The Seattle PI may be within a month or so of closing. So it is all the more melancholy and impressive to see its staff still gamely at it. A few days ago environmental writer Robert McClure got an interesting one from a conference on the predictable state impacts of a changing, warming climate. He focusses on a “flood of new residents driven north by heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming.”

And, say meeting participants, most will be poor and will therefore put a heavy load on the state’s already-creaking social services systems.

Speaking of creaking and newspapers, a Seattle-based “new media” outlet called Crosscut has this article by writer Bill Richards: Time to say goodbye to print newspapers. It’s resonant with the post below, on similar topics as reflected at Columbia Journalism Review. Richards’s opening line: “I yield to no one in my love of newspapers.” And you know where he’s going with that.

Pic: dustbowl refugees, source;

-CP

Fans of and worriers about the state of science reporting ought to look in regularly at the Columbia Review of Journalism’s blog site The Observatory. Two pieces have recently landed there with distinct pertinence:

• Cristine Russell: Science Journalism Growing Overseas / AAAS meeting highlights dwindling American coverage ; Cris, currently at Harvard and also president of the Council for the Adv. of Science Writing, was at AAAS and noticed an effervescent Brit, Aussie, and otherwise not-American press corps having a great time. The old time US media were hardly to be seen. One might argue that the overseas cadre has a tradition of going to AAAS, a fun trip and good party, while cynical US reporters sniff that it no longer has much news. But one suspects there is more to this than that.
• Curtis Brainard : Science Journalism’s Hope and Despair / ‘Niche’ pubs growing as MSM circles the drain ; The Observatory’s in house science journalism maven provides yet more war stories from the shrinking field in main stream journalism, contrasted to the ferment in other, mainly on line outlets and related opportunities. A fear he shares: “ghettoization” of science news to a narrow readership.

Plus, a column wrapping up the media’s recent Darwin tsunami:

• Eric Simons: Darwin Mania! / Journalists devote reams to his 200th birthday – does he deserve it?
  
• one more: Curtis Brainard (today, on climate change skeptics): Lingering Denial: The unfortunate case of a few pundits with too much influence ;

Pic: It’s what came up upon googling “mainstream journalism.” Source .

A few weeks ago The Tracker missed a highly readable account in the Anchorage Daily News, from non-staffer Ned Rozell, describing the accelerating erosion of a stretch of its north coast, along the Beaufort Sea. Its vignette lede relates a local US Geological Survey researcher’s surprise when he went looking for a known archeological site. He found a stretch of encroached ocean where a trading post used to stand. That led to a paper in Geophysical Research Letters on the rapid recent and accelerating retreat of the shore, a presumed result of global warming via thawing permafrost, or greater wave action as winter see ice ebbs, or a rising sea level, or maybe all three. The fast erosion up there has gotten plenty of media attention with this paper adding specific detail.

I was led to the story by the arrival of a press release today by email from the USGS, trumpeting the same study. Looking to see if it had any nibbles revealed that Rozell already had gotten it into his local paper. But there is a twist to this, its details not clear to me. Rozell is a freelancer, an accomplished book writer, and also works as a science writer for the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute.  Ergo, he has an enviable, inside line on such news as this. The newspaper identifies him as such, and runs an additional credit under his byline, “Alaska Science.” It’s unclear what that is, whether this story is also part of a press release, was sold as an excloo to the Daily News, or what. Curious, that. I’ll update the post if I learn exactly how this story, which reads quite well, reached the newspaper.

*UPDATE:

• Hardly had I asked but Rozell explained. He did the story for the university institute, which for more than 30 years has provided a weekly column to the local paper and offers it to any other newspaper anywhere, free. Rozell has been doing it for 15 years. And Rozell got the story at last year’s SF American Geophysical Union meeting when he ran into the lead author. My suspicion was that maybe the paper is among those cutting staff and finding other ways to get copy. Perhaps so, but this instance is part of a long-standing arrangement. That’s not exactly independent journalism and ought not be done at a large scale but, on its own merits, this example appears to be a public service.

Grist for the Mill:

USGS Press Release ; GRL Abstract ;

Image source Reuters ;

-CP

In the journal Conservation Letters is an encouraging bit of news for the increasingly large crowd of people resigned to significant global warming and who pray that with avoidance a goner, adaptation will ease some of its impact on nature. Researchers at Durham University, U. of York, U. of Leeds, and elsewhere found two species of English butterflies – marbled whites and small skippers – whose optimal ranges already had migrated north of their historic habitats. They gathered up samples and took them north to locales that the computers said ought to suit them. That was nearly ten years ago. Now they are doing just fine in their new fluttering grounds. While butterflies do, after all, fly, these appear not to be migratory and unlikely to adjust their ranges on their own in pace with shifting climatological zones.

Stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray : Butterflies could be saved from global warming with moves to cooler climes ; Possible misleading aspect here. She writes in the lede of “a massive decline..as the climate warms” but a source deeper says the sharp reduction is due largely to habitat fragmentation, farming, urban development, etc. Warming worsens things, could become a major factor, one can assume.
• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Butterfly colony trial hints at novel climate fix ; Story has a properly wide scope. One bets Doyle didn’t write the hed, referring to this tactic as a climate “fix.”
• Press Association (via Hutton Cranswick Today): Butterflies thrive in warmer north ;

Grist for the Mill:

Durham U. Press Release ; Conservation Letters Abstract ;

-CP

A short while ago we had some fun with the fuss in some corners of the media world over a poisonous green comet heading straight for, or sort of straight for, or actually not a whit straight for Earth (see previous post) . It’s a real enough long-period comet, called Lulin, that makes its closest passage by our planet early next week. A few outlets are giving us the lowdown this week and without such tabloid spice. Much of the news focusses on its backwardness. That is, it is coming in to the solar system more or less in the plane of the planets but in the opposite orbital sense. Plus, as it has already made its closest approach to the sun, its solar-wind and radiation-pressure driven tail is preceding it. Ergo, it is flying backwards. Even, it appears, some astronomers say it is going backwards. This even though such long period comets are pretty well random in their orbital behaviors, and their tails always point away from the sun. Also, it is green, barely. The image here, lifted from the Science News story linked below, has a caption saying it is greenish. Looks bluish actually, and given that the double star also in the image has the same tint, one suspects it is mainly very pale and very much whitish in reflected sunlight.

Stories:

• Science News – Ron Cowen : A green visitor makes its approach ;  The story takes the comet and the astronomy around it seriously, detailing some of the spectroscopic and other studies set up for its visit and the reasons this comet, perhaps on its first loop close to the sun after some sort of Oort disturbance, may have too tough a shell to allow a big, easily-seen spectacle.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Backward green comet makes one-time only visit ; A brief, calm piece. One wonders about that one-time only line in the head. A source cited in the story says it will gain enough speed to escape the solar system. Really? Into interstellar space, adios but no hasta la vista? What kind of gravitational slingshot way out there would have hurled it so hard toward the sun? Maybe the source meant inner solar system.
• Space.com Joe Roa : Newfound Comet Lulin to Grace Night Skies ; He explains particularly well the unusual visibility of this one’s “anti-tail” of dust lingering in the comet’s orbit and that has unusual prominence due to the shallow angle at which it is seen from Earth.

A few weeks ago The Tracker took note of an info-filled story in the Anchorage Daily News on the economic forces that are planting wind turbines in Alaska, largely in remote villages (previous post, ADN story here, ).  Today in the NYTimes‘s Business Section reporter Stefan Milkowski goes out and takes a look for himself while kicking the story up a notch. It’s no simple or, for that matter, soft assignment to get to a remote village in Alaska in midwinter. But there was Milkowski in Toksook Bay on Nelson Island in a stiff frigid breeze off the Bering Sea. One pictures him with icicles hanging off his nose, trying to take notes while wearing fat new gloves, and learning why wind power makes such immediate sense for the town’s mostly Yup’ik residents and for Alaska generally. The whole state, it appears, is gearing up for a future when fossil fuels become less and less practical, mainly because of the price of getting diesel or coal or other combustibles to its scattered population. It’s a step. It does not appear from this that the hinterlands are going altogether green yet. The turbines just take some of the load off the CO2-spewing electrical installations.

Of further note, Alaska’s governor comes up several times with nothing snarky and without a trace of reference to her celebrity turn on the electoral hustings last year. Here, she is merely a responsible chief executive trying to get something useful to happen for her state’s residents.  It’s a diverting, informative story. It is what big newspapers do, quite aside from their efforts to get ahead of things and breaking stories nobody else has. If something comes across the wires or arises elsewhere, it’s good to have such mainline media institutions with the wherewithal and sense to send somebody once in a while to check it out and to give readers a sense of being there. It also has a business angle in the company that makes turbines suited for Antarctica and Alaska.

But some things remain a bit sparer at NYTimes than in the old days. Milkowski took his own pictures. Presumably, also, he made the very windy-sounding and bone-chilling video, linked to the story, of the village and of the spinning turbines.

Related News:

• Reuters – Wendell Roelf : First carbon-free polar station opens in Antarctica ; Filed from Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth Base. It’s a striking, moderne-looking place and has several wind turbines and solar panels. It looks like they bought their turbines from some other company than the one with the Alaska contract. (One also imagines it has a backup diesel rig hidden in a shed somewhere. What if the wind dies during the dark winter?)

Other Frozen Landscape News in the NYTimes:

• Kirk Johnson: Debate Rages Over Elk Feeding ; In Wyoming, people love their elk. Now a well-rooted tradition is running up against the strictures of wise management of wildlife. For this one, the Times hired a local photographer. Great thing too – check out this image.

-CP

  The Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz on Friday gave fans of astronomy and of brainy space aliens a welcome update, with a back story right out front, on the stalled Allen Telescope Array in California. It is now a few dozen, smallish radio dishes not far from Lassen Peak. When and if completed it will have 300+ individual receivers spread across a pretty valley. The full thing will be able to scan millions of individual stars lickity split for very narrow, rapidly changing radio emission lines – ie, possible signals from distant civilizations. It will do in a few minutes what it  takes weeks to achieve with the instruments now in operation. It not so incidentally will also provide astronomers with a powerful new tool for wide manners of alien-free, astrophysical study.

The project has gotten plenty of ink over the years ( see this Los Angeles Times John Johnson Jr. story from last year, and previous posts here and here). It relies primarily on private funding. Its name reflects the biggest angel so far, Microscoft cofounder Paul Allen, but he’s about tapped out on this one. Hotz meets with one of the project’s leading lights, SETI Institute astronomer Jill Tarter, and details the impact of a recent prize she received. The award has opened doors to celebrities and other wealthy people largely in the high tech and entertainment industries. Hotz does a good job defining the project as serious, a natural partner of the rapidly growing specialty of finding planets around other stars, not something for the X-files. Readers also get some of its context in other research fields gaining similar support from wealthy patrons.

Grist for the Mill: SETI Institute ;

-CP

Cartoons and sloppy advertising graphics to the contrary, one does not find penguins in the far north or walruses in the Southern Ocean. But dip under the waves and, it appears, the twain’s biologies do meet and mingle.  A progress report from a project called The Census of Marine Life, released over the weekend, revealed not only that the two polar seas are squirming and crawling and swimming with diverse species, many of them only recently discovered, but in a surprise several hundred of those found in the south are present also in near-identical form in the north.

In between, of course, is the ocean bottom. It stays freezing down there even at tropical latitudes, but that a continuous exchange and update of genes would keep species in the regions in step despite being literally poles apart appears to be quite a surprise. The combination of new species, and a somewhat baffling discovery about their long-distance fraternity, seems to have been irresistable to many reporters.

Stories:

• AP – Michael Casey : Study: ‘Astonishing richness’ in polar sea species ;
• Canadian Press – Alison Auld (via Toronto Star) :  235 similar species found in Arctic and Antarctic ;
• Reuters – Alister Doyle : Antarctic ice fish redefines “cold-blooded” ; shorty, narrow angle, but has the story.
• Voice of America: Arctic, Antarctic Teem With Similar Marine Species ;
• Canwest News Services – Tom Spears : Different poles yield identical species: study ;
• Science News – Susan Milius :  Marine census: Surprising number of creatures bipolar ;
• The Sun (UK) – Vince Soodin : Ice animal pole riddle ; Short piece, almost comprehensible.
• Telegraph (UK) – Louise Gray : Arctic and Antarctic home to more than 200 species ; Hed has two lines, plenty of room to add “..in common” ; this one also opines that “until recently it was thought that the world’s poles were frozen wastes where only penguins and polar bears could survive.” That makes little sense.

Grist for the Mill: Census of Marine Life news website,  Press Release ;

Pic, a swimming snail, source

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How’d I miss this during all the Darwin mania? Perhaps many of you did too, so take a look at this gem by Joel Achenbach that ran in the Post Sunday before last. It has an antique shop, a lawyer who didn’t at first know what he’d bought, and it adds up overall as a well-crafted and tasty morsel for the appreciation of  Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalist and Charles Robert Darwin’s catalyst.

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-CP

Over the weekend many stories emerged from Chicago and the meeting of the American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science. One of the bigger gushers was on news, and news conferences, about a perceptible speed-up recently in the causes and symptoms of climate change.

Near the head of the parade were, natch, the wire services and other syndicated news outlets on Saturday. The stories focussed on the latest word on CO2 emissions delivered by a Stanford man (and IPCC honcho). The upshot: greenhouse gases are going up faster now than back when the newly minted Kyoto protocol aimed to slow them down but whiffed ; some included examples of the attendant changes in climate:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid : Climate warming gases rising faster than expected ;
• Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen : Global warming seen worse than predicted ; Highlights some rather dire quotes from sources with the IPCC ;
• AFP : Climate change could be even worse than feared ;
• Xinhua : Global warming allows no optimism, scientists warn ;
• BBC :  Global warming ‘underestimated’ ;
• Deutsche Welle : Scientists say global warming worse than predicted ;

Other daily outlets, some filing then and others coming in Sunday or yesterday with additional, related news, include:

• Financial Times – Clive Cookson : Global warming closing in on ‘critical threshold’ ; with extra remarks from Gore, etc., after the summary delivered Friday.
• Telegraph (UK) – Matthew Moore : AAAS: Tropical forests are drying out because of global warming ;
• Environmental News Service: Climate Could Cross Critical Threshold by 2100, Expert Warns ; Most comprehensive summary of the Saturday briefing ;
• Wash. Post – Kari Lydersen : Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates ;

And in the enterprising dept. of when one has lemons, make lemonade:

• CNN – John D. Sutter: Five places to go before global warming messes them up ; According to man at the University Corp. for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Grist for the Mill: Stanford Univ. Press Release ;

Other pertinent news: Washington Post editorial takes a decidedly well-informed and direct potshot at House Speaker Sen. Nancy Pelosi’s climate agenda, and calls without equivocation for a carbon tax. A tax? The US policy wonky chorus responds “non starter!” and voila,  thinking stops.

Pic:  Alaskan smokestacks , source ;

-CP

About a month ago The Tracker composed a brief panegyric to Donald G. McNeil Jr.‘s short, sad,  account of the terror of being an albino in Tanzania (see earlier post). A combo of greed and superstition results in brutal murder for many. Well, he has a followup today inside the SciTimes section. As with his previous item it’s not so much a science story as its opposite: a reminder of the powerful grip of myth and illogic in the human psyche.This one is more enterprising and intimate. It contains a welcome whiff of optimism that humanity is responding, that the horror may ease.

Elsewhere inside the section, Natalie Angier runs an appreciation of – or more accurately, a cautionary reminder of – the power of envy. The emotive drawing above comes with the story. Envy’s an under appreciated, powerful, highly motivating emotion, she writes. It explains much of the world’s unhappiness and productivity simultaneously. Most telling line, one that deserves a full story to explain why lowering taxes on the wealthy does little to make anybody happy including the less-taxed, she describes financiers competing “to avoid the shame of being a “mere” millionaire.”

The section’s lead story from John Markoff sketches and explains the transformation of our social maps and perhaps our senses of privacy wrought by those hand-held computers we still tend to refer to as telephones – cells, mobiles, etc.  He focusses on the quid pro quo of having a machine that does more than a mere, passive GPS – it not only tells its user where he or she is, but may be sharing the info with scores to multitudes of others. It places us on an increasingly public, shared map. Notably, Markoff in Sunday’s Week in Review had a solid piece on the evolution and perhaps imminent replacement of the internet with a sturdier and safer, but perhaps far less anonymous, one. Together, the two are nice glimpses of our deepening dive into a new digito-sociobiology.

Other notable headlines:

• Gina Kolata :  Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF ; Like life, this story prompts more questions than answers. It describes the possible, even likely, distortions of genomic expression in embryos that spend a while in an artificial broth. The picture, one might add, is barely emerging ;
• Elizabeth Svoboda: The Unintended Consequences of Changing Nature’s Balance ; A deeper exploration of a ravaged and unbalanced landscape, on the subantarctic Macquarie Island, reported in news accounts a few weeks ago (see earlier post) ;
• Guy Gugliotta: Perseverance Is Paying Off for a Test of Relativity in Space ; Finally, maybe, an end to the forever-odyssey of Gravity Probe B is in sight. We science reporters with gray hair started writing about this thing back in the Eocene, it seems, bedazzled by the notion of two perfect, mirrored spheres spinning blithely along in a cocooned, relativistically warped orbit of Earth. Good to learn that its data set may actually bear fruit. Somebody give Francis Everitt a big gold medal for stubborness.
• Tara Parker-Pople: Vitamin Pills: A False Hope? ; yes for us, no for big pharma. They’re the cash cow that never stops giving.

As usual, lots more in whole section ;

So Happy Valentine’s day, and The Tracker won’t be doing any major posts, maybe none, till Tuesday. In the meantime, aside from reflecting seriously on Lincoln’s and Darwin’s 200ths, the dismal economy, the satellite shards overhead and that an asteroid out there has our number on it that’ll be redeemed one of these days or eons, a few sweethearts this weekend  will exchange love tokens, kisses, and all the rest. So here are a few love stories on the science of love and its expressions:

• AP – Seth Borenstein : The science or romance: Brains have a love circuit ; Not just a holiday toss-off, this has some diligent reporting and a novel angle. Love may, literally, be a form of addiction. ;
• New Scientist – Sheryl Kirshenbaum :  Valentine’s Day Special:  K*I*S*S*I*N*G ; Why do we do it anyway? Fruit? ; Plus editorial: A boon to kissology or, What’s in a kiss? ;
• LiveScience – Meredith F. Small: The Romantic Evolution of True Love ; It hangs together except for one sentence: “But in modern times, there really wasn’t any need for the male-female bond.” Is that supposed to be until modern times….?
• LiveScience ; Andrea Thompson: The Sweet Truth: Chocolate Can Be Healthy ;

Pic from CrazyLeaf Design Blog ;