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It’s not a terribly cheery bunch of stories gathered up today. Maybe better luck this time next year. The shop reopens Monday. Thank you to all this site’s readers – regulars and newbies – for your messages and attention in 2008 and be safe over the holiday.
Pic: Things do turn around. Fireworks over Kosovo. Source.
-CP
Here the January 1st holidays are upon us and The Tracker is still catching up on stories from the Xmas break last week, and even before. One important one, carried by a few outlets, was news of a report on abrupt climate change from the U.S. Geological Survey and commissioned by a consortium of federal agencies. It declares that climate change’s pace is outstripping the pace projected by the Int’l Panel on Climate Change of just a few years ago. The chance of big, sudden dislocations seems less remote, it says. The IPCC, limited by its ponderous size, had to depend – with a firm, early cut-off date – on properly published scientific literature. It thus ignored some of the most recent findings from the cryosphere and on sea level rise’s potential havoc. This new report plugs that gap.
The report, on abrupt climate change, came out mid-December. It has gotten more of a rolling rather than abrupt media reaction. Among the first responders was the Baltimore Sun where blogger Tim Wheeler put it up Dec. 17.
The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin got it out December 25 and wrote in balanced fashion that it offers some increasingly alarming extrapolations, and a few worries that seem to be abating a bit. Abrupt change and sea level rise look worse. But a shutdown of the thermohaline circulation in the ocean that delivers heat from the tropics toward the poles looks less likely this century; ditto for immense outpourings of methane from polar regions.
Other stories:
Grist for the Mill: USGS Press Release ; Abrupt Climate Change report ;
Pic: Hi res ; ok, it’s a dull plot. Polar bears on melting bergs and drought-blasted wilderness scenes are much more eye-catching. But the Nat’l Snow and Ice Data Center‘s daily updated measure of Arctic sea ice is a marvelous public service. This shows the rapid refreeze now underway – most notable, after a slight head start the ice’s regrowth has flagged a bit. It is now tied for 07-08, which set the record for low ice cover up there.
-CP
One can hardly expect a place atop a giant plume of magma, and that has several times in geologic history literally blown the stuffings out of the local crust in super-volcanic caldera-forming eruptions, to sit there like a church mouse under a pew when the cat prowls by. But when a swarm of earthquakes jiggles Yellowstone National Park, and jiggles it again, and then again, that’s news.
It’s been shivering and rumbling since the day after Christmas. It evokes in the memories of attentive TV watchers the hyperdramatic depiction on the Discovery Channel/BBC a few years ago what a replay of the last big’un would look like. That was scary. Check out this still from the movie, with more here.
Stories:
Grist for the Mill: University of Utah Seismographic Stations Press Release ; Main Page for updated map ;
Munich Re, one of the big, publicly low-profile reinsurance outfits that wind up holding the bag for big liabilities even though the policy holder signed up with some smaller company’s agent, is getting media attention this week on the greenhouse front. Its message: 2008 was the third worst claims year for natural disasters (2005 with Katrina was tops). Climate change is showing its hand clearly in the industry’s payouts – and in uninsured losses as well. The world’s governments, the company’s execs add, need to do something about that. Several outlets – the top ones listed below - filed on Monday. Others are still cropping up today including the NYTimes.
Not so many years ago it was a vital aspect of such news reports to exclaim that a staid gray or pinstriped business such as insurance providers accepts without blinking the reality of climate change. Reporters often felt it necessary, and rightly so, to thereby point out that worry extends beyond the usual suspects: alarmed and perhaps lefty enviros and scientists in professors’ chairs or at obscure institutes. They might even have called a few climate skeptics for another view. Not so much anymore. At many outlets now, it’s just biz news.
Stories:
Grist for the Mill: Munich re Press Release (It’s more a detailed report than a news tip sheet) ;
Pic hi res ;
-CP
The year ends with plenty of melancholy news from many quarters on 2008 – and earlier. Not least is a reminder of the shocking and spectacular loss of the the shuttle Columbia nearly six years ago in the thin air high over Texas. A painfully detailed report from a NASA committee, released to the families of the seven crew members on board and to the public, has just one saving grace: the end was swift. Most of us who read about, or reported on, the accident recall speculation that a few crew members may have survived for many long minutes, perhaps all the way to ground impact, aware of their sure fate.
The AP‘s version likely will get the most readers. Reporter Seth Borenstein handles the story gracefully and forthrightly and with succinct, pertinent detail and context. Members of the crew learned of their peril only a minute or so before the end, he writes, and were surely absorbed in efforts to control the craft for only a brief few moments before a loss of cabin pressure rendered most or perhaps all unconscious, followed by a violent tumbling that none could have survived for long at all. “In short, the Columbia’s astronauts were quickly doomed,” he writes. “…the crew didn’t suffer much.”
His and most other stories add a natural, forward-looking aspect. There were lessons learned. The next generation of spacecraft, better seat belts, and better space suits that allow quick reaction to emergencies, ought to cut the odds that such calamity can occur again – including most prominently the Orion capsule that the space agency has designed as part of its Constellation, post-shuttle launching system.
Other headlines:
Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release, Reports ;
Pic: A better way to remember Columbia. Shown in 1997, delivering Chandra space telescope.
-CP
(A post that has grown since Dec. 22)
It’s the time of year for top ten lists and their various close kin. The Tracker will update this as more come in from the beats that interest us. Some are the work of individuals using their own personal, ineffable perspicacities as guides, others mark them up by strict accounting rules. No effort will be made here to segregate standard journalism lists from those published by professional societies, technical journals, gov’t agencies, or special interest groups etc. as long as their ethics and trustworthiness or other randomly selected qualities pass The Tracker’s high bar (one that has no specific rubric for judgment, at all). I haven’t read all these in any detail, so generalities are hard to make. Odd, though, that the monster Large Hadron Collier in CERN that promptly broke down during its shakedown cruise comes up a lot. Next year, one hopes, it also will rank, on merit.
*UPDATES:
Dept of 2009 Predictions, gadget division (or, another kind of annual list):
-CP
The Inquirer‘s Sandy Bauers starts off with a punch in the gut: “In Chad, the ivory poachers have upgraded to automatic weapons.” His long survey of how wild elephants are doing, with a spot of news from those in zoos, does not lighten the mood. Populations are falling fast, life in captivity is difficult for such large, bright, and sensitive social animals. Even “wild” elephant herds in their native lands are not so wild anymore, as most are tended by rangers (or shot by poachers if not) and live in national parks or other delimited areas. Hmmm. Bauers doesn’t bring it up, but maybe that slightly loony and romantic idea to reestablish a sort of Pleistocene fauna in North America’s great plains including African elephants has a tincture of practical and enlightened game management to it. Camels and African lions too? Hmmmm again. But please, no Nile crocodiles. Somehow, they’d wind up in the Everglades and bayous.
-CP
Uh oh for climate change denialists, skeptics, sound-science rationalists, whatever they’d prefer to be called. They may have to revert to an old philosophy – only long term trends count, as in centuries or millennia or however long it takes to make current conditions look like a blip. That’ll mean abandoning a recent spasm of blip-embracement and argument from within that crowd: global warming stopped ten years ago because (maybe) 1998 was a record and 2008 was only in the top ten all-time. It IS true that the running five year mean just took a slant downward.
The news is that the UK’s Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s climate research group project that 2009 will be hot. Maybe a record, maybe hotter than 1998 and 2005 (the Brits say ’98 got the record; some other groups including one at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies say 2005 was tops). The reason lies way out in the Pacific Ocean, it appears. If the office’s prognosticators are right as regards the further future, 2010 and on should see a continued and record-setting trot toward the torrid.
The Telegraph‘s Duncan Gardham and John Swain bake and serve up this latest news with a frosty icing. For now, it’s a deep freeze in England. New Year’s eve will bring weather colder than that of Reykjavik, and about even with Raufarhöfn. Both are in Iceland. Then comes the summer….
Reuters‘s Christina Fincher writes it simpler, focussing on the forecast with nothing on the frigid blasts outside right now.
Grist for the Mill: UK Met Office Press Release ;
Pic – Telegraph weather story
-CP
AP‘s Malcolm Ritter says your brain’s dimmer switch might be on the blink if you’re of a certain age and wonder why everybody else at the party is yakking away while all you say is “huh?” or maybe you just nod agreeably, blankly. The Tracker has a dimmer switch – two of’em. Each is a button on these consarned digital hearing aids that toggle through various modes until they beep twice to tell me they’re trying to ignore sounds from the back while giving me a shot at the noises from that mouth that’s moving right in front of me.It’s the cocktail party problem, in journalistic medicalese.
Ritter’s piece is a good jaunt through the anatomy of the ear, the failings of fading otic hairs, and the deft dance performed between ears and brain circuitry that gets a step slow with age. He writes it as though he knows first hand about this problem. Imagine that – a reporter personalizing the news to himself! The story has a good hook – the problem is not new, but now researchers say they’ve found mice that have it too. That opens new avenues for research.
-CP
With all the talk about bridge loans, bail outs, etc. for US car makers, The Tracker got a soft laugh out of the Dispatch and Kevin Mayhood‘s simile today. It comes up in an ode to the NASA Mars Rovers. The piece salutes the approaching completion of their fifth year of operation. A source compares them to “that old Volvo or Honda in your driveway; they keep running and running.” Once upon a time, the phrase was “….like an old Chevy….” and often pronounced “shivvy”.
Mayhood keeps with the usual formula in his paper’s science section: do it local. So several of the first sources quoted are at Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center, Ohio State U., etc. Locals, one learns, are leaders of the project’s navigation team. The news here for those of us who haven’t kept up on the latest is that Opportunity, despite a steering difficulty, is about to start an 11-mile trek to a new crater called Endeavour. Imagine that – it wasn’t even expected to reach Victoria Crater where it (or she, as many prefer) has roamed for a year or so. (Pic show’s the rover’s exit track from Victoria).
Grist for the Mill: NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission ;
-CP
John Schwartz gets his hooks into the conundrum known as NASA to lead the section. Schwartz has a zest and fondness for exotic gadgetry, bold decisions, and high-stakes technological gambles – especially if people in spacesuits are involved. This one’s illus ought to excite the heart of any old-time rocketry fan (Tracker’s hand is raised), filling all but one column above the fold and most of the page below, too. Online, the graphic is interactive. It was a surprise, in this quarter even though it should not have been, how much larger the proposed Ares V booster is than the were the Saturn Vs (Saturns V?) whose leftover carcasses decorate historic space age displays. The hefty package includes a sidebar on private start-up companies. These outfits hope their gear can help NASA bridge the Bush administration’s planned multiyear gap between the last shuttle flight in a year or two, and the first passenger-carrying launch of its successor Constellation system.
The piece is one in an ongoing occasional series, The Long Countdown. Links to others accompany the story. More than a quibble is that this one’s hed says “The Fight Over NASA’s Future.” But the story is entirely about the “exploration” division, which means the space-suited share, of the agency’s mission. There’s nary a word on the more scientifically rich planetary and Earth-observing, automated adventures – you know, the parts that generate far more public internet interest than do the doings on the space station. Nor is there anything on the first A in NASA.
The story’s tenor gives space to, but not much credence to, NASA mavericks and their blogger partisans who want to scrap most of Constellation as a technical error and to build a different, perhaps safer set of human-rated launchers. The message, sensible to these ears, is that if the money keeps flowing NASA’s proposed new rockets ought to work out as well as have previous generations of such things. Schwartz hits all the bases as he rounds up the post-shuttle program’s controversies and the task facing the Obama scouts prowling the agency’s headquarters near the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. He clearly reported and confirmed the essentials himself. But, beyond the nod to Keith Cowing’s long-running NASA Watch website, it might have been a good idea somehow to acknowledge the persistent digging into NASA’s precarious condition by the likes of the Orlando Sentinel, with its latest installment out today, by Robert Block (this one feeds hope by some for a re-do of Constellation’s architecture).
Now for the REST of the Science Times:
William H. Broad a few weeks ago ran a review of two books (previous post) that say nuclear weaponry designs worldwide all have a spy-propelled genealogy traceable to the Manhattan Project. Today he adds a third book. It has the same theme but is more narrowly focussed in arguing that one man working deep inside the US weapons program, and who is now deceased and not named, delivered key insights and documents to the Soviets in the early 50s. Hence, their H-bomb may have benefited from the genius of Andrei Sakharov, but a few tips from a spy helped a lot too.
The opinionated John Tierney – who as a curmudgeonly columnist is fully licensed to openly display scorn and approval – turns out a different kind of piece today. His topic is his own atheism (check that – he avoids the term, calling himself a heathen and a nonbeliever) and a study that concludes people of faith have more self-discipline and are generally a bit more civil than those of us who do not really think anybody or any thing else is listening if we pray silently. The piece has a welcome dollop of nuance and nonpartisan uncertainty about the study’s meaning, and about its advice.
Other notable headlines:
As usual, much more. Whole Section ;
BUT WAIT THERE’s EVEN MORE! Apparently unsatisfied with its measly news hole in the Science Times, the NYT’s science corps stakes territory elsewhere in the paper too:
The story is a bit blinkered. It doesn’t mention Brazil’s example, nor that in principle cane sugar, combined with burning the bagasse plant-waste for energy, is far better at reducing reliance on petroleum than is corn or other grains. Perhaps the paper has already written stories with those angles?
-CP
