Just about everyone has had a go at this story, which ventures a definitive answer on a theme that has swung in different directions over recent years: whether weight-loss diets are more effective if they emphasise protein or if they go heavy on the fats or carbohydrates.

Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it is a large (811 participants) prospective and randomised trial, hitting most of the hot buttons for quality and reliability in medical research. Overweight adults were assigned to one of four diets, equal in energy content but differing in proportions of macronutrients, which they were to follow for two years. All were offered an exercise program and counselling in addition.

Eighty per cent of people stuck with the program, and they lost an average four kilos regardless of which diet they followed.

At the Boston Globe, Elizabeth Cooney does a nice job of describing the methodology of the Harvard School of Public Health study that gave rise to the flurry of reporting. But she does not go far beyond the confines of the research itself to seek comment, including only a press release statement from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which funded the study. 

Time’s Tiffany Sharples has scored a lively interview with co-author Catherine Loria and lead author Frank Sacks, who told her such gems as: “We have a really simple and practical message for people: it’s not so much the type of diet you eat. It’s how much you put in your mouth.”

Other stories

• WebMD Kathleen Doheny : Best Diet? The One You’ll Follow
• CBCnews.ca : Calories, not diet type, matter for weight loss, trial shows
• Chicago Sun-Times : Low-fat vs low-carb
• Baltimore  Sun – Kelly Brewington : Diet study finds what counts is calories
• Scientific American – Coco Ballantyne : Weight-Loss Winner: A Diet High in Fiber, Low in Calories
• Daily Telegraph (UK) – Rebecca Smith : Diets that count calories work just as well as Atkins, shows research

Grist for the mill:

• Harvard School of Public Health press release

-JR

If one enters “dinosaur” and “human footprint” together in an internet search, which The Tracker does not recommend as the result may be dispiriting, up come myriad young-Earth creationist websites asserting geological evidence that dinosaurs and people co-existed. Science of the more normal sort can’t even come close to that sensation. The best it can do is in Science Magazine this week. There, researchers from multiple institutions report evidence that a “mere” 1.5 million years ago human ancestors walked along a bluff near today’s Lake Turkana in Kenya by planting their feet in more or less exactly the way Homo sapiens does today. The most suspected pedestrians: Homo erectus, also presumed to be the last (and smaller-brained) common ancestor to us and our cousin the Neanderthal. Some experts, depending on how keen they are to lump or split our ancestry into few or many branches, might ascribe it to Homo ergaster. Either way, it’s not us but it’s close.  It gets extraordinarily wide pickup by news media.

The import for paleoanthropologists is that this gives a waymarker between today and the only other ancient hominid footprints known, left by Australopithecus afarensis (as in “Lucy”) 3.7 million years ago. Those, as related well by the NYTimes‘s John Noble Wilford this morning, show a very different foot structure and stride. The new prints, adds Wilford, are the first direct indication how H. erectus and its close kin walked as no foot bone fossils from the species are yet known.

Other stories:

• Scientific American Katherine Harmon: Researchers Uncover 1.5-Million-Year-Old Footprints ;
• Reuters Will Dunham: Footprints show human ancestor with modern stride ;
• AFP : Another ancient fossil found in Kenya ; For such well-arched feet that’s a remarkably flat headline. The story’s fine, if brief. But one notes that it has auto-generated Google map illus pointing at locations mentioned in the dateline or text. AP sometimes does this automated Google mapping too. It’s not helpful – too many datelines are many miles, even half a world, away from the actual news site.
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson : Footprints of ancient Man point the way out of Africa ; Clever hed, as H. erectus is widely believed to be the earliest of our ancestors to spread into the greater part of the Old World.
• Nat’l Geographic John Roach :  Oldest Human Footprints With Modern Anatomy Found ;
• Science News Bruce Bower : Modern feet step back 1.5 million years ;
• Wired News Brandon Keim : Walk Like Us: 1.5 Million-Year-Old Footprints Look Modern ;
• BBC: Earliest ‘human footprints’ found ; Smart use of qualifying quote marks – it is not clear if all members, or how many of, the genus Homo can be equated with human.
• Philadelphia Inquirer Tom Avril : Footprints offer clue on path of modern man ; Avril explores with some care why this is exciting to experts in the field, and what it says about how much these creatures were on their two feet ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW Ann Gibbons: Early Humans Toed the Line ;
• .. could do more

Grist for the Mill: Rutgers University Press Release (via ScienceDaily) ; George Washington University Press Release ;

Note: The Tracker is never consistent in typography style, but readers may notice a different look to these bullets. The bylines are linked, the heds are in italics. More commonly with bullets in previous posts the link is through the headline. Just experimenting. An early intention with this site was to, when sensible, link through bylines if possible. I’ve gotten at times away from that. But doing so serves to emphasize that this site’s attention is as much on reporters and the process of news writing, editing, and presentation as it is on the importance of the news events themselves. I’ll digest it awhile, may stick with this style, may not….

-CP

In Science this week a research team based at Rochester University reports discovery, in mice, of a gene called Osr2 whose presence appears to ensure that once a rodent’s teeth are in place, more don’t grow right alongside them. And its absence produces not only abnormalities in skull structure but the ready production of extra teeth. Plausibly, human teeth follow much the same genetic marching orders. The AP‘s Lauren Neergaard gives it a lively lede, asking why it is we get just two sets – baby teeth and one set of adult backups – while sharks can break teeth off all year long and rely on new ones next door to slide into their places. The work, she goes on to say, could spur work to help adults one day grow new teeth when their own wear out. That puts on optimistic spin on what looks intuitively like a payoff that will be very difficult to achieve. But she backs it up with an outside source who says he intends to use it quickly to spur his own research in exactly that direction.

The story is commendable for getting deep enough into a few arcane details of the research and to give readers a solid sense of the complex, basic science involved. The story has some other pickup, but not much from major outlets. But it follows close on another announcement from researchers at Oregon State University that they had found the gene that triggers formation of tooth enamel.

Grist for the Mill: U. Rochester Press Release ;

Other tooth gene news:

• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne : Gene found that makes tooth enamel could revolutionise dental care ;
• HealthDay News: Scientists Find Gene for Tooth Enamel ;

Grist for the Mill: Oregon State U. Press Release (via ScienceDaily); (Corrected – earlier version mis-attributed this about 40 miles south, to Univ. of Oregon. See comment.)

-CP

What? Spookfish again?! No, seriously, only the second time known to The Tracker, but nonetheless it is passing strange that in just a few weeks two spates of news relate discovery of fresh progress on a mystery that hardly any scientists knew existed: how do  little, deep sea creatures’ tubular eyes work?

To back up, as reviewed in an earlier post. January 7, University College London, Bristol University, and others’ fish experts disclosed that the first-ever capture of live spookfish – off Tonga – led them to realize its cylindrical eyes are mirrored. That gives it, they said, exceedingly sharp vision in nearly dark, mesopelagic (which means pretty deep but not crazy deep) waters. Way cool.

Now even more interesting news is landing from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. It has its own spookfish – also called a barreleye – in the great undersea canyon just offshore. It eats jellies (ie, jellyfish). And its tubular eyes may or may not have mirrors, but they can be aimed in various directions. That fixes a puzzle created by misapprehension by previous researchers who looked at dead versions and concluded their barrel eyes can only look upward, not straight ahead. They, too, caught some alive and gave them close scrutiny.

Only upon looking closely does one realize that the Tongan spookfish and the Monterey spookfish may have tubular eyes but they belong to different species, even to different genera (Dolichopteryx longipes and Macropinna microstoma). Thus one has convergent evolution, perhaps, of both tubular eyes’ genes and of nomenclature’s memes.

   The latter, California fish may overall be the weirder of the two. The image is striking. Its head has a transparent dome resembling, says the MBARI scientific leader, the canopy of a jet fighter. Is the head’s interior shining with its own luminescence, or exterior lighting from the ROV? Dunno. But from here it looks also like Robbie the robot, with “his” flashing, whirling, working internal bits visible through glass.

The new report is in the journal Copeia. It also is on YouTube where it is among the most heavily watched videos of the day. News outlets have a lot of fun with it. Many writers give second billing to the discovery about the operation of the barrel eyes. It’s that transparent head that transfixes them.

Stories:

• NBC – Caitlin Millat : Crazy See-Through Fish Wows  Scientists ; And it “gives new meaning to ‘clear-headed’,” she adds.
• Popular Science – Brooke Borel : Totally tubular / Researchers have finally cracked the case involving a bizarre deep-sea fish that has a transparent head and rotating tubular eyes ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon : The Clear-Headed Fish ; Just a fat caption for the pic (and video), but it appears to reverse the eye discovery. The news is that it can see straight ahead, too. Already know was that it can see upward.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : Fish pivots tubular eyes to scan for food ; Perlman doesn’t just jape on the funny fish’s looks, but explains how the work was done and how the animal’s attributes fit it into its ecosystem niche.
• Cosmos (Australia) – Gillian Shaw : Odd fish looks up through transparent head ; .
• Deep-Sea News – “Dr. M” : A blog by an expert, lively writing too: Scientists Solve The Mystery Of Shy This Fish Is So Freakin’ Crazy;

Grist for the Mill: MBARI press release ;

Here’s a good line: “A canopy of trash envelops our planet.” The Wall St. Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz uses it* during a bracing followup today to the Feb. 10 T-bone collision of a privately owned, US Iridium communications satellite with a defunct Russian Cosmos. The event sprayed twin jets of instant, spreading, lethal trash into crowded lanes of space traffic in near Earth orbit. As it is, he also notes that every single space shuttle comes back pockmarked from the dust storm of particles shed by the thousands of payloads that have preceded it. A big collision – the kind that knocks big holes in things – is inevitable. The story is heavily reported, with five quoted, well-placed sources at pertinent government, industry, and watchdog organizations. It’s a muscular piece overall. The result punches the reader with lefts, rights, and uppercuts of verbiage all saying we were warned, we had to have known this was going to happen, hardly anybody did anything about it, it’s even worse than most of us thought, and now just look at this mess.

It includes an ambitious animated video – screen shot upper right – with a soundtrack worthy of a Jason Bourne movie thriller and narrated by Hotz. It might scare the flight suit pants right off any would-be space tourists.

Incidentally, a genuinely superb, but very different, after-accident report on the affair is at the on line trade journal The Space Review.  A former Air Force satellite-tracking maven, Brian Weeden writes a lengthy list of misperceptions and startlingly detailed facts about the perils to the space age posed by orbiting junk. He details what probably happened a few weeks ago over Siberia and, more important, points out what’s possible and what’s not possible in the prediction and prevention department. Also in it are his pointed suggestions why owners of both satellites may have some fast talking to do if lawsuits ever go to court.

*A quibble on the next line:  These remarks are not to detract from the story’s broad merit. But Lee also writes in the next sentence that “Orbiting swarms of junk careen into each other like billiard balls…” Is it just me? Maybe “careen” – traditionally meant to mean leaning (as a ship hauled ashore at low tide to have its bottom repaired) – has been so altered by sheer usage that it is only the overly persnickity among editors that still and routinely replace it with “career” when the meaning is wild, unpredictable, or uncontrolled path. But that’s how The Tracker was raised. Aside from that, billiard balls (see also the headline on the Space Review piece) cleanly bounce off one another. They don’t bust into yet smaller and far more numerous bits. Perhaps billiard ball behavior would be superior. Nitpicking is now over. And yes, hypocrisy and glass house police, I know I regularly screw up it’s and its and lots more.

-CP

The scads of researchers winding up their big International Polar Year of coordinated study were no fools when choosing which topic to mention first as evidence their efforts paid off: polar meltdowns and their attendant sea level rise. The conclusion, while it has been reported off and on, in bits and pieces, is pulled together and doesn’t sound any better when the World Meteorological Organization puts on its imprimatur. As noted in earlier news (earlier post), recent warming in Antarctica was found to extend well south of the continent’s peninsula to include much of West Antarctica. Now its corollary is getting specific highlight: the glaciers are moving faster, their buttresses along the continental margin are failing, and an acceleration of sea level rising beyond forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems likely. Plus, Greenland’s ice is ebbing too. Again, none of this is a departure from the general news on such things lately. But this is fairly official.

Polar Glacier Stories:

• Bloomberg – Alex Morales : Greenland, Antarctica Glaciers Speeding Faster Toward the Sea ;
• AP – Charles J. Hanley : Ice in east Antarctica a bigger threat long term ; Filing from a meeting of national environmental ministers at Norway’s Troll Research Station, Hanley gives broader context to the word from smaller West Antarctica. Long term, its the continent’s bigger ice sheet that our descendants may confront. Hanley’s earlier dispatches include this, and this. Hanley took the picture, above right. That’s presumably his shadow at the bottom.
• AP: How much is Antarctica warming? Officials get firsthand look ; A fact sheet, presumably with Hanley’s help from the meeting.
• AP – Elaine Engeler: Study: Antarctic glaciers melting faster than thought; Filed from Geneva.
• Reuters: Polar regions found warming fast, raising sea levels. ;
• AFP: Poles warm up and the Arctic grows greener ;
• BBC – Richard Bilton : Antarctica’s cold awakening ; filed from the enviro. ministerial meeting at Troll Station.
• Xinhua/China Daily: Study: Snow, ice declining fast in both polar regions ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Marian Wilkinson : Poles apart but warming greater than thought ;
• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Scientists find bigger than expected polar ice melt ;

More IPY News:

• At Nature News Quirin Schiermeier provides a colorful set of snapshots and summaries of what the 50,000-odd participants in the program got done.
• BBC : Polar Year ‘hailed as a success’ ; Beats me why that hed merits quote marks.
• Edmonton Journal – Ed Struzik : Canada urged to take lead in polar research ;

Grist for the Mill: International Polar Year site with recaps of major achievements, Press Release ;

-CP

Just the asserted date on these hand-chipped stones has to be enough to make any North American archeologist drool: 13,000 years. And they’re not little flakes scattered willy-nilly or scrappy left-over knappers’ cores, but 83 tools including fully formed blades, choppers, handaxe-looking things, and other implements that date from the dawn of the time that all argument ends over when people first arrived from the Old World and in the New. Maybe people were here much earlier than that, but at 13,000 years the landrush was on; in full bloom was its most iconic culture, the Clovis with their penchant for hunting megafauna like Pleistocene mammoths, giant sloths, and camels. And the new tools look to be the work of Clovis artisans, mainly butchering implements, say reports.

Plus, and get this: some have blood residue on them that appears to be from camels and horses, maybe bears and sheep too.

The news is that a University of Colorado-led team has id’d just such a trove after the shovel wielded by a landscaper preparing a fish pond for a Boulder biotech executive went clink on unexpected stones. The contractor and the home-owner recognized that the rocks weren’t regular rocks. Experts soon arrived.

A mystery arises on reading the press release and news accounts. Why is this news today? No reference is made to a journal article or presentation at a scientific conference. Although there is no reason to suspect the news’s legitimacy, there also is no sign of peer review or professional presentation – and the brick bats that may inspire – before it hit the press. There is thus a slight odor to this that needs further checking out. A neatly placed stack of sensational, bloody tools buried near the surface and right in a backyard a few blocks from campus? Wonderful! Really? Jim Scott, the u’s p.r. man, reports the lead scientist did present it at a regional archeology conference last October. Such info ought to be included in news stories. A second mystery is that if it is as presented, that the stories aren’t bigger. It seems that it may, to specialists in this field, be like discovery of a whole new box of Dead Sea Scrolls would be for a Near Eastern archeologist.  We’ll be reading more….

Stories:

• Denver Post – Mark Jaffe : Tools unearth 13,000 years of history ;
• Colorado Daily/Daily Camera – Laura Snider : Ancient camel-butchering tools found in Boulder ;
• NYTimes – Kirk Johnson : Colorado Backyard Yields Cache of Stone Age Tools ;  Very short piece, one thinks, considering …. ;
• LiveScience: Ice Age Camels Butchered in Colorado ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano : Camels in Colorado — and other surprises from 13,000 years ago ;

*UPDATES (Feb. 27) :

• AP – Alysia Patterson: 13,000-year-old tools unearthed at Colorado home ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Christine Dell’Amore : Ancient Camels Butchered in Colorado, Stone Tools Show? ; The question mark reflects one, outside source’s warning that such blood tests are not universally accepted by experts.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: What a find! Stone-age tools in a Boulder backyard ; Only hed seen that makes word play of “stone” and “Boulder.”

*UPDATE#2 (Mar 10): Popular Mechanics – Andrew Moseman : Ancient Clovis Toolbox – Were Prehistoric Nomads DIYers? ; note – all Pop.M’s regular readers know what a DIYer is. Do you? Answer bottom right.

Grist for the Mill: CU Press Release ; Includes stunning photos of the implements.

-CP

(do it yourself-ers)

At least Bobby Jindal didn’t find his prime example of government waste in the Dept. of Commerce’s Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the one that tries to figure out where hurricanes are headed. But he did take aim at another federal agency with a pile of mandates from Congress and executive branch policies to watch for incipient natural disasters: the Interior Dept’s United States Geological Survey.

In his broadly non-applauded official Republican reaction to the President’s address to Congress night before last, Jindal said in derision, “something called volcano monitoring” is getting $140 million. That was meant as a snicker and laughter line. It’s not even true that the money all goes into volcano work, as it covers a variety of natural disaster programs. But aside from that, oh my. Scientific research – in fields that to a certain stripe of japing low-browed anti-intellectual political activists just sounds ridiculous – is a recurrent bipartisan punching bag for government-waste cheap-shot artists. Not that the science agencies never spend money unwisely or even stupidly. But during the last campaign, John McCain chortled and shouted over studies of bear DNA in the Rockies so many times that the study wound up with heavy ink explaining how worthy an expenditure it actually was. Ditto, a few weeks ago a House floor speech that slammed “porky” stimulus studies of the San Francisco salt marsh harvest mouse only led to explanations that the mouse is a tiny part of a genuinely job-hungry program for ecological preservation. (Previous posts here and here) But here we go again.

One can’t find any newspaper or other major media stories that have anybody saying bingo, that Louisiana guv sure nailed those pointy headed volcano dorks with their greedy hands in the public till, didn’t he?

If you want a good roundup of some press reaction, plus the writer’s opinion, it is at the Washington Post by Alec MacGillis. The piece highlights the irony of a pol not only slamming gov’t for not doing enough (ergo, it should stop trying so let’s starve the beast) during his city’s encounter with Katrina, but dissing programs aimed at helping other communities survive looming natural hazard. At the blogsite Pharyngula, biologist PZ Meyers heads his brief reaction, “Jindal continues a tradition.” He tars the GOP exclusively, however, failing to recognize that the tradition lives on both sides of the aisle – remember Dem. Senator Wm. Proxmire’s Golden Fleece awards of a few decades back? What’s disheartening is that the tactic seems to hit a chord with the public despite occasional debunking by journalists. Power of the press, p’shaw.
Other stories:

• Juneau Empire : Sen. Begich bristles at statement about ‘volcano monitoring.’ ;  Alaska has lot of volcanoes. Maybe the governor made a statement too? No sign of that – but she may be able to see the rumbling Mount Redoubt if she likes, or go visit the Alaska Volcano Observatory where the monitoring is a life and death matter.
• Anchorage Daily News: Alaskans fume about Jindal volcano gripe ; He says he tried to reach the governor. No go. But her office told him that of course Alaskans want to know when a volcano is fixing to blow.
• IANS (Indo-Asian News Service) filed from DC: ‘Does Jindal have a volcano in his backyard?’ ; The piece appears stitched up from other news accounts and includes a great quote from a gov’t volcano watcher: “We don’t throw the money down the crater..and watch it burn up.”
• CNN – Brian Todd, Matt Smith, wires too? : Gov. Bobby Jinal’s volcano remark has some fuming ; Ah, same quote as in preceding bullet. Wonder who heard it first.
• NPR – Nell Greenfieldboyce: Jindal Comment on Volcano Monitoring Causes Some To Erupt ;
• LiveScience – Andrea Thompson: Gov. Jindal Follow-up: What Is ‘Volcano Monitoring’? ;
• Scientific American – Jordan Lite : Bobby Jindal and volcano monitoring: What was he talking about? ; Another fine aggregation of the writer’s reporting plus allusions and links to other media/blog accounts.
• NYTimes – Paul Krugman : What should government do? A Jindal meditation; Aside from his remark that the La. governor’s remarks’ “intellectual incoherence is stunning,” the Nobelist scrivener gets to the heart of the issue – if there is anything that fills the bill for being important, that government can do, that private enterprise has no incentive for, it is natural hazard monitoring.

Related News on volcano monitoring underway now:

• A few weeks ago The Portland Oregonian‘s Michael Milstein ran an update from Mount St. Helens on continuing, gov’t-sponsored research there. The photo above ran with this story.
• And earlier this month, for Popular Mechanics freelancer Douglas Fox visited the situation in Alaska: Redoubt Volcano’s Rumblings Threaten The World’s Third Largest Air Cargo Hub ; And, it says here, in Anchorage filtration face masks are stockpiled to deal with any ash plumes that come that way.

Search engine unintelligence: Oddly, couldn’t find anything in the Hawaii papers on this. But putting “Jindal” into the Honolulu Advertiser’s search box got this response: “did you mean genital?”  So weird, this digital age we’re in.

Who’d a thunk that really really soft toilet tissue, of a sort wildly popular in the U.S. but elsewhere, not really, has a particularly big environmental black mark? The Times‘s Leslie Kaufman provided this morning an eye-opener on the toilet paper trade. Front page, too. It turns out that the very best, silky soft paper fibers are most easily milled from old growth trees. Kaufman calls it the Mr. Whipple effect, in honor of the old Charmin commercials. Hence, as pulpy paper goes, high-end t.p. is particularly dependent on logging in areas that make most enviros furious. That includes the far north boreal forests, old growth in the US, and varioius places in Australia and in South America. Some comes from tree farms, which don’t to The Tracker seem too ecologically awful (cut a tree, a new one comes up, maybe the carbon sequestration is actually accelerated..?).

Maybe the enviros need a good slogan. Hmmm. No teak on your tush? Don’t be usin’ eucalyptus on you’se a’caboose! Brasil trees belong in Brazil, not on your Bottom! Keep the cedar from your keester? Nope. I don’t have the jingle gene.

Grist for the Mill: Greenpeace TP guide ;

-CP

For some time automakers have fought efforts by many states, led by California, to dramatically reduce the permissible emissions – including greenhouse gases – by motor vehicles. Opponents argued, in part, that to have one  standard in some states but another elsewhere makes a difficult life worse. They may get their wish, sort of. The Post‘s Juliet Eilperin reports this week that the new EPA team is considering setting up one, new national standard for such emissions (which are a proxy for sharp tightening of fuel efficiency standards). Whether the new standard would be as strict as what California has pending in its books is unclear. But to directly regulate CO2 is the main thing. Eilperin’s story includes a brief aside on a related topic: the state of play on a cap and trade regime for CO2 emissions by industry in general.

Related News: NYTimes – Felicity Barringer: Economic Crisis Complicates California’s Goals on Climate ;

-CP

The picture shows a slender cat staring nonchalantly at the lens. One wishes there had been another frame a split second later. POOF goes the flash. One bets that prowling, cautious creature turned into a blur and jumped a mile. The news, spread by the Wildlife Conservation Society based in New York, is that for the first time a remote camera captured images of several rare Saharan Cheetahs. Such data, if augmented by other such stealthy ways to audit wild cats, could give wildlife biologists a far better idea how many of these animals remain. Researchers from the Zoological Society of London and colleagues in Algeria set up the remote viewing station – which may explain why nearly all the press action is in the UK.

Another but daytime camera trap image, beautiful enough to pass for a diorama, is here.

Stories:

• Telegraph ;
• Times ;
• New Scientist – Rowan Hooper ;
• National Geographic – Ted Chamberlain ;
• BBC ;

Grist for the Mill:

WCS Press Release (via EurekAlert) ; ZSL (London Zoo) Press Release ;

Is it news when climatologists – who already are on record as worrying that the changing climate is hurtling mankind and the natural world into a calamitous readjustment – now say the problem could be even worse than what they said the last time? In one instance, even though it’s in the Proceedings of the Nat’l Academy of Sciences, apparently not so much. And, it’s understandable. Editors and readers alike may get slightly eye-glazed at yet another model-based forecast of worsening trouble, even if it is credible. The gist is that it may take a slighter rise in temp. to seriously derange many, important natural patterns such as storm track behavior.

AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid did write the report up. Good for him. Its implications are serious. The study has many authors. Schmid names two of them – Stanford’s Stephen Schneider and Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer. They are fine scientists. Experienced reporters on Earth sciences immediately recognize them also as men who, for years, have been waving their arms and banging on pots to alert the public to an onrushing pickle for life as we know it (and isn’t that a sorry metaphor?). Maybe that’s why it got little notice at most outlets. Could be folks are enured to such climate science iterations.

AFP also filed on it.

Grist for the Mill: Princeton U. Press Release ;

Pic explanation: Francisco Franco. Years ago, much was made of a story, during uncertainty over the dictator’s demise and its cause, that carried the exasperated headline “Franco Still Dead.” Or is that apocryphal?

-CP