Plenty of ink for the daily climate drear: Greenland is melting faster, US’s highs outnumber its lows and it’s not the stock market we’re talkin’
The Reuters science feed has today’s top items of climate news of the day stacked on atop of the other. From two of its more stalwart reporters we find Alister Doyle with Greenland ice loss accelerating: study ; and Deborah Zabarenko adds thump to his ker-: Record-high U.S. temps outpace record lows: study ; Before moving on, a brief ponder upon the distinct grammar of headlines. Isn’t it the norm in regular English for the source or cause of an effect to be to the left of the colon? As in Study: reporters do like their free pastries at morning press conferences. And if one cites the source second, wouldn’t parentheses be more apt? Oh well, concision and news first are paramount on the copy desk.
Before we get to more coverage of those two news bites, few outlets covered another one in the last week that draws a direct connection between their general topics: Arctic and US climate shifts. A study of cave stalagmites in California, that Earth and Planetary Science Letters published, found that over the last many thousand years periods of higher temps and presumably low sea ice in the Arctic tend to align with drought in California. A warmer Arctic, reports UC Davis researchers, apparently pulls climate bands north – drawing the aridity of Southern California across more of the state. The Tracker would put the release down there in Grist but one old-line, if recently shrunken, news outlet, US News & World Report, put the NSF press release right on its site. At least one local TV station reporter, ABC KGO-TV‘s Wayne Freedman, covered it with its own rewrite and reporting (UC Davis Press Release provided grist for his mill). It’s a story handed to him, but kudos to Freedman anyway: relatively few local TV outlets cover climate with an eye to the science at all, much less with a feature focus on local authorities.
Back on topic: The US temperature study news is via an article in Geophysical Research Letters by US meteorologists at the Nat’l Ctr for Atmospheric Research, the private Climate Central outfit, NOAA, and others. Greenland’s asserted acceleration in ice loss is in Science from a team that a researcher in Holland led, and who had US and British colleagues.
Other Greenland Ice stories:
- BBC – Richard Black: Greenland Ice Loss “Accelerating’ ;
- Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than ever, data shows ; Actually the data show things. The story tells readers that two different ways to gauge the change were used: one based on precip and glacial flow measures, the other and more impressive one thinks: gravitational field trends. Concise, true.
Grist for the Mill:
Bristol U. Press Release ; U. Colorado (via ScienceDaily) Press Release ;
Other US Temperature Stories:
- NY Times Dot Earth blog – Andrew C. Revkin: More Record Highs and Far Fewer Lows ;
- AP: Temperature records: More highs than lows.
- MSNBC: Warning Sign: Record Highs are double the lows ;
- Science News – Janet Raloff: Record Chills Are Falling, But Only in Number ; She gets the people story – that is, how the researchers met and decided to look deeper – behind the news. And she tells us that even in 2100, if projections hold and record highs outnumber lows eight to one, there will (natch) still be some places setting cold temperature records every once in awhile.
Grist for the Mill: University Corp. for Atmospheric Research Press Release ;
Grist for the Speaking of Unusual Low Temps Mill: NOAA Press Release on October 2009 as third coolest on record for U.S..
And for the outlier news story of the day:
- Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Climate change ‘sceptic’ Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming / Carbon dioxide in the atmopshere is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes and is not responsible for climate hcange, a scientist has claimed ; Denialists are legitimate topics of news. Ms. Gray is the “Environment Correspondent” so climate change is part of her beat. One would think that, in response to the idea that most of the annual increments of CO2 are from volcanoes, she’d at least fact check it with other authorities. She and her editors let this fellow’s assertion sit there unchallenged, without rejoinder from from the mainstream side of this non-debate (who are limited mainly to saying CO2 is so warming things up). Hmmppppphht. All she had to do was run a search and perhaps come up with this report from the British Geological Survey putting volcanic CO2 emissions at 1 percent of those due to human industry, mainly fossil fuel combustion, and other activity.
- Charlie Petit
