The Tracker hasn’t had much reason to highlight science news at this newspaper lately, as it’s been almost all consumer health material since one of its (maybe only) all-purpose science writers left. But today it provides a thoroughly entertaining piece from staffer Sarah Avery on camels’ milk. It’s still not so thorough on the science side. But what it does say is sensible in reply to boosters’ assertions that such milk could cure allergies, autism, diabetes, and more.

The best passages reflect the loonie enthusiasm some people have for milk from non-standard dairy operations. Did you know that there’s an agency that determines the legitimacy of Grade A Milk, and that its list of interstate commerce elegible udders (or whatevers) includes those of cows, natch, plus goats of course, but also horses, pigs, deer, sheep, and water buffalo? (What! No bison?) Now a local woman, a naturopath, hopes to add camel milk to the roster. This despite the surliness of camels including ones that are lactating. They don’t like being milked much. They kick sideways. That can kill people.

As for health claims, Avery writes quite near the top that the science is “thin.” Indeed. It also says something, if the description in this piece is correct, about naturopaths that one such doctor could be on a crusade for marketable camel milk after reading of “the health benefits in a magazine three years ago.” Reporter Avery consulted a nutritionist, at UNC, with sterling-sounding credentials. His skeptical remarks come at the end. They include a great guote about goji-berry miracle juice. Never heard of that. But it too sounds unscientific.

-CP

In the annals of Ideo-economic Inverse Perceived Causality, or IIPC, before the Kyoto Protocol there was the Montreal Protocol. You know IIPC, right? The Tracker just made it up. It’s the process, also known as cart before horse, by which one judges the reality of a problem by the personal palatability of the most prominently discussed solution. It’s why doubters of global warming tend to be conservatives who suspect a socialist plot aimed at eroding private enterprise’s vigor and profits not to mention individual liberty, and why lefties tend to take global warming as an urgent way to be not only environmentally upstanding and communitarian but to sock it to corporate capitalism’s fat cats via regulatory bureaucracy. One wonders therefore what political complection will arise in reaction, outside the sort-of-objective halls of science, to word that the Montreal Protocol’s ban on chlorofluorocarbon or CFC refrigerants was an exceedingly good move. During the lead up to its passage in the late 1980s, debate over its wisdom bore political coloration resembling that of global warming policy discussion today. (The animation shows how just one chlorine atom can zap 100,000 ozone molecules.)

The news is that a team including NASA scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, reports its simulation of how an unfettered business-as-usual increase in CFCs in the atmosphere would have altered the atmosphere by about 50 years from now. The Goddard press release, linked below in Grist, has a lede that would be hard for scriveners at the dailies and other services to top for punch:

The year is 2065. Nearly two-thirds of Earth’s ozone is gone — not just over the poles, but everywhere. The infamous ozone hole over Antarctica, first discovered in the 1980s, is a year-round fixture, with a twin over the North Pole. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation falling on mid-latitude cities like Washington, D.C., is strong enough to cause sunburn in just five minutes. DNA-mutating UV radiation is up 650 percent, with likely harmful effects on plants, animals and human skin cancer rates.

Holy eco-calamity jane. And this is from NASA Goddard in Maryland, home of legions of straight-arrow engineers and scientists, not the NASA Goddard Inst. in Manhattan run by one of the climate doubters’ favorite hobgoblins, global warming warrior Jim Hansen.

Speaking of scriveners, for all that drama only one big US outlet has the story. The Associated Press‘s Seth Borenstein took a tack different from the opening drum roll  of horror at the top of the press release. His lede: Here’s rare good news about an environmental crisis: We dodged disaster with the ozone layer…”  Good call. We also dodged, according to one of the scientists Borenstein called, a place called “bizarre world.” Most interesting is not the UV and health part, but the calculations of the huge impact so much additional penetration by UV would have on the atmosphere’s thermal structure. Other stories may have been triggered by Borenstein’s piece. One suspects that, with time, this study will prove to be useful ammunition for those arguing that international cooperation can avert calamities without torpedoing economies.

Other Stories:

• LiveScience : Earth’s Future: Scary Ozone Scenario Thwarted ;
• Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) via Economic Times (India): Ultraviolet radiation would have singed us by 2065.
• Asian News International via Newstrack India : Two-thirds of Earth’s ozone would have disappeared by 2065 in simulated world ;
• UPI : Study: Montreal Protocol avoided disaster ;

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Press Release ; journal abstract ; Plus a very dramatic animation of two worlds, one with and one without CFC limits.

Pic source, Geophysical Institute, U. of Alaska ;

-CP

Two titanic issues in the western US – water rights and energy resources – get wrapped today into one piece of news. Oil shale companies, according to a report by the activist organization Western Resource Advocates in Boulder, Colo., have bought up water rights on such a scale that farmers may fall short of irrigation water, ski resorts may have a hard time finding water for artificial snow, could endanger some species as stream flows fall. Several local outlets picked up the news.

Stories: 

• Denver Post – Mark Jaffe : Oil companies ‘corner’ Western Colorado water rights ;
• Grand Junction Sentinel – Dennis Webb: Oil shale water rights acquisitions could threaten agriculture, Boulder group says ;
• AP – Judith Kohler : Environmentalists: Shale imperils other water uses ;

Grist for the Mill: Western Resource Advocates report “Water on the Rocks..”

-CP

The big black and orange beetle opens its carapace, spreads it wings, takes off … and plummets roughly straight down. Maybe the big radio strapped to its back is still just a wee bit heavy. That’s a success, sort of, the Dispatch‘s Kim McGuire reports this week from the St. Louis zoo. At least, the researcher tells McGuire, the animal tried to fly in a normal fasion. The insects are of an endangered and dwindling species. The hope is, eventually, to find a radio tag that doesn’t so much hinder the insects and allows remote, 24-hour monitoring of their behavior. The report includes considerable detail on pertinent natural history.

-CP

Regular readers may have noticed that the Tracker checks in regularly the the Yellowstone Newspaper aggregator regularly for wildlife news from the Northern Rockies, indulging especially a soft spot for the wolves up there. Two items today:

• Powell Tribune (WY) – Gib Mathers: Distemper devastates Yellowstone wolves ; Pop. is down 27 percent, but the disease has hit before and eased off, as it is doing this time. Well detailed report.
• Billings Gazette : Officials kill wolf with mange.

Plus, found elsewhere:

• AP – Matthew Brown: Wolf numbers up again, but expansion slowing ;

Nature this week set off a tidy little feeding frenzy in the media. Aside from the melting of West Antarctica two posts down (plus its sci journalism poll, next down), it reported something purely interesting from the world of academic science. Chinese researchers dug from early Cretaceous sediments in the nation’s northeast the fossilized remains of a little plant-eating dino. It has traces of fibers that look strikingly reminiscent of feather shafts,  sticking from its hide. If they are feathers or their prologs, that significantly modifies prevailing views of how dino and eventual bird feathers evolved. They were thought to have occurred only among theropods, mostly carnivores and, in dinosaur time, fairly recently. But this thing apparently has clear affinities with and thus an implied, ancient, common ancestor to such saurichean plant eaters as stegosaurs and ceratopsians.

Stories:

• Science News – Sid Perkins:  Dino feathers may have had earlier origin than thought / Hairlike filaments found on ‘wrong’ side of dino family tree ;
• BBC -Victoria Gill: Fossil hints at fuzzy dinosaurs ; Good example (or bad) of finding the one thing NOT new to use in the hed. Story itself is fine, with an interview with the lead author.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Feathery find could rewrite dinosaur history ; Spotts wraps this one in with other notable, recent dino news.
• Economist: Our Feathered Friends ; Includes a pretty good description of what phylogenists call primitive v derived features.
• China Daily : New feathered dinosaur gives flight to debate; It’s still debated among the researchers – as this story’s body says – whether these really are proto-feathers or anatomically distinct spines growing from below the skin.
• Nat’l Geographic – Brian Handwerk : Early Dinosaurs Had Feathers, New Fossil Suggests ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : Tiny dinosaur fossil stirs feathery debate ;  It’s got them stumped, Perlman writes, but he provides further word he got via email from China. Detailed tests are in the works to see if the fossil’s microstructure or composition can settle the feather or feather-mimi debate.

Here are some discouraging words for those in the conventional world of print and big-institution daily science journalism: It is “dying in the mass media”… “mainstream media has pitifully low standards of science journalism where the herd mentality prevails” … “Independent science coverage is not just endangered, it’s dying…” . We’ve heard this before. But new numbers are out. In Nature magazine are results of a recent poll of hundreds of science reporters, and a story by Geoff Brumfiel on the decline of mass media in science reporting (and everything else). Such punchy illus : a crumbling monument topped by a stack of ossified newspapers, overwhelmed by USB and laptop cables. The fade is combined with the rapid rise not only in other kinds of jobs for science writers, even if many are in various forms of p.r., but a surge in scientists whose blogging may at least provide better explanation of recent developments if not the occasional, investigative critical eye one expects from old time journalism.  Nature put them up on its open web site, thank you very much.

-CP

When is a catastrophic collapse more like a slow motion oscillation? A: in Earth sciences. One thousand years is but a moment on geologic time. That’s the metronomic pace that led researchers, in one of two tightly-paired analyses in Nature today, to forecast imminent catastrophic collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. One paper, by dozens of authors, reports evidence from core drillings that the ice sheet has collapsed and regrown many times due mainly to changed insolation from the Earth’s varying axial tilt and other orbital factors. The other describes via computer modeling how a likely new round, this one our doing, might look. Their caveat on the latter is merely that, as expected, Southern Ocean temperatures rise another 5 deg. C beyond today’s levels as greenhouse gases force things along. But this collapse would take centuries to get into high gear.  The cycle might take 10,000 years to play out and rebuild. While in the popular mind “catastrophic collapse” ought to be reserved for more immediate emergencies such as landslides that bury towns or dams that burst, the calculated, epochal fate for the ice sheet is bad enough.

Already a few on line comments have made much of some of the varying ways the news is handled by major media journalists. (See this from Tom Yulsman at the Center for Environmental Journalism). The prime example of different tones of coverage comes from the NYTimes‘s Andrew C. Revkin at his widely-read Dot Earth site, and on the wire from Reuters‘s Michael Perry filing from Melbourne. Revkin’s story won’t make anybody hyperventilate at first encounter. Its hed is West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair and, high up, assurance that for most of us the news is of some comfort due to the time frame. Perry and Reuters, by contrast, go for the sharp, initial intakes of readers’ breath. Its hed: Antarctic ice close to melting tipping point-study. The story describes loss of ice if temps rise only slightly, a collapse, a seven meter rise in sea level, the previous 38 such collapses in the last 5 million years, and more. Not till the 13th graf does it tell readers that the buttresses to the land-bound ice will probably last centuries, and the full ice sheet melt will take many centuries after that. That part, one thinks, belongs in or very near the lede, and should have a hint in the headline.

Revkin includes a YouTube video, featuring the animation that the researchers put together.

Plenty of outlets covered it, most of them appreciating that what is catastrophic collapse to a geologist, to a climatologist, or to an evolutionary biologist, is something different to most of us – or to a weather man. Other Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Big melt seen in Antarctic past, and maybe future ; That’s a good, cautious set-up to the key quote, “We’re on track for losing part of the West Antarctic ice sheet.”
• Reuters – Alister Doyle : Temperature rise may trigger West Antarctic thaw ; Interesting to see to dispatches from Reuters – this one considerably more temperate.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Melting of Antarctic ice becoming unstoppable ; And the lede, “The good news is that it would take more than 1,000 years…” ;
• NPR Morning Edition – Richard Harris : Antarctic Ice May Melt, But Not For Millennia ;
• AFP – Warming to speed icesheet collapse ;
• Chicago Tribune – William Mullen : Great polar melt-off feared ;
• Telegraph – Louise Gray : Antarctic ice sheet could collapse due to global warming, scientists warn / Global warming could cause the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, leading to a catastrophic rise in sea levels, scientists have warned ; By her 2d graf she specifies how long it may take ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Phil Berardelli : Giant Ice Sheet Is Safe … for Now ;

Hmm, maybe this is catastrophic in anybody’s book. If people had done something around the year 1000, despite wide warnings from learned scholars, that today had rendered sites of many of the world’s great historic coastal cities uninhabitable – even overwhelming Holland – we’d probably still be shaking our heads over such foolishness. Thus grows the case to proclaim the Holocene history. We’re in the Anthropocene. Masters of the world for better or for worse.

Grist for the Mill: NSF Press Release ; Penn State U. Press Release ; U. Mass. Amherst Press Release ;

Related News:

• Time Magazine Bryan Walsh essays on tipping points in climate change, the slow by human standards pace of global warming, and the recent sag of public worry about it in opinion polls.

Pic: from Nature. Shows Antarctica is it was about a million years ago, and as it may look again in several thousand years.

Durante el trayecto en avión que le llevaba a Camerún, el Papa Benedicto XVI ha dicho que la distribución de preservativos no resuelve el problema del Sida, sino que lo agrava. Luego ha abogado por una “humanización de la sexualidad”. Lamentable. Según la OMS, 22.5 millones de subsaharianos están infectados por el VIH, cifra que supone 68 por ciento del total mundial. 

No hay muchos heroinómanos en África; la transmisión del SIDA en ese continente es casi exclusivamente sexual. Las críticas a estas palabras han sido recogidas por toda la prensa de habla hispana. Varios gobiernos europeos ya se han quejado de manera institucional, y España ha reaccionado anunciando que enviará 1 millón de preservativos al continente Africano.
Recojamos algunas historias:

El Universal (Venezuela) se hace eco de la reiteración por parte del portavoz del Vaticano de las palabras del Papa, y su advertencia de que la posición de Benedicto XVI no cambiará durante su viaje por África.

La Vanguardia, y otros medios españoles: El ministro de Sanidad decide enviar un millón de preservativos a África

M. Moreno del diario ABC dice en su titular que la decisión de enviar preservativos a África 24 horas después de las palabras del Papa es una provocación del Gobierno a la Iglesia.

Un artículo de Público.es recoge las palabras del secretario de sanidad español “el papa está muy mal aconsejado” y la petición que rectifique y base sus afirmaciones en la ciencia. En otra pieza reproduce las declaraciones de un portavoz del ministerio francés de exteriores: “el mensaje del papa pone en peligro las políticas de salud pública”

La tercera (Chile) explica que la asociación Alemana de Ayuda contra el Sida acusa al Papa de pecar contra la humanidad.

La corresponsal en Italia para La Nación de Argentina, Elisabetta Piqué, revisa las fuertes críticas de los gobiernos de Francia, Alemania, Bélgica y España a las palabras de Benedicto XVI.

Noemí Gutiérrez para el Universal de México: una organización católica critica las declaraciones del Papa y pide a la iglesia que promueva el condón

En El Clarín (Aregentina) se puede leer que la oposición del Papa a los condones muestra que el dogma religioso es para él más importante que la vida de los africanos.

El Pais en su editorial tilda de peligroso e irresponsable este rechazo al preservativo.

- PE

¿Se habrán puesto de acuerdo los paleontólogos? ¿Es una cuestión de inercia en las publicaciones? ¿Es casualidad que en tres días de margen los periódicos estén copados primero con el gigantesco Depredator X, luego con el dinosaurio carnívoro más pequeño de Norteamérica y terminen hablando de otros que tenían plumas pero no eran pájaros?

La repercusión de la misión del Discovery hacia  Estación Espacial Internacional (ISS) era previsible. Además de las agencias, Alicia Rivera de El País realizó una muy intensa cobertura de todo el proceso: empezó fuerte a mediados de la semana pasada con el enésimo retraso del transbordador, esta vez debido a una fuga de gas en su tanque de combustible externo. Al día siguiente se anunció que la misión de la NASA duraría 11 días en lugar de 14 para que no se solapara con una nave rusa Soyuz. Un día después, alerta en la ISS por un fragmento de basura espacial que iba a pasar dentro de su zona de seguridad. Finalmente, con un mes de retraso la madrugada del lunes despegó el Discovery con el objetivo de llevar paneles solares y una viga a Estación Espacial, a la que se acopló con éxito ayer por la noche. Sin embargo, la fotografía más difundida fue la del murciélago que el domingo se posó en el depósito de combustible y ni se inmutó cuando encendían los motores del Discovery.

¿Vertiginoso corredor de noticias? Nada comparado con los dinosaurios y fósiles “encontrados” esta semana. El lunes Rosa M. Tristán para El Mundo explicaba que unos restos guardados durante 25 años en un cajón se habían convertido de golpe en el dinosaurio más pequeño de Norteamérica, cuya principal peculiaridad era ser una especie depredadora única en ese continente. (Merece la pena destacar que la versión online de la noticia cuenta con un video con los descubridores doblado al español). Las agencias también expandían el hallazgo en Noruega del gigantesco Depredator X, que con sus 15 metros destronó al Tiranosaurus Rex como el carnívoro más grande de la historia. El Clarín de Argentina combina ambos hallazgos en una misma pieza. Pero todavía hay más; el anuncio del descubrimiento en pleno desierto chino de Gobi de un cementerio de dinosaurios que al morir todos de golpe, permitirá estudiar la conducta social de dichos animales. Y finalmente, la aparición de un dinosaurio con plumas que vivió hace entre 99 y 144 millones de años y pertenece a una rama evolutiva totalmente diferente a la de las aves actuales.
Y por si fuera poco, científicos argentinos han descubierto en la Antártica un cementerio de amonites gigantes, unos moluscos parientes lejanos de los actuales pulpos y calamares.

¿Cómo continurán las tareas en la ISS?

¿Aparecerán todavía más dinosaurios?

- PE

On NPR‘s Fresh Air today Terry Gross interviews a photographer behind a tremendous project to document climate change, sped up for easier viewing. He set up cameras in absurdly precarious places in the Arctic largely, but as far south as Mount Kilimanjaro, to watch glaciers fade over a three year span. It’s a good interview, for as long as The Tracker had this morning to listen, but the website linked above is the place to go for videos and other highlights. It’s hard to provide a visual story on the radio, one must say. The program is in essence a plug, and that’s not so bad. The fruits of this photographic essay are to be featured March 24 in a NOVA and Nat’l Geographic special, Extreme Ice.

Grist for the Mill:  NOVA/PBS Extreme Ice; Extreme Ice Survey site ;

-CP

This site paid some attention to last week’s Int’l Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen last week, but not a great deal (previous post). Neither did a particularly large slice of the US media. Travel budgets, one thinks, can be blamed for that. The Tracker happened this morning across a piece on the non-profit, developing world-oriented SciDev.Net wire, from Imelda V. Abano. She reports that the chairman of the meeting, an American on faculty at the host Univ. of Copenhagen, had some sharp words for journalists in general. It is easy to believe – The Tracker’s hand is up – that media across all platforms provide a steady diet of mostly-sensible climate change news. That’s what I look for, it’s what I find. The meeting chair said, it says here, that climate news is too important to be left to journalists. The madam chairman further said that too many journalists work for “organizations more interested in making money than presenting a clear interpretation of climate change to the public.” One rejoinder is that the two interests are fully compatible. Interesting observation, though. Good on SciDev.net to circulate it.

One might note that at his Climate Progress site blogger Joe Romm has recently, similarly, specifically excoriated US journalists for letting so many Americans get away with snorting derisively at anthropogenic climate change. The Tracker has a lower regard than Romm apparently does for the ability of news reporting to command public opinion. But Romm is a polarizing figure by disposition, it appears;  he seems to be one of those impatient types who have serious cases of hard-ass. Such people evince little patience for, or civility for that matter to, those who don’t see what’s obvious to them (as in “Why are you carefully folding your towel you idiot when there’s a damned TSUNAMI bearing down on this beach. GET MOVING!!). We do need people like that, however maddening they can be.

Speaking of Romm: He has another, newer post on batteries and, if one reads down into it, mention of  a super duper sounding gee whiz and possibly game changing spin-battery idea from researchers at Univ. of Miami and in Japan. It’s been published in Nature. Romm appears to have spotted something that got entirely too little attention in news media, including at narrow-focus, gadget-freak outlets. There is even a U. Miami Press Release out on it. Tracker wants to learn more about this.

-CP