Whoa. Check out lower left on Science Times’s p. 1 today. There one finds the cheerfully skeptical columnist John Tierney’s full-body immersion in the world and logic of Roger Pielke Jr., a climate and environmental researcher in Colorado, and operator of Prometheus, a well-known blog. Pielke is popular among those relatively few intellectually dissonant crossbreeds who believe that greenhouse overwarming of Earth is real and perhaps very serious – but simultaneously that this is no reason to get nutsy with huge government and multi-government programs and other interferences in the private market to deal with it. (More commonly, it seems to The Tracker, vigilant small-government conservatives are so repulsed by the colossal international regulatory bureaucracy that might be need for a truly effective post-Kyoto agreement that they seem instinctively to decide that such an awful solution can only mean one thing: the problem is wholly fiction, even a lefty scam.) Tierney does a reasonable job pointing at the scientists in the Obama administration explicitly as activists. Yes. But The Tracker frankly does not recognize many actual academic scientists who, in keeping with Tierney’s description, try to wholly disguise their political agendas as objective science. They do that at the likes of Greenpeace, not so much in the Nat’l Academy of Sciences. Tierney seems to have no similar problem with the political colorations of the smallish number of science skeptics who sport academic credentials. A possible antidote for this column is to listen to the goofy, cheerful, gov’t-funded, reasonably scientifically sound rap-attack,  Take AIM at Climate Change, that is getting so much mileage at YouTube (despite the scorn of serious aficionados of hip-hop). I like the piece. This despite its being as schmaltzy as “It’s a Small World After All” that hammers the ears through a Disney World and Disneyland ride (at least, used to) and then drives one crazy by replaying itself again and again in the brain.

Whew. Too much about that. But the pic above right, source here, seems appropriate.  THAT’s activism that’s not disguised at all.

Other headlines of note:

• Denise Grady : After a Devastating Birth Injury, Hope. First, take a look at the stunning image a Times-hired photographer got and is the section’s lead art. It supports a fully absorbing, wrenching word portrait of traveling surgeons facing the results of deep poverty. That’s an old formula, and a good one. This time it is about fistula, a potentially dreadful injury from prolonged childbirth that the infant seldom survives and the mother barely if at all. One wonders, in sadness, if the particular women where this is set, in East Africa, also live with the results of mutilative female circumcision. Perhaps better left alone – one category of calamity is enough for this piece to carry.
• Thayer Walker : Wave-Powered Monitor Is Moving Beyond Listening to Whales ; for those who love simple, sophisticated gadgetry that is so clever, yet so obvious when explained. Oddly, the piece does not mention a passenger-carrying vessel that the NYTimes wrote up less than a year ago, using much the same locomotive principle (illus here).
• Abigail Zuger: In the Open at Last, a Secret All Women Share ; Ah yes, the first period. Actually, at the line “At this point, male readers may want to go outside and toss a ball around for a while,” The Tracker moved on. To many however this bood review will be engrossing.
• Nicholas Wade: From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How? ; an explainer, not a news story, on epigenomics and part of what the Times calls a new, occasional series on frontiers of cell biology. Wade recently quoted sympathetically a man who believes a Neanderthal genome could be used to recreate a live one in short order. He’s written similarly on mammoth DNA. Now he’s writing ably on epigenomics – a biological wrinkle that The Tracker has opined (without much expertise, as usual) may make reconstituted mammoths or Neanderthals an impossibility. But this piece today suggests that a pure DNA sequence can command an appropriate epigentic scaffolding to form around it. I’d like to know more…
• Benedict Carey : After Abuse, Changes in the Brain ; More on epigenomics. See fine ksjtracker post, a few below, by Julie Robotham (JR tagline), for more on this news.
• Gardiner Harris, Kenneth Chang: Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few ; Read this if you wonder how research grants can be solid economic, job-generating, stimulus for our hard times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.