global climate change that further damps the oceanic sink and so on and on. He also has some experts who want to see more data and analysis to be convinced that the trend is real. Zarembo also reports reasons that the Southern Ocean may be so unique its carbon behavior implies little for other seas. Apparently its rising winds have saturated the sea’s surface by stirring up deep, carbon-rich water.

One might surmise — but the stories on this news don’t say so — that if the oceans are taking in less carbon, it could have a silver lining. Maybe ocean acidification would become less likely to dissolve the hard parts of diatoms, corals, and other shelled animals? LATE ADDITION: Nope on acidification help. See comment below.

-CP

Other stories:

Reuters Deborah Zabarenko; Inter Press Service (IPS) Stephen Leahy; The Australian Lewis Smith; BBC Paul Rincon; The Register (UK) Lucy Sherriff; Independent (UK) Michael McCarthy; Nat’l Geographic Kate Revilious; Wall Street Journal Gautam Naik; Telegraph (UK) Charles Clover; ABC (Austr. radio) Barbara Miller;

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. East Anglia Press Release; CSIRO (Australia) Press Release via ScienceDaily;

Ask an actress and funny lady to report on something usually taken as grave and you get laughs. At NPR‘s show “Day to Day,” contributor Annabelle Gurwitch got turned loose on global dimming. And yes, she talks to a bonafide top scientist, who explains, in carefully edited bites, a bit on sulfate aerosols and China’s coal soot and the like. She then provides a list of social advantages to low-light. It’s amusing and somewhat informative. Some grumps may admit to viewing it as a silly use of important air time. The Tracker may be imagined raising his hand, but nobody wants to be seen as having no sense of humor.

Who is A. Gurwitch? Dept: NPR bio here.

-CP