Big headaches at Los Alamos National Laboratory and DOE. According to stories on the AP wire and at the Los Angeles Times, an independent review of earthquake risks at the big, secretive New Mexico facility has found that buildings that house large quantities of plutonium could fail and produce a major, even deadly, release of the radioactive metal.

The LA Times‘s Ralph Vartabian, relying in part on an activist watchdog group and also on reports from federal safety officials, reports one scenario is that if a powerful quake were to hit during delicate plutonium processing – including operation of furnaces and production of molten metal – uncontrollable fires might break out. One likely source would be the large glove boxes and other equipment used in such procedures. So it says here. It appears that the story broke during an LA Times investigation of polluted water in or around Los Alamos. At any rate, the paper put up a gallery of photos on that to accompany Vartabian’s report.

Conceivably, it says here, enough Plutonium and other radioactive substances could escape confinement and reach the laboratory complex’s security fence to produce exposures “thousands of times greater than a chest X-ray” possibly be fatal within weeks. Among close neighbors are residents of an Indian reservation and a trailer park. The assumption is that all the thousands of pounds of Pu on site go up in smoke, one gathers. That seems from here far-fetched but not so far as not to demand immediate, further analysis and action.

Tracker always thought Plutonium’s risk from its short-range alpha particles is the triggering of slow-developing cancer. Maybe not.

AP’s Tim Korte filed similarly, citing a four page letter from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to Energy Secretary Steven Chu to do something quick.

*UPDATE: As he notes in the comment below the Albuquerque Journal‘s John Fleck had the story too. I should have thought to check that paper, as Fleck stays atop things well. Getting in to read it  takes a few extra clicks. As often noted here, the AJ is among the few papers that attempts to sell its content on line – but a brief free pass is often available, as now. He describes TA-55, the key building, as “bunker like,” implying that a retrofit – especially of mountings of internal equipment – just might be feasible quickly. This is a well-informed story, and implies that storage of the plutonium somewhere else without fire hazards is a likely, immediate option.

If nothing else, the affairs looks like yet another opportunity for the Obama administration to demonstrate how transparent it will be when holding ticklish information amid intense public interest. And, another crying need for media to explain the situation as clearly as humanly possible.

- Charlie Petit

Proceedings of the Nat’l Academy of Sciences carried some pretty obscure spider news this week, but writers with at least four outlets saw a chance to explain something involving sex, violence, and even disease. The news from researchers at New Zealand’s Univ. of Canterbury is that males of a species of jumping spider in East Africa prefer to jump on mosquitoes that have recently drawn vertebrate blood. The result is some sort of odor or other signal that makes female spiders more likely to accept their wooing.

At LiveScience, Charles Q. Choi filed it Monday under the hed “Spiders Attracted to Blood Perfume,” noting that the preferred, blood-filled meal is even better for the spiders if it contains malaria parasites. As a result, some wonder if a new biological control of malaria is worth pursuing.

Science News’s Susan Milius put it on line yesterday, without the (iffy sounding to me, anyway) malaria angle.

And now for the big boys –

USA Today‘s Dan Vergano writes “Just in time for Halloween – vampiric spiders..” . , and at the NYTimes in yesterday’s science section, Henry Fountain writes it up under The Alluring Power of Blood in Spiders. ;

Creepy news, just in time for Halloween.

- Charlie Petit

Just in case you missed it, the first test flight of the first stage and overall structure of NASA’s proposed vehicle for taking crews to low Earth orbit and eventually beyond, the Ares 1, seems to have gone well this morning, one day after weather forced a scrub. Its booster parachuted and the rest just fell into the Atlantic Ocean, which was the idea. The AP‘s Marcia Dunn has the news from Cape Canaveral. She has an interesting tidbit: This is the first new rocket model launched from there in almost 30 years. Maybe so, it depends on definitions one supposes. The Ares 1-X test vehicle’s business end is basically a standard shuttle solid rocket booster so this may shade the meaning of new. Plenty of others stories on the flight are coming in too. See earlier post on the stakes involved. Nifty AP photo complete with condensation shock.

Late Addition: The Cleveland Plain Dealer may be the only regional outlet to send a reporter so far, but it did. Its John Mangels filed this quickie: “Cleveland should be proud’ – Ares 1-X launch ; This came a few moments after his even briefer bulletin: Up and away – Ares I-X ; That’s quick work. But one wonders whether such live blogging detracts from the reporting needed for a longer account in tomorrow morning’s paper.

.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Constellation Program page ;

ONE MORE THING:

If this Ares effort doesn’t work out, try Romania. A hat tip to Nature’s The Great Beyond and its highlight today by Geoff Brumfiel of a Romanian program for a moon rocket that, as he writes, may elicit initial giggles but is not completely crazy. The animation of its flight is slick.  It is a contestant in the Lunar X Prize.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A news story at El Universal (Mex) today explains that the Moon may have caverns  that might be used for protection against radiation by visitors. Another very good story in El Pais implies this might only occur much further into the future than we might expect … Under the headline “Projects without Money” is a very good analysis of NASA’s Human Space Program. Another article about the Guinness record in Mexico by simultaneous telescopes observing the Moon, seems to suggest that to understand the Universe we might not need to spend so much money trying to travel around in it.

En El Universal (México) encontramos una interesante nota de Andrés Eloy Martínez Rojas explicando que en la Luna hay túneles subterráneos que podrían proteger a los futuros colonos de las dañinas radiaciones solares. Una pequeña buena noticia para la futura exploración humana de la Luna, que cada vez se percibe como más… futura.

El aplazamiento por mal tiempo del cohete Ares es, en el fondo, una anécdota. Una noticia que se olvida en dos días. Lo que no es anécdota es el progresivo deterioro del programa de exploración humana espacial de la NASA. George W Bush intentó en 2004 dar un poco de luz a la agencia diseñando un plan para regresar primero a la Luna, y allí tantear la posibilidad de pisar Marte. Obama ha sido siempre esquivo a tratar este tema. Nunca ha hecho ninguna promesa, ni incluso durante la celebración del 40 aniversario de la llegada a la Luna. Paralelamente, la NASA le pide que se moje, porque para seguir con sus planes necesitan más dinero del que tienen. La parte científica de la NASA goza de buena salud, pero ya hace meses, años, que el programa de exploración espacial no tiene rumbo. Esto es difícil de tratar como una noticia; para ello se necesita un reportaje como el publicado en El Pais por Malén Ruiz de Elvira: “NASA: proyectos sin dinero”. El artículo destapa el informe realizado por un comité de expertos para el presidente Obama, cuyo mensaje es claro: objetivos y presupuesto no concuerdan. Los planes no se sostienen; o se aumenta la financiación, o nos dedicamos a tareas menos ambiciosas. Ante tal crisis interna, Malén explica que Obama no tiene prisa en tomar decisiones. Y esto, puede implicar pérdidas económica considerables, pues se mantienen en marcha programas que posiblemente serán parados dentro de poco.  Reporteros de ciencia, estemos preparados para indagar en el previsible cataclismo que tarde o temprano sucederá en la NASA.

Mientras, actividades entorno al 2009 Año de la Astronomía como el récord Guiness de telescopios observando la luna explicado por Andrés Eloy Martínez para El Universal, o el encuentro astronómico en Piltriquitrón reportado con contagiosa pasión por Laura García Oviedo para La Nación (Argentina), pueden hacer ver a chicos, chicas y adultos, que para conocer el Universo no es imprescindible, en absoluto, que los humanos invirtamos cantidades exorbitantes de millones intentando desplazarnos por él. La exploración espacial puede esperar. Al menos esto es lo que parece pensar el gobierno de Obama.

- Pere Estupinyà

One finds a pretty good example of a presumably solid political reporter cast into the energy beat,with its dose of techni-arcana, and confused by quantitative reporting, in Florida today. The news is President Obama’s  announcement of $3.4 billion in economic stimulus money to modernize the nation’s electrical grid. On tap is more nimble switching gear including so-called smart meters for individual household customers. I took a look at the Miami Herald’s site first as this is a local story for it. It has one there from a sister publication. It has a little ooops.

Obama made his announcement at a 180-acre field of solar panels in Florida that represents the clean energy that his administration wants to see coursing through this upcoming efficient, robust, and smart grid. And it’s on this last bit that the St. Petersburg Times’s reporter Adam C. Smith stumbles  with an error anybody, of any beat, might make. People can have a hard time, especially at deadline, with unfamiliar rates, accumulations, and relative values. Smith writes that the 90,000 solar panels’ power is equivalent to “removing 4,500 cars from the roads every year.” An editor should have saved him from that unlikely growth in the installation’s presumably fixed impact – unless the field’s owner is adding another 90,000 panels every year. The small goof – it does not throw the whole story off kilter – provides illustration from this country why that outfit in Canada is setting up a Science Media Centre for general assignment reporters confronted by jargon and concepts they’d never thought hard about before.

More generally, media accounts don’t explain to readers very much on how a smart meter will work. In some countries, they allow utilities to remotely adjust the power an individual customer can get – even shut them off one by one – and provides moment to moment measures of demand and cost. They provide a far more flexible way to deal with possible blackouts. Customers too can quickly learn how to use electricity more efficiently. But what features will US users get, and how easily can the electric company adjust one’s juice without asking permission first?

Maybe nobody knows. I looked at the nation’s main newspaper of record, the NYTimes, for its explanation. It carries an account from the respected ClimateWire service from the Energy & Environment Daily lineup of paid, daily e-newsletters. Writer Peter Behr says were in for revolutionary changes. The hed however cautions us of “a still undefined future.” He also carries the vital info that on top of the federal billions, industry is throwing another $4.7B at grid overhaul. He has a fine sketch of the program’s somewhat erratic choosiness over which utilities and companies are getting grants and which are not.  And it says that all our smart meters will do (and they are hardly the whole program) is to give consumers near-instant ability to learn how much they’re using and what it’s costing them to run a dryer at 2 pm in the summer compared to 10 pm, say. What? No big brother turning down one’s dials? Really. How much good is this without a little stealthy utility finagling within one’s own home?

You’d think, with smart meters already being installed, there’d be more info for consumers, in the media too, explaining just how to use them and why they’re so smart.

Other stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Jim Tankersley : Obama to detail stimulus spending on ‘smart grid’ ; Written before the formal fact. Not much on smart meters – more about rerouting and adding power lines so that sunny, windy, and lightly populated lands can get green energy to the larger grid.
• Wall St. Journal - Jonathan Weisman, Rebecca Smith: Obama Trumpets Energy Grants; Includes link to a Feb. 9 “smart grid” story with big graphic on a test of the technology, and WSJ’s Environmental Capital blog has more from Keith Johnson with considerable more detail and links to other info  including samples of those with a sour view of the grants and of the overall smart grid strategy.
• Washington Post – Michael A. Fletcher: US electrical grid gets $3.4 billion jolt of stimulus funding ; This story is about jobs and politics, with almost no explanation what a smart grid is with one important exception. Included in the grants, it says here, is help for one utility whose smart meters WILL be able to turn off a customer’s air conditioner (down, more likely, one thinks) or get the dish washer running when night rates are low. Really? I want to see the wiring diagram that permits that.
• NPR – Scott Horsley : Clean energy Touted As Good For Planet And Jobs ; Lead is on the grid grants, the body is largely on the overall Obama strategy to boost green, clean, efficient energy. We hear here from Joe Biden too. He talks fast. Imhoff too. Mostly politics, good tight wrap-up.
• Business Week – John Carey : Obama’s Smart-Grid Game Plan ; Chatty start at the top, giving examples why today’s grid is so dumb and old. Didja know that power companies may not even know about an outage till somebody calls and complains? That’ll change, it says here. Carey is a pro and knows his stuff. He also sketches a future in which scads of electric cars, quietly charging up in garages and parking stalls, can be tapped to return some of that energy pronto should the local grid face sudden strain. AND the user charging that car might get paid for permitting such wattage reversal.
• Reuters/Greener World Media – Mart Gunther: The Smart Grid Is On Its Way — Slowly ; An explainer, heavy on the notion that consumers will act better by knowing more about their energy use. That’s the White House version too. Is somebody soft-pedaling the potential ability of utilities sometimes to take over one’s household switches? That may be a good idea – and it needs to be clearly spelt out.
• Christian Science Monitor – Mark Clayton : Obama awards $3.4 billiion in ‘smart grid’ grants ; Says a smart meter program “lets utilities work closely with customers to reduce energy use during peak load periods.” Doesn’t say how the utility will work closely with me. Not that I mind, but… Good info: such metering in Baltimore already has cut peak load demand by one third. Wow.
• AP – Charles Babington: Obama announces $3.4B for ‘smart’ power grid ;  Punchy piece with a special jab: Obama “arrived in a motorcade of gas-guzzling SUVs.” And some official vehicle kept their engines running to drive their air conditioners the whole time.” AP also ran several localized accounts focussed on grants to specific utilities or others in the business.
• And in the dept. of reaching for an outsider to explain things – San Jose Mercury News – Bob Lento: Opinion: Smart grid success requires instant consumer information ; An industry man’s take on what is needed for this to work.

Grist for the Mill:

White House Obama’s Smart Grid speech ; Press Release ;

Pic, AP, source;

Universal testing for HIV? How does one do that? And if not universal, at least that reaches “virtually every adult in a community?” For the NY Times today former Washington Post physician-science writer Susan Okie provides the section leading piece, on “test and treat” campaigns planned as experiments of a sort, in neighborhoods of the Bronx and Washington DC. It does not quite say that people will be compelled to take a test – only that if necessary public health officials will track them down. It appears that persistent nagging and high-visibility screening pitches are the main tool. The story’s main point appears to be two-fold: 1) If nearly everybody with HIV gets retroviral treatment, plummeting viral loads will bring further infection to a near-halt and 2) The rates of treatment, and patient compliance, are now frighteningly low.

The section also inside a good example of the all-graphics story, one portion reproduced upper right  in low res. It takes The Tracker back to junior high school when I’d pore over rocketry diagrams in the LA Times for hours, imagining building such things in the giant basement laboratory I would’ve had if I were a superhero. It is credited to Frank O’Connell.

Other notable headlines:

• John Noble Wilford: At Ur, Ritual Deaths That Were Anything but Serene ; Or savagery among the powerful goes way back. This time, in Iraq.
• Gina Kolata: Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How? She cites a new study on spontaneous regression of tumors. But isn’t that a standard if mysterious observed phenomenon in medical literature? She reports several physicians who appear to be surprised to hear it.
• John Markoff: Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons ; The lead is on effort in the US to prevent foreign, or domestic too, makers of military electronics from inserting lurker software that can be used by adversaries to disable the Pentagon’s best stuff. But the meat of it, deeper in, is revelation who has already played this game. Mainly, it appears, the US and some of its allies.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a news arc for you, sort of like the I’ve-gotta-secret game of signal distortion in which a line of kids passes a whispered message, one to the next, and everybody screams with laughter at the utterly transmogrified version  delivered out loud by the last one to hear it.

In Nature Photonics a team at Bristol University, after studying the extraordinarily sensitive compound eyes of the mantis shrimp that lives in Australian waters, declared that their ability to distinguish colors and polarities of light might inspire engineering of far better optical readers of the data in CDs and DVDs, among other things. It has to do with something called a “natural full visible-range achromatic quarter-wave retarder” possessed by this stomatopod crustacean. All totally speculative, if confident. The Australian newspaper then picked up the Reuters version that calls it a “key to developing a new tpe of super high-quality DVD player.” And THEN the story resurfaced in the UK’s Inquirer where writer Ed Berridge, citing the story in The Australian, proclaims that “British Boffins have come up with a super high-quality DVD based on the eyes of an Aussie shrimp.“  Starting with speculation and ending with finished product, that story just got better and better with each telling.

It IS interesting, and it is getting circulation largely because a vaguely cute, certainly colorful,  bug-eyed critter is involved.

Other Stories:

• Wired Science – Brandon Keim: Mantis Shrimp Eyes Might Inspire New High-Def Devices ; Keim has written about these animals and their eyes before: 2008 story..
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: Shrimp eyes could lead to new generation of DVD players ;
• ABC Science (Australia): Shrimp eyes tuned to polarized light ; The writer seems to confuse the fresh news – the biomimetic possibilities in shrimp eyes – with the year+ old news that they can detect and process polarized light. But Phillips does dive deep into the intricacies of circular polarized light, R8 receptor cells, and quarter-wave retarders.
• Reuters – Ben Hirschler: Shrimp’s eye points way to better DVDs ; Same piece as highlighted in 2d graf above in ref. to The Australian article.
• LiveScience: Sea Creature’s Amazing Eyues Could Inspire New DVD Players ;

Grist for the Mill:  Bristol U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Rather than updating yesterday’s post on DOE Secretary Steven Chu’s announcement of $151 million in research grants for fat-chance-but-here’s-hoping efforts to radically improve energy supply and efficiency, here’s a fresh list of additional reports. Wanna know the truth? Tracker’s doing this mainly because the pie chart here (hi res), which I found at Wired Science News along with a fat caption, is so elegant and interesting that it merits front right placement.

As for the REAL money, we’ll track tomorrow the reports on President Obama’s announcement today of $3.4 billion for improving the nation’s electrical transmission system. We need some help here in Berkeley already. Out of a clear blue sky Sunday afternoon the power went out. Sun went down. Gas still worked of course. Neighbors Dirk and Betty came across the street with soup. Mrs. Tracker had soup on the stove too. Slurped and talked by oil lamp and candle light. After they said good night the electric lights came back. On second thought, don’t make the grid perfect. It was wonderful.

More Major Media Stories on ARPA-E :

• NYTimes – Andrew C. Revkin (blog): The Energy Quest Begins ; One expert reporter’s analysis of the news that his colleague Matthew Wald heralded in yesterday’s paper. His first conclusion: The mix of awardees “seems to imply that the Obama administration sees the private sector as more apt to be the source of game-changing breakthroughs.” A question however: how many of these companies are spin offs from university and nat’l lab research programs done with taxpayer help? He also runs a plot showing that this bolus is barely a blip in overall R&D $$$ trends.
• Wall St. Journal – Keith Johnson (blog): Lab Rats: DOE Awards $150 Million to ‘Breakthrough’ Energy Projects. He sees greener transportation, via better batteries and biofuels, as the DOE’s big target. And he gets in a wisecrack about Arizona State University.

And some of the regional, specialty, and advocacy outlets:

• Power Engineering Int’l: Research projects get $151mn in stimulus funds ;
• Treehugger – Matthew McDermott: Dept. of Energy Invests $151 Million in tomorrow’s Transformative Technologies: That’s a pretty optimistic hed, “invests” and flat equation to tomorrow’s stuff. Again, one can always hope.
• Boston Business Journal: Six Mass. projects get energy grants ; Tiny piece, but it links to an interesting, if p.r.-heavy, piece in an event tinier pub, masslive.com, by Stan Freeman: FloDesign Wind Turbine Corp. of Wilbraham awarded $8.3 million to help develop new turbine. And here’s the pic of its idea plus a happy bull elk.
• Delaware News Journal – Aaron Nathans: State energy projects in line for $13.4M in funding ;
• New American – James Heiser: Energy Dept. Funds Speculative Science ; A pub. that doesn’t like taxes and is sour on most things they’re spent on. But it describes the grants fairly before asking a question that all fiscal, business-minded conservatives ask, about government’s business picking winners and losers.
• Minneapolis Star Tribune – Thomas Lee (blog): BioCee Inc. wins big DOE grant ;
• Phoenix Business Journal: Two ASU projects get federal funding totaling $10.3M ;

Could go on. But all in all, not much coverage. If one of these ideas works as well as its boosters think it might, that’ll be the time for the banner heds. In the meantime, one supposes most of these grants are opportunities for some digging, and for features on the gambler’s streak that drives inventive entrepreneurs – including post-docs and professors giddy with what they saw happen in small scale lab tests – to decide to try to change the world (and get rich too).

- Charlie Petit

Can’t do italics in the headlines with this site’s software, but in plain English Cucurbita maxima is the largest member of the genus Cucurbitaceae. So The Tracker learned this morning. AKA Atlantic giant, it is a variety of pumpkin and can get way too big to serve as jack o’lanterns on most porches unless they get reinforced by some four-by-four pillars and homeowners have forklifts handy to get them there.

A few weeks ago a flurry of standard-issue stories reported a new world-record weight C. maxima at a punk’n contest in Ohio. A Tracker salute to LiveScience‘s Andrea Thompson for carving that bit of news into a spritely little yarn on the natural history of pumpkins and on the meteorology recently that has fostered such giants in some parts of the country while trimming the harvest in others.

Pic AP – source ;

- Charlie Petit

It may never reach the penetration of the oboe but in crossword puzzle land Aral, as in a central Asian body of water, ranks high among the standard answers. And every time I fill it in I get a pang, a mourning for a big salt lake I’ve never seen and don’t expect to see and if I did,  it would be sad. Its name evokes bleak photos of ships and village piers on scraggly expanses of salt pan and sere weeds, many miles from what’s left of this so-called sea. So forlorn, such an indictment of our kind’s husbandry of Earth.

So what a nice surprise to see on the AP wire, from writer Peter Leonard, a story under the hed, From ecological Soviet-era ruin, a sea is reborn. Its opening vignette is of one of those once-dry and abandoned shorelines where  “one fishing boat after another returned with the day’s catch.” An environmental miracle, he writes, has permitted “the return of the Aral Sea.”

Then, thump. Maybe Leonard’s tactic is to declare a miracle in order to create one. The recovery, as one reads on, is limited to a small portion of the lake that is in Kazakhstan. It has diked off a portion with the help of the World Bank, returned substantial stream flow to the basin, and is filling it back up. Some of those stranded ships are due to be sunken ships soon. But the Aral’s greater, one-time expanse in Uzbekistan continues to shrivel, we read here, down 80 percent in just the last three years. Only a smidge of the original body of water remains and dust blows in great clouds.

Pleasant news. Hardly the rebirth of the Aral.  I could have done without the bait and switch. The story, by its end, is complete and offers little reason to expect actual restoration any time soon. At least, Aral will always fill to the brim its four boxes on the puzzle page.

- Charlie Petit

In a post yesterday, I called attention to a story in the current issue of The Atlantic questioning the value of flu vaccines.

I also linked to an anonymous, critical rebuttal in the blog Effect Measure. I made a point of noting that I don’t like to accept criticism from anonymous sources, but that I was making an exception with this blog because I thought the issues were of interest to our readers.

Shannon Brownlee, one of the authors of the Atlantic article emailed me with a response, which she said I could post here, and I have done so below.

Effect Measure also emailed the Tracker, asking for equal time to respond to any Brownlee response. I told the Effect Measure blogger that he would have to identify himself (or herself) to respond on the Tracker. I also suggested that the blogger might ask an ally to respond by name. The blogger emailed to say he (she) is considering it. I haven’t heard anything more, but if anyone responds by name, I will post the response.

In the meantime, check out the comments on my earlier post. And here is Brownlee’s response, unedited:

You might be interested to see the reply Jeanne Lenzer and I have posted to Revere on the Effect Measure site. http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/10/journalists_sink_in_the_atlant.php?utm_source=networkbanner&utm_medium=link

The study you cite by Jefferson as showing efficacy is talking about efficacy in evoking an immune response. Jefferson TO, Rivetti D, Di Pietrantonj C, Rivetti A, Demicheli V., Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults, Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004;(3):CD001269 It is not a contradiction of what he said to us. When he and his coauthors say that vaccine is a 30% effective, or 50% effective, they mean it is effective in evoking antibody titres. The abstract and the full article say clearly that there was insufficient evidence to estimate reduction if any in clinically meaningful outcomes, like hospitalization and other serious complications.  Some of the bloggers who should know better mixed up antibody response for clinical outcomes.

What’s more troubling is the fact that many of the attacks on Jefferson and our story rely on character assassination, implying that he says one thing in the literature and another to two journalists. This simply isn’t true, and they know it, or at least they should if they have read his papers carefully. Some bloggers also seem to be saying that Jeanne Lenzer and I are too stupid to know the difference between good science and bad and have simply taken the word of a crank. Not so. We did our homework.

We can’t say we’re surprised by the level of vitriol or the ad hominem nature of much of response on the web, but we are dismayed that many bloggers have decided that it’s better to attack the messengers than to consider the message. We’re simply saying that the nation’s seasonal flu strategy, which is to vaccinate the elderly and other vulnerable populations, may not be working as well as has been claimed.  If we rely on vaccine during a major, deadly pandemic (which thus far this one does not appear to be, but things could change), the public may not be as well protected as we might hope or believe. We don’t say flu vaccine is worthless, we simply say nobody really knows how much protection it might offer.  Better studies would help define what vaccine can and can’t do – and help us prepare for the really nasty pandemic that many experts believe is only a matter of time.

For some reason, those simple statements make some people see red.

Shannon Brownlee

Senior Research Fellow, New America Foundation; Woodrow Wilson Visiting Scholar.

- Paul Raeburn

The chanting from skeptics of anthropogenic global warming – or any kind of warming for that matter among some of them – has recently zeroed in on a so-called plateau or even cooling trend in the current decade. One version of the mantra is to say global warming stopped ten years ago.

At the AP reporter Seth Borenstein enterprisingly decided to check it out (i.e. acted as good reporters are supposed to act). He forwarded accumulated ground temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while disguising  its source, to four “independent statisticians” for a trend analysis. He also sent a data set often favored by skeptics and gathered by reputable scientists.

Answer: The last ten years comprise not only the highest data set  in the record – no surprise – but they also have an internal, continued, positive trend. Ergo his story’s headline: Statisticians reject global cooling.

The Tracker has his own, less rigorous reaction to ideas that global warming has stopped – which is possible one supposes – and to arguments that the evidence for cooling is right there in the numbers. I usually look at the longer record gathered up by NASA Goddard Inst. for Space Studies, here. One notes that the upward trend over the half century or so is unmistakable – without doing any numerical analysis. Plus one notes that it’s far from a monotonic, year to year rise. The plot has up jags, and down jags. The former predominate. No matter how one squints one’s eyes, nothing in the current situation differentiates it as a break from the past 50 years – which also had occasional excursions downward. It  would be weird were the record to have stopped having a few downs with its more common ups.

- Charlie Petit