One cannot order the news cycle to schedule its items to minimize confusion. Today we’ve already had a post, scroll a bit down,  on news that either the world is accelerating toward hothouse hell, or it is cooling (or both), take your pick.  NOW  on the same week that ice on our Moon comes out, NASA pops up, waving its hands, and saying we have big splotches of near-equatorial ice on MARS!! Many readers will see the Mars heds and think they’ve already read about that. The news is in Science, from a team led by a U. of Arizona man.

So it goes. The Mars news is not something that demands heavy reporting. Pictures pretty much tell the story. Five fresh craters from meteor strikes, photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, show what looks like layers of something pure white in the newly exposed soil. They indicate shallow ice exists extensively, not just near the poles.

A question is whether reporters will help readers out and, while describing the Mars discovery, gently mention that Moon water is in the news, too.

Stories:

• AP:  Spacecraft spies frozen water in Martian craters ; Really, “ice” would do. There are all sort of ices, in space and here on Earth, but the default unadorned meaning of ice is water ice.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts:  NASA finds water ice in Mars craters ; Oh.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: More ice discovered on Mars ; That’s a good hed – it indicates this is incremental news. He also explains succinctly that the ice is ephemeral and may be refrozen sublimation, not the exposure of a big solid slab of ice.
• Reuters – Chris Wilson: NASA finds ice on the moon and on Mars. Somebody got smart in tying the two events together. Hmmmm  …  it was a NASA instrument and some US investigators on the Moon news, yes, but oughtn’t India get primary credit? It’s a holy grail anyway, it says here.
• Nat’l Geographic News – Brian Handwerk: NEWS MARS PICTURES” Water Ice Exposed by Meteor Strikes ; Nice what-if? Speculation here, too, on the old Viking landers’ bad luck.
• LA Times – John Johnson Jr: Ice on Mars more extensive than thought ; Nothing on the Moon water, which Johnson also reported, but a good passage explaining how new, and small, these craters are.

Grist for the Mill: JPL/NASA Press Release;

Charlie Petit

The Journal‘s science columnist Robert Lee Hotz today has a solid piece on empathy, its deep roots in our primate ancestry, the brain bits involved, and on a book that got him on to the topic: by Frans de Waal, of Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

One might remark that the piece is a subtle reply to creationist beliefs against evolution and for the singularity of humankind’s appearance on this Earth. But Hotz does not say anything specific on that – could be The Tracker’s over-interpretation.

A more certain reason to follow that link is to watch the video that Hotz put together for it. The pic above is from it. Two observations. First, Lee may be an old timer in the biz but he has gotten pretty slick at the multi-media demands of contemporary publication. Second, the segment on chimp yawning is priceless.

Charlie Petit

Some people like to jump out of airplanes. Some dangle from bungee cords. Others tackle Everest.

J. Duncan Moore Jr., a 53-year-old freelance medical writer in Chicago, has chosen not to buy health insurance.  And in an intriguing article in the Los Angeles Times, he explains why.

Moore left a high-pressure journalism job that was making him crazy, and he watched his COBRA run out as he was unable to find another job. He failed to anticipate the journalism job collapse, and he was stuck. Instead of reflexively scrambling to find a sketchy, over-priced policy–which is what many freelancers and unemployed people are stuck with–he paused.

Moore wasn’t merely a medical writer–he was a medical writer who had covered health insurance for years, and knew the industry and the jargon as well as any executive. “I considered the insurance problem from two perspectives: my health status and history — and what insurance actually buys,” he writes. And he decides to go it alone–without insurance. “I’m not freaking out, though,” he writes. “Should I be? I’ll tell you what I know. Then you decide.”

That’s where I almost stopped reading. I’d already decided: Moore is nuts.

But…I continued reading. And while Moore didn’t change my mind, he did make me think. I wouldn’t choose that path, but maybe he’s not nuts. My apologies.

Moore is annoyingly healthy. He exercises, isn’t overweight, has no family history of serious illness, and is now free of the deadlines at his job that he thought were killing him. So, he’s a good bet, even at 53. Of course, good family history doesn’t prevent a taxi from mowing you down at a street corner, but, in fairness to Moore, let’s not play the worst-case-scenario game. He probably won’t get mowed down. A piano probably won’t fall on his head.

That’s half of his argument–he’s in good shape. He then recites the litany of all the things that are wrong with insurance, mainly that if he does get sick, there’s a good chance his insurance company would cancel on him or otherwise refuse to pay.

“Insurance,” he says, “isn’t worth what we’re being asked to pay.”

But here’s where I think his argument breaks down: “I still have money in the bank and can afford to pay most bills myself,” he writes. “A disaster costing more than $50,000 would be a problem, but short of that, I could handle it.”

That’s the thing; almost any serious medical situation is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars. Treatment for cancer, which is tough to predict or prevent, can cost far more than that. A bad fall on his bike could eat up most of his savings.

And then what? Would he feel the same way if, instead of choosing not to buy insurance, he couldn’t afford it?

Moore lays out the arguments very nicely. It’s an interesting, surprising, thought-provoking piece.

- Paul Raeburn

Sometimes one little number can take over a big complicated story – but in this case, the number itself won’t sit still.

But first a little background.

One might think a slap of global warming’s deep soul-chilling reality – meaning reality according to standard (and scary) climate models – would have splashed its way into world headlines today.  The easiest translation of a new report: no matter what we do that’s at all politically plausible at the moment, we’re screwed. The Tracker has heard that sentiment, often in more vulgar language, several times and for several years now from depressed climatologists. It does sap one’s resolve a bit.

Many authorities have been warning that even if the world’s developed nations cut back sharply on CO2 emissions – say, by the 80 percent that already has many critics screaming in protest – and developing countries like China and India muddle themselves a bit to the greener side, no dice. The built-in warming of what’s already in the air plus the continued belchings inherent in such promises looks to be far short of what it will take to avert calamity. Which is: we’re in for an additional warming well beyond the two degrees C, or about 5 F, that many suppose is the upper limit of what leaves the planet roughly as livable as now.

Now, a team working for the United Nations has run some of the numbers for a big report and trumpeted them yesterday in a press conference. The report is huge, and covers a lot of ground that says things don’t look at all good, with climate impacts already piling up faster than even the last IPCC report expected.

The result? Pffffft in the media.

After all, one thinks, this sounds like more of the same.  By the way, this comes as considerable attention is being given to a German researcher’s conclusion – and this really is newsier, as in different from the norm – that for now, the world may even be cooling and could keep it up for a decade or so. This is, despite the push from greenhouse gases, Earth’s own oceanic dynamics and other factors are holding temperatures in check. And then the average thermometer will start going up radically. That would be a welcome hiatus. More on this below.

Back to the United Nations Environment Program’s report. The AP‘s Seth Borenstein gives it the best ride. He  notes that one of the report’s contributors said at the press conference, as his best guess, that if nations hew to the most optimistic agreements likely from the upcoming Copenhagen meetings on a new climate change agreement, then Earth’s temp will still rise by century’s end about 4 degrees C above preindustrial levels. He then factors in the 0.8 deg. C uptick already changing the climate. This means 3.2 left to go – or if one is meticulously overprecise, 5.76 F hotter than now by 2100. Borenstein says he checked his math with a source at the press conference. He then rounds it up to nearly 6 F. This number, rather than the bulk of the report, is the heart of his account.

As these numbers are pretty fuzzy; an exact rendition probably does not matter as much as the “we’re screwed” subtext to the news. But at the Washington Post the diligent Juliet Eilperin comes up with a 6.3 F increase by century’s end. Not sure how that’s derived, and putting it down with such seemingly confident precision is hardly needed. An apparently earlier version of her story, still on line this morning at the Dallas Morning News, said even with all national pledges honored temperatures “would probably rise by 8 degrees Fahrenheit.”  While now seemingly withdrawn, that latter number is difficult to parse – a 4 C  increment above pre-industrial levels  is 7.2 F, and she doesn’t say where the start point of the rise is but implies it’s now.

What’s going on here with the flying numbers? . A diligent-looking analysis is at Mother Jones, where Kevin Drum traces the numbers not to the UNEP report, but to one organization that helped the UN do it,  Climate Interactive, and its officer, Robert Corell (whom both AP and the Post quoted).

Grist for the Mill:

UNEP Report, UNEP Press Release ; Climate Interactive ;

On that other topic – the alternative view that, in the very short term Earth may cool off and then stew us in our own fossiliferous vapors – that comes from a German scientist of some professional distinction, Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Insitutte of Marine Sciences at Kiel University. It has garnered a stir in media too:

• New Scientist – Fred Pearce: World’s climate could cool first, warm later ; It includes a link to Latif’s bio.
• Telegraph (UK) James Delingpole (the paper’s resident contrarion wag):  Why we can all stop worrying about ‘Global Warming’ for a bit ;
• NYTimes – Andrew C. Revkin : Momentum on Climate Pact is elusive ;  This piece also noted in a previous post ;

Much of the additonal reaction in mainstream media (as well as in the blogosphere)  is from opinionizing columnists who focus on the idea of a brief cooling, cite it as evidence for an unraveling of the entire idea of a long term and dangerous global warming, and dismiss Latif’s declaration that the hiatus is not enough to undo greenhouse warming for long. Examples from general media:

• Calgary Herald (via Vancouver Sun) Lorne Gunter : Scientists pull an about face on global warming ;
• Atlanta Journal Constitution – Kyle Wingfield: Facts are cooling off climate alarmism ;
• This is not quite mainstream media, but National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg also writes it with a knowing ah-HAH! tone: How the Times Covers Inconvenient Truths ;

PLus, one blogging, global warming hoax exposer’s offering:

• NewsBusters – P. J. Gladnick: Global Warming Skepticism Grows as MSM Finally Notes Climatologist’s ‘Inconvenient’ Findings ;

Charlie Petit

Nuclear engineers like to show off pretty diagrams explaining how, with fast nuclear reactors and an advanced fuel cycle built around recycling and burning high level “waste” one stretches original enriched uranium fuel almost forever, obtaining oodles of energy, while practically eliminating long-lived waste.

The NYTimes‘s Matthew L. Wald has a story out, arising entirely from one meeting of something called the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, that reveals just how tough it is to follow such straight looking paths out of Yucca Mountain’s conundrums.  The board met as part of the endless effort to figure out a palatable solution to commerical nuclear power waste, with many options on the table and with each burdened with very long time horizons, huge price tags, or both. Yikes. This solid piece is a bummer.

Pic source ;

Charlie Petit

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, gives us an insider’s report on swine flu. He went and caught it while on assignment in Afghanistan.

Presumably Gupta didn’t plan this, but his discussion of the illness with Anderson Cooper provided interesting insight into the illness and its symptoms. (Gupta expanded on his comments in a blog post on CNNhealth.com.)

Gupta and Cooper coughed and sputtered their way through the interview. In the course of the discussion, by satellite, Gupta more-or-less concluded that Cooper had swine flu, too.

I believe that’s called telemedicine.

- Paul Raeburn

Investigative reporter Andrew Skolnick has found the real death panels.

In a well-written, considered op-ed in the Buffalo News, he offers a few useful tidbits I hadn’t seen anywhere else. We know that insurance companies are prone to cancel the insurance policies of people who get expensively sick. And many of us read of a recent court decision in South Carolina that slapped Fortis Insurance (now known as Assurant) with a $10 million fine for rescinding the insurance policy of a teen-age student after he tested positive for the AIDS virus.

One detail I hadn’t heard was that insurers make these decisions in what are called “rescission committees.” And according to Skolnick, in the two-hour meeting during which Fortis dropped the student, it also dropped 45 other policy holders.

Much of the rest of Skolnick’s piece will be familiar, but he makes a compelling argument that insurance companies must be regulated. Check it out.

- Paul Raeburn

Glaciers don’t lie. At least, glaciologists like to say that when asked whether global warming is a fluke, a fad,  or the door to a changed planet. NASA ‘s ICESat orbiter with its laser altimeter has revealed a remarkable speed-up in the shrinkage of ice cover on Greenland and Antarctica. Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey and University of Bristol who pored over several years of data  have their results in the current Nature.

The measured loss is a “surprise,” Reuters‘s Alister Doyle reports from Oslo, and sources tell him it is a sign of “dynamic thinning” of ice more pervaasive and persistent than had been generally expected.

Other stories generally take the same line: Better numbers reveals faster ice lost than supposed. How this will play in the public mind, if at all, is unclear. Stories of shrinking ice caps, ice packs, and ice streams have been coming up for so many years now, they may all run together in the average reader’s mind. The challenge to reporters to try to keep it fresh is immense.

• Irish times – Dich Ahlstrom: Glaciers melting faster than expected ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Satellite reveals faster melting of polar ice ; Perlman offers a physics lesson on the side, one that many people have not take in before. He points out that, unlike landbound ice that flows into the sea, floating sea ice and ice shelves as they melt, “do not effect sea level any more than melting ice cubes would raise water in a glass.” Good move – it may reduce one of the more common popular misapprehensions in global warming and sea level rise.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: NASA data: Greenland, Antarctic ice melt worsening ; the meaning of it all is unclear. Borenstein does get an important opinion from a distinguished outside authority who says the most optimistic views of glacial loss and sea level rise are now eliminated. One possibility bruited here: a runaway.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Laser satellite records ice loss:
• Independent (UK) Michael McCarthy: Ancient glaciers are disappearing faster than ever

Related News:

• AP – Karl Ritter: Greenland’s Helheim glacier: a melting mystery; Ritter has been filing stories from on the scene in Greenland. This one looks into the irregularity of ice stream velocity – some speed up, then slow down, and he rpeorts that the reasons are not clear. Earlier this week he filed another piece, on intrusion of somewhat warm tropical waters into Greenland fjords.

Grist for the Mill: British Antarctic Survey Press Release ;

Charlie Petit

When going to the moon, it appears, you may not need to take a tank of drinking water.

Yesterday’s post, scroll a few down, on stories reporting hints of water on the Moon noted that a torrent of fresh stories were likely this week. It’s here already – an embargo broke – and will continue tomorrow. NASA is beating the drums for an international trio of spacecraft and their data indicating that the dusty, sterile, and airless Moon of ours may not only have ice deposits in dark polar craters, but spot a widespread, thin scum of water on surface rock. It might be the result of hydrogen and oxygen carried by the solar wind. Speculation abounds.

The Los Angeles Times‘s John Johnson Jr. has a source declaring he was “completely blown away” by the concatenating evidence of surface and near-surface water. Another says the discoveries “will forever change how we look at the moon.”

Results are in this week’s Science magazine. Data are from NASA’s Deep Impact Spacecraft (while outbound toward a comet) and the Cassini spacecraft (while doing a loopitty loop maneuver on the way to Saturn 10 years ago) and most notably from a NASA instrument aboard India’s recent Chandrayan lunar orbiter. When the latter relayed the surprising data last year, a check of the info from the earlier probes revealed that they, too, had detected it.  All saw, it says here, the signature of the OH molecule – a near-sure surrogate for water – at many places on the moon’s surface.  One paper even finds direct signs of H2O. One fellow turned an old saw on its head, telling Johnson that “the moon is almost as wet as a bone” (maybe that means a fresh bone – not the kind you find on a desert dry lake).

At the least, abundant water may alter somewhat NASA and Congressional calculus as they consider abandoning plans to put people back up there, at rather high cost, in a decade or so. On the other hand, how a layer of water a few molecules thick (as several accounts describe it) will yield enough to fill a canteen, much less take a shower, is not spelled out convincingly in news stories so far. Could be some hyperbole here. I’ll update this post tomorrow as more stories come out.

Other stories so far:

• NPR – Nell Greenfieldboyce: Surprise! Water Found On Moon’s Surface ;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Water Sheathes, Permeates Moon / Spacecraft reveal higher than expected abundances of the liquid on the lunar surface and in volcanic rocks ; He includes info from other work that implies a watery interior for the moon, too.
• Sydney Morning Herald: Richard Macey: Signs of water detected – living on the moon may be feasible ;
• Reuters – Missions find evidence of water on the moon ;
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Moon River? Not quite, but three space probes spot surprising signs of water in lunar soil. ; This seems the prudent adjective: traces.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos : Spacecraft see ‘damp’ Moon soils ; He reports that a cubic meter of lunar surface soil might yield a full liter. Really? From a thin surface layer of water? How could that have been missed till now?
• Financial Times (UK) Clive Cookson: Scientists discover water on the moon ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr: A Whiff of Water Found on the Moon ; This one is circumspect or, as Kerr writes, wetter is not wet and “don’t break out the beach gear just yet.”

*UPDATE (Fri Sept 25) :

• Philadelphia Inquirer – Faye Flam: Moon river? Unclear; and yet... ; She includes a back and forth on why the water is there, and mentions NASA’s aim to augur its lunar orbiter into the moonOct. 9 and check directly for water in the impact plume.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Traces of water in lunar rocks may hint at more ;
• Providence Journal -  John E. Mulligan: Brown geologist key in moon finding ; Local angle works best, and yields strong quotes.
• Voice of America – Anjana Pasricha: India Hails Role Played by its Space Mission in Gathering Evidence of Water on Moon ;
• Business Week – Bruce Einhorn: A Win for India’s Space Program ;
• AFP: Space Probes find water on the moon ;
• Asia Times – Martin J. Young: India finds water on the moon ;

The news is big in India and, while a NASA instrument on board got the data, it puts a shine on the Indian Space Research Organization. A few samples of stories already out in the press there:

• The Hindu – Divya Gandhi: Water discovered on moon? “A lot of it actually” ; apparently stitched up from on line sources;
• Press Trust of India: Water detected on moon by Chandrayaan, ISRO says path-breaking ; It’s a landmark, it says here. But how exactly this “will trigger a hunt for life in outer space”  is left unexplained.
• Times of India – Srinivas Laxman: Did Chandrayaan find water on Moon’s surface? ; A good story that pieces together hints and buzzes to guess the announcement in advance. This may be the source of the PTI’s story one bullet up. Laxman, too, opines without evident basis that this will start a serious hunt for life in outer space.
• BBC: India hails Moon mission ‘find’ ;

*India Media UPDATE:

• Times of India – Srinivas Laxman, Prashanth G N: One big step for India, a giant leap for mankind ; Also, Subodh Varma: Tiny molecules of water open floodgates for science ; Prashanth G N: ‘Our baby to moon has done its job’ ;
• PTI: India mulling deeper exploration of water on moon ; Yes, it has another mission in the works – Chandrayaan II.

Grist for the Mill: JPL/NASA Press Release ;

Charlie Petit

It’s a staple of science fact and factoid that no instrument can equal a person’s nose and sense of smell – not to mention a dog’s much better version – at detecting and identifying trace chemicals floating in the air. But in an enterprising and engaging, not to mention important, piece at the Globe Carolyn Y. Johnson reports that artificial noses are closing the gap.

She starts it off with a couple of grafs with rat-a-tat listings of artificial noses and their abilities already, then turns for a localized focus on one nearby company’s automated sniffer and identifier machine. Hopes to add hyper-smelling machines to cancer diagnostics take a turn. And she winds it up saying for all that, biomimicry is still well behind the real thing or, as one company officer says, it would be better to have a “full-blown dog nose in a box.”

PIc source (Just a toy. Dunno if it can smell) ;

Charlie Petit

At New Scientist is a strangely delightful story. Veteran science writer Jeff Hecht kicks it off with a note on the rarity of discovery of new species, and then says, in effect, get a load of this. A radar-wielding Canadian sky survey has identified 62 additional meteor showers to join such well known examples on the list as the Perseids, Taurids, and Geminis. These are not, one infers, the sorts of showers one stays up all night to watch. Rather, the radar tracks of their paths allows experts to pick out small smatterings of meteors with a common origin from the random events seen on any night.

PIc source ;

Charlie Petit

While world leaders fret over how to be serious about global warming without causing riots in the streets (more posts on that below), at the fine-scaled level things move along. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s David R. Baker has two stories in this morning. One describes the big federal stimulus-environmental loan that just plopped into the lap of a California company named Fisker as it angles to make hybrid luxury sedans and, eventually, cheaper models for those more on the hoi polloi side of the tracks. The other is about the better-known Tesla company, whose all-electrics just got a boost from a private businessman. He is just about done setting up recharge stations up and down one of the state’s major, scenic highways. And he’ll plug in and charge up those little lithium-ion road burning roadsters for NOTHING. At least, nothing at first.

Stories:

• Charging-station network built along 101 ; Some of them, it says here, will be using a big dose of solar power, too. That’s hyper-green.
• $529 million loan for plug-in hybrids ; (This DOE news got fairly wide pickup, but kudos to the Chron for pairing it with the first story).

Charlie Petit