The Advertiser reports a deep and unsettling mystery. A colony of a little-known sea bird, the Laysan Albatross, was discovered quiet and empty in a remote, Oahu preserve by state biologists and workers from the Fish and Wildlife Service. They searched it for hours. Nothing. Had it been pigs or dogs that had gotten in past the preserve’s fence – and they are known to cause trouble – there would at least have been feathers and other remains. Some suspect “human interference.” It has taken 20 years, it says here, to build the colony to its recent size of 50 adults. The story, it appears, is pretty much straight off the press release, in Grist below. This one, it appears, merits more staff work.

Grist for the Mill: Hawaii Dept. Land and Natural Resources Press Release (link leads to pdf) ;

-CP

When a news outlet has a big story locally, it keeps after it day after day. So for any lava and ash plume fan who needs a Mount Redoubt fix, here’s the latest, at length and with plenty on seismic activity, red alerts, and the formation of a new dacitic (ok, just guessing that) dome. It’s from the Daily News‘s James Halpin and Richard Mauer. For the moment, the mountain is running at a steady but low pace. Great explosions, or nothing much, could happen again any time.

It has one highly informative tidibit for those worried about the oil tanks at a nearby, evacuated terminal. Operators told the reporters that even if barges could be gotten safely to the site, removing the oil before a conceivable flood of glacial melt through the adjacent Drift River might wash through the site would be horrendously difficult. More important, the tanks are not designed to be completely drained with any ease. And if left nearly empty, but still with lots of oil, they’d be bouyant. A flood might carry them off only to be wrecked somewhere else. “We don’t want to create a situation that is riskier than it is now.” Good thinking.

Grist for the Mill: Alaska Volcano Observatory Redoubt page ;

-CP

For some reason, on reading news that a huge overseas fund looking for green investment has bought a giant stretch of the Adirondacks from American land owners is just a bit dismaying. Some years ago one heard that, in Chile, some natives were going nuts as wealthy US environmentalists bought huge stretches of their forested mountains to stop logging. The move  inflamed local worries over sovereignty and foreign meddling. Now, while it looks fine, the same thing’s happening here. Still…. The Tracker thought WE were the ones who were supposed to be out buying up acreage in less developed parts of the world, all to help save said world. Suddenly we’re on the receiving end. Goes around, comes around.

The news is that the Nature Conservancy has sold 92,000 acres of forest to ATP, a Danish pension fund, for $32.8 milion. The buyer gets tax credits for managing the acreage to state conservation standards, including limited and careful, selective logging. Recreational facilities may follow. The conservancy had just bought these parcels, and many others, from a paper company. It’s not clear how, but carbon credits must be involved.

The NYTimes‘s Mireya Navarro has the story, naturally, and includes all the pertinent numbers and word that local communities generally welcome it. The regional press also gave it heavy attention.

Other stories:

• Albany Times-Union- Brian Nearing : Danish twist on Adirondacks, climate change ;  This story led The Tracker to this news (at first, I thought hey the TU has a scoop, but not so). Aided by a detailed press release from the seller, it’s a good write-up.
• Business Week – Mary Esch: Danish investors buy 92,000 acres in Adirondacks ;
• Rochester Democrat and Chronicle – Luke Rosiak: Danish investors buy Adirondack land ;
• Schenectady Gazette – Kathy Bowen : Danish fund buys 92,000 acres in Adirondacks; provisions would allow for much public use ; She quotes a Nature Conservancy man saying this means “whole mountain ranges..” will eventually come open for public access ;
• Lake Placid News – Mike Lynch : 92,000 acres of Adirondack timberlands to be sold by The Nature Conservancy ;

Dept of Missed Scoopettes: Essentially the same news has already circulated in specialty and newsletter press. Sharp-eyed reporters at general media outlets could have gotten a jump on it. An example is at London Based Responsible Investor – Hugh Wheelan:  ATP seeds €400m sustainable forestry investment programme / Fund to buy FSC certified timberland in North America, Australia, New Zealand and EU ; and this one at Global Pensions – Giovanni Legorano: ATP set to invest $500m in forestry ;

Grist for the Mill: Nature Conservancy-New York Press Release ;

Pic source ;

-CP

For a feel for how a change of administrations can transform the mood and ambition of federal bureaucracies, take a look at yesterday’s Post. The prolific Juliet Eilperin found herself an illuminating vignette to pull readers behind the  granite and limestone facades of the DC agencies that draft and enforce new rules. The tale begins specifically about international regulation of mercury pollution. It then expands. The professional government minders of the public’s weal are happier. We’ll probably all be better off. As this says also, the professional private business executives who make things happen can expect an inevitable downside: more paperwork, more mandated hardware and manufacturing adjustments, more maddening delays when compliance enforcers demand recalls and such, and more costs to pass on to customers. It’ll still be private enterprise, but not so much free enterprise. The story also offers, if one looks for it, a bit of vindication to all those Bush administration political operatives who prowled the corridors and screened every speech and directive – convinced that, otherwise, the career civil servants would revert to their “democrat” ways and start telling businesses and industries what to do and spending taxpayer money on more mounds of regulations. The Bushies were right. And the folks bent over their desks in the cubicles kept planning for this day all along.

Pic – EPA headquarters, source ;

-CP

One hundred five days locked in a cramped warren eating food from the menu for residents of the Int’l Space Station can’t be any picnic. Neither would a flight to Mars – but at least that would provide a spangly starry view to remind the inmates that something rather glorious should follow. But it IS cheaper. Half a dozen volunteers are, by now presumably, already ensconced in Moscow in their new digs – what Russia Today describes as “locked up in a tube.” At the AP, Vladimir Isachenkov calls it a “claustrophic metal module” at the Mocow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems. All are men (four Russian, plus one German and one French). Isachenkov notes that a similar test ten years ago left a woman volunteer furious over an entirely too kissy kissy Russian’s advances, and that he and another man then punched each other so hard the blood flew. The NYTimes‘s science section put this news, reported there by Michael Schwirtz, on its front page and points out this is just a warm-up. If it goes well, the institute will do a 520-day dry run that simulates a trip to, a visit of, and the return from Mars. He also finds a Houston space medicine man arguing that, barring extreme advances in robotics, people are still the most productive explorers in space. (Hmm. Probably so per hour of work. Per dollar, euro, ruble, etc., maybe not).The test is sponsored by Russian and European space agencies, with a mind to the real thing at least 20 years off.

The Tracker is of the mind that human expeditions to other worlds, asteroids, etc. are a bad way to spend the necessary huge piles of government money. If it’s to happen, let the travel industry and rocket entrepreneurs find profitable ways to extend our society into zero-g. Scientists could then buy tickets. Nonetheless, the results of this test are likely to be interesting. Few if any of the stories provide much analysis of the larger, space-race evoking context of the test. Some from the Brit press do have a cynical edge.

One would think they could at least twitter from in there. But, it appears, not so.

Other Stories:

• Reuters – Dmitry Solovyov : Six embark on 105-day simulated trip to Mars ;
• BBC: Mars ‘journey’ experiment begins ;
• Guardian (UK) Tom Parfitt: Sitting in a tin can, not far from central Moscow: Russian scientists prepare for Mars mission ; The volunteers, he writes are “apparently fearless.”
• Scientific American – John Matson : Volunteers set to spend 105 days in isolation module, trial for Mars mission ; He asks, “could reality TV be far behind?” ;
• Telegraph (UK) – Adrian Blomfield: Volunteers simulate mission to Mars in Moscow capsule;

Grist for the Mill: European Space Agency Press Release;

Some of us here in the US who watch too much cable TV politics-regurgitation have taken to the cheerful leftie Rachel Maddow. She’s for people who want a distinctly liberal cant but without the spittle and rant. Her fans know one of her soft spots: INFRASTRUCTURE. She pronounces it like it’s a big slice of chocolate cloud chiffon. (Mrs. Tracker used to send me out after dark to get her some. Finally, mercifully, the shop closed). Oh…infrastructure. The word evokes for Ms. Maddow, it seems, lots of jobs for brawny blue-color types driving big trucks and giant frontloaders to build sturdy bridges, high speed rail lines, and other very useful, long lasting public amenities. In Science Times today Henry Fountain cuts loose in long form (rather than his surgically precise shorties for The Observatory roundup) on one of infrastructure’s necessaries: concrete. He went to a trade show  called World of Concrete, in ‘Vegas. The story is more progressive cookbook than science. It diagrams one bridge that’s been in the news and uses fresh ideas in cement (old fashioned aggregate, it appears, is fine as is). It notes without explaining, understandably, much of the underlying chemistry, the fresh new kinds of ingredients going into it to displace the energy-intense, CO2-spewing old standby Portland cement. He mentions at some length a new process that has received speculative news attention – to bubble fossil fueled power plant smoke through sea water to make a calcium carbonate and hence a CO2 sequestering, carbon negative cement substitute (previous post). This is a robust, feel-good story for the infrastructure set.

The rest of the section is long on stories The Tracker usually passes by, worthy as they are, on sickness and health, patients and healers, dying and living. I still won’t dwell on them. But a medical student and writer named Nell Burger Kirst, for the running feature “Cases,” has one that will bring tears to the eyes.

Other notable headlines:

• Nicholas Wade:Single Gene Shapes the Toil of Ants’ Fighter and Forager Castes ; He soft pedals – so that it sneaks up on the reader – that we have the gene, too ;
• Claudia Dreifus: A Conversation With Dee Boersma / ‘The Big Thing Is That Penguins Are Showing Us That Climate Change Has Already Happened.’ ; Q&A on Megallanic penguins in Chile (and a hint why it is that, while it’s not mentioned here, more of them lately are washing up dazed and weary on Brazil’s beaches.) No clue why the paper edition on the West Coast lacked CD’s byline. It’s there, on line.
• Michael Schwirtz: Staying Put On Earth, Taking a Step To Mars ; This is the kind of story, along with word from China and India on heroic space exploration ambitions, that gives fits to NASA’s planetary scientists facing deep budget cuts for automated, no-spacesuits-involved missions to the solar system’s curiosities. Other outlets have it, too – as to be tracked today in a separate post.
• Natalie Angier: BASICS: The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size ; This one, on how to think logically and tactically, shouldn’t be buried in the science section. The Arts makes better sense. It’s too useful and empowering to be read almost exclusively by those on the hunt for brainy science stories.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Público publishes an excellent – and positive-  story about transgenic crops in Brasil, the Argentinean Página 12 joins in with a very critical interview, La Jornada from Mexico says they need GMO crops to compete with US, and El Pais (Spain) writes that “A world without GMO is possible”. Don’t bet on it, according to Latin America newspapers.

Excelente reportaje en Público (Esp.) de María García de la Fuente acerca de la situación de los cultivos transgénicos en Brasil, tercer productor mundial de cultivos modificados genéticamente.

El principal mensaje del artículo es: sí rotundo a las enormes ventajas que ofrecen los transgénicos, mantengamos controles para evitar la polinización cruzada, y apostemos por la coexistencia con los cultivos convencionales.

Según explica María, los agricultores brasileños empezaron a plantar soja transgénica de manera ilegal en 1998. Conseguían las semillas de Argentina, donde sí estaba permitido su cultivo. Tras comprobar sus ventajas (9 veces menos uso de herbicidas, menos agroquímicos, menor gasto de agua y de combustible), presionaron hasta que en 2005 se legalizaron los cultivos modificados genéticamente. En ese momento, el 20% de la soja que producía Brasil ya era transgénica. Ahora lo es un 90%. El global de plantaciones transgénicas es del 60% frente al 40 % de convencionales y pretenden que se mantenga en esta cifra, ya que alternarlas previene la resistencia a herbicidas.
El artículo aborda varios de los temas esenciales en este asunto.

Economía: “Brasil tiene que competir, y eso pasa por la utilización de tecnología; no se pueden cerrar los ojos y estar al margen del mercado”.

Etiquetado: “En los comercios brasileños, todos los productos con organismos genéticamente modificados llevan una etiqueta con un triángulo amarillo y una ´T´ ”.

Riesgo de polinización cruzada: “No se da en el caso de la soja (…), pero sí puede aparecer en las plantaciones de maíz, y por eso la legislación brasileña establece unas restricciones: debe haber 100 metros entre una plantación transgénica y otra convencional”.
Además de la soja y el maíz (del que Brasil ya es el tercer productor mundial, y su principal comprador es España), el tercer cultivo transgénico aprobado es el algodón. La intención es competir con India, el principal productor mundial.

El reportaje incluye una entrevista corta con el presidente de la Asociación Brasileña de Productores de Maíz y ex secretario de Estado de Agricultura de Brasil con fragmentos como “en 10 años no hay noticia de efectos negativos para el medio amiente”, “habrá que aumentar más la superficie de maiz modificado para poder competir con EEUU”. No se incluyen opiniones en contra de los transgénicos.

Sí que las hay, y contundentes, en la extensa entrevista de Daría Aranda a Marie Robin, autora del libro “El mundo según Monsanto”, recién publicada en Página 12 (Argentina). Segmentos: “Monsanto es una empresa delicuente. (…) Miente y falsea estudios sobre sus productos (…)”. Según la periodista francesa, Monsanto tiene tan buena fama “Por falta de trabajo serio de los periodistas y la complicidad de los políticos”

En una linea parecida al artículo de Público, La Jornada (México) publica una nota de Angélica Enciso con segmentos como: “ya llevamos 13 años de consumir maíz transgénico. No hay nadie que no lo haya hecho”, y “se debe ser competitivo y alimentar a todos los mexicanos. También se podrá competir con Estados Unidos y salir del atraso”.

El cultivo de organismos modificados genéticamente va en aumento. Sorprende entonces el titular de El Pais (Esp) “Un mundo sin transgénicos”, firmado por Lara Tomás Serrano, en el que sin más argumentación opina “Es hora de pedir a nuestros políticos que adopten una actitud valiente en defensa de la salud, el medio ambiente y la agricultura. Que no cedan ante las presiones de las multinacionales para introducir sus semillas manipuladas y patentadas”, como reacción a que España sea el principal productor europeo de maíz transgénico, mientras que está prohibido en Francia, Suiza, Hungría, Polonia, Austria, Grecia, y varias regiones europeas.

Mirando fuera de Europa, y comparando si ir más lejos con las noticias procedentes de Latinoamérica, una apuesta por un mundo sin transgénicos no parece muy ganadora…

-PE

The Post‘s Juliet Eilperin got away from the hothouse politics of environmental policy in DC to tramp around the dry ravines and chaparral hillsides of the Channel Islands off Southern California. This site has posted several times on programs there to restore a semblance of the wildlife there when Spanish settlers showed up a few centuries ago. They are going well, she reports, providing inspiration for other such conservation programs elsewhere. Most of the imported or otherwise invasive pigs, golden eagles, goats, cats, cattle, and elk are gone or soon will be (she leaves out the bison, which are culled regularly but do yet graze on Catalina Island, probably because that’s not part of Channel Islands Nat’l Park).  Now the varied subspecies of native foxes, bald eagles, scrub jays, deer mice, and native vegetation are coming back.

-CP

Lists are terribly popular with news outlets around January 1, but here we are at the end of March and Bob McDonald is popping one off at his CBC Quirks and Quarks show in Canada. That’s worth a salute merely for not following standard form. This one is the top nine and a half Technologies that could save the world. The Tracker hadn’t time to listen through the whole thing this morning. On line the summaries are intriguing. It seems a decent list. But why the one-half? Dunno. There are nine listed. It must be explained on the show – anybody share that with me (use the suggest stories function) and, if it’s not a spoiler to the program’s enjoyability, I’ll add it.

Selected topics include in vitro meat, hope for better batteries (and smarter use of same),  and fusion. That last one features a focus on a hybrid magnetic/inertial confinement concept called magnetized target fusion. That, to these eyes, makes intuitive sense as worthy of further testing. The idea is to make a plasma and then squash it very quickly. Los Alamos, The Air Force, a venture capital firm, and perhaps a few other outfits are working on it. Intuitive sense is, of course, not to be trusted. Fusion after all is such a tease – Half a century-plus since Project Sherwood and NOTHING cold, hot, or sono-implosive has worked except for horrible military weapons (ok, also such obscure tools as electrostatic, neutron generators to test oil well casings) ;

-CP

Science News‘s Ron Cowen regularly hits paydirt while mining the Astro-ph site, part of the arXiv constellation of prepublication sites. On Friday up went his tale of a dwarf planet out beyond Neptune, named Haumea, and its two moons Hi’iaka and Namaka. Planetary astronomers at Caltech report new spectroscopic evidence that its two moons, each in highly elliptical orbits, may be composed almost entirely of crystalline, water ice. The story reports that this makes some sense. A family of small objects in orbits similar to Haumea’s has been taken as evidence of a major collision some time ago. That two chunks wound up in orbit of the parent body itslef is not so surprising. Neither is it that they may be solid ice. Haumea is believed to have a solid sheet of ice covering its rocky interior. Bam, and off come some big ice chips. It’s a natural drama that’s not been much in the news; it was all a surprise to these eyes. Wikipedia has an entry on Haumea that explains the mythical, Hawaiian source of its name (a goddess of the Big Island of Hawaii) and her two daughters.

Cowen calls the moons ice cubes. He might also have called them ice bergs. They seem to have an affinity – shards of large planetary (or minor planetary) ice sheets cast in one case into the ocean sea, in the other into the sea of space.

Grist for the Mill:

Astro-ph prepub includes link to full PDF, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters ;  NASA Goddard Haumea site ;

-CP

Freeman Dyson is on a lot of people’s lists of revered big-thinkers. He’s been at the Institute for Advanced Study for a long time, was a pal of Einstein and Oppenheimer, and is, all agree, wizard smart and very pleasant (if personally elusive) social company as well. Great consternation, from some quarters, greeted the cover profile of him in the NYTimes Magazine yesterday by Nicholas Dawidoff. In case you missed it, it is essential reading for those interested in the interior workings and motivations of cultural icons. The thing is, Dyson as pretty firmly a lefty, an Obama man, an old time peacenik, but most important, an iconoclast. He believes global warming’s outcome is terribly uncertain, that climatology is too imprecise a science to understand where the climate is going, and that all in all the world’s chattering classes have much more to worry about – starting with social injustice – than a climate change that he believes is probably for the better. Dawiddoff’s story calls him “The Civil Heretic,” and civil he is.

The profile underscores that this is an interesting man. But before getting one’s feathers too ruffled over his refusal to worry about the anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse effect, one ought to dwell on the story’s primary message. Dyson is by nature a wielder of a skeptical hammer. He sees any consensus as an opportunity for some instructive whamming away at key bolts and struts.  Thus, to global warming skeptics who like to say there is a genuine and significant divide among scientists over GW’s reality or peril, Dyson’s stance is scant ammunition. That he is a doubter only serves to enforce the reality: most experts in the field agree with what the National Academy of Sciences, AAAS, AGU, the IPCC, and other redoubts of ace scientists say (which one is tempted to translate into “we’re screwed”).

There have been some calls, most notably from ferocious climate blogger Joe Romm at Climate Progress, for condemnation of the Times for publishing an admiring portrait of a man he calls a “climate crackpot.” Romm is correct that the piece may provide some ammo for the climate change deniers (or whatever is the term of the day for skeptics). But to squelch such nuanced and engaging profiles as this – to prevent mischief by people with a tiny fraction of the brainpower of Mr. Dyson – would be a shame. Even crusading climatologist and atmospheric physicist James Hansen, who is rather uncharitably regarded by Dyson in the piece, has risen to his defense, sort of. Hansen’s letter in response to the profile has been posted as part of a Dot Earth blog by Andrew C. Revkin.

-CP

Plenty of landmarks went dark, and a few thousand towns and even cities went dimmer Saturday night for the third, annual Earth Hour (it started in Sydney and, organized prominently by the environmentalist org. WWF, has gone global). The Tracker lives in the Berkeley Hills and really intended to go out to watch at the appointed hour to see if the town below lost some of its sparkle. It likely did. But I forgot to look. It’s easy to be cynical about the importance of one hour of fewer lights on. But it seems to have built some momentum. The AP‘s Venessa Gera, writing from Bonn, provides a roundup of the disparate places that took part “…From an Antarctic research base and the Great Pyramids … Colosseum in Rome …. Empire State Building” and so non-luminously on.

Over at Fox News, the self-proclaimed Fair and Balanced outlet, at least one reporter took it very seriously. Reporter Joshua Rhett Miller manages to find not a single source who thinks Earth Hour makes any sense – and summarizes it in part as a United Nations ploy gimmick to sway public opinion in advance of the Copenhagen talks later this year on global warming strategy. Uh huh. That could be true.

More interesting is the enormous number of local outlets that wrote things up (often, briefly).

A few samples:

• South Wales Echo (via Wales Online) – Nick Machin : Earth Hour ‘lights out’ ; Dark went the Senedd, Millennium STatium, and CAerph8illy Castle..
• Sydney Morning Herald – Terry Smyth : Planet speaks with flick of a switch ; This is the world roundup, The darkness in Sydney and the nation is covered by Amy Coopes: Australia kics off Earth Hour climate campaign;
• BNET Travel (a travel industry trade outlet) Barbara E. Hernandez: Las Vegas Casino LIghts To Out for Earth Hour ; And they did – see pics above.
• Atlanta Journal Constitution – Shane Blatt : Atlanta turns out the lights for Earth Hour ;
• Canadian Press (with some AP): Earth Hour power drop sometimes small but even sends green message: organizers ; Not so small everywhere – Toronto recorded a 15.4 percent electrical usage dip. In some provinces, maybe a one percent drop.
• Philippine Daily Inquirer – multiple staff writers: RP shins in dim Earth Hour ; This outlet went all out, with reports from all over the nation. With 647 cities participating, the Philippines ranked #1.

Grist for the Mill: WWF World votes for decisive climate action in massive Earth Hour event ;

-CP