If you put John Johnson Jr. in the search box at this site it will lead you to the more than 80 times that his byline and his stories have been cited here. Not for much longer, at least not at the LA Times. He’s on the latest lay off list.

After receiving a tip from another staffer at the Times, I asked Johnson about it. He replied, in part, “The separation agreement forbids me from disparaging the company, which I would be uninclined to do anyway, since the Times paid me well for a long time and allowed me to range from Big Sur to Baghdad to Geneva in pursuit of stories. I do think it’s unfortunate that science continues to be whittled away at newspapers across the country. I went to a physics conference last year in St. Louis and I think I was the only daily newspaper journalist there. At AGU conventions niche publications rule the day. There are very fine science websites out there, but I still tend to feel that newspapers — whether in print or on Kindle or some other form — drive the national conversation, whether the topic is politics or the new European collider.”

Our best wishes to Johnson, whose copy is always clean. His departure is also a blow to the LA Times readership. He has been covering space and astronomy mostly, at least during the tenure of the  ksjtracker. Such stories tend to provide the sort of good-news tonic that science journalism does better than most beats, countering the usual run of crime, catastrophe, corruption, and celebrity canoodling that takes up so much of our time. He wrote largely of smart people using impressive tools to expand the sphere of human knowledge just a bit, generally delivered with a good sprinkling of implicit amazement.

Pic source laist blog More Layoffs at the LA Times;

- Charlie Petit

Before I get to the debunking part, the reason I went looking for sunspot stories is in the always-informative Bad Astronomy blog, where its main man Phil Plait posts today The return of sunspots! Maybe! As news reports for about a year now have relayed word from puzzled solar astronomers that our day-star seems stuck in a low simmer, it’s worth reporting that it seems to be perking up. As Plait tells us, this has happened a few times already without going to full boil. And it’s a picture worth sharing.

This news led me to pieces in the UK over the last few days reporting (another) dismissal by some solar authorities of ideas by other, if fewer, authorities that recent warming of the Earth has been modulated mainly by variations in solar output, not greenhouse gases, and with sunspot cycles providing important evidence.

• Telegraph – John Bingham: Sunspot theory for global warming attacked ; Rather a furry story, hard to see it changing anybody’s mind. Just argument and counter-declaration.
• Independent – Steve Connor: Sun sets on sceptics’ case against climate change ; Nice long exposition of the sunspot-climate theory and a journalist who picked up cudgels for it, along with reasons that this theory, as proposed by two Danes, can now be set aside.

I do wish, however, that Connor – as he dove pretty deep into this – had alluded to and perhaps investigated opinion on work by some of the US researchers most identified with the idea that solar cycles are dominant drivers of climate – including Willie Soon (who is a presenter at this week’s AGU meeting in SF) and Sallie Baliunas.

Other solar-earth connection news:

• Boston Globe (Dec. 7) Colin Nickerson: Can a lull in solar activity head off climate change? It might help but don’t expect it to last, scientists say – the sun isn’t the real issue ; Maybe, some thoroughly mainstream scientists tell the writer, the relatively flat temperature trend of the last ten years really is a solar effect. But if so it can’t keep its grip on temps for long.

- Charlie Petit

Unless, as I mused a few days ago, the ruckus at the Copenhagen climate meeting is all staged just to make the incoming brigade of heads of state look like a big collective hero when it pulls a deal from its top hat, reporters there have no coherent story unfolding before them.

Just compare these two, from major outlets:

• Reuters – Michael Szabo: Brazil blocking increase of carbon finance: source ; The source is unnamed, so keep the credulousness on low, but it says here that forestry carbon offsets and other such measures are strewn in unraveled strands all across the tables in the conference’s back rooms.
• NYTimes – Elizabeth Rosenthal: Climate Talks Near Deal to Save Forests; This one says the forestry provisions may be the bright spot among meeting results. Outside of that, as one high ranking and similarly unnamed source told her, the overall state of the talks is “terrible.”

Maybe one should turn to new media for the upshot. At Politico writer Glenn Thrush writes today that the conference – with multiple-sided deadlocks inside and multi-directional lines of cops outside driving protesters up and down streets and into paddy wagons – seems to be “imploding from within and exploding from without.” Plus, his story suggests, the Danish hosts are exasperated and discombobulated.

At Columbia Journalism Review‘s Observatory Curtis Brainard and Cris Russell call the meeting’s news power “Bipolar Coverage Disorder.” They provide their own set of links to coverage.

In keeping with an inability to digest the entirety or even a fat slice of the conference I’ll indulge a pet peeve of mine – a recurring theme in coverage of climate politics. This is that climate worriers are hypocrites if they themselves have notable “carbon footprints.” It does seem that if one hopes to move from today’s world and its fossil fuel addictions, to a greener one, that for the moment one remains mired in the world as it is now. That, after all, is the point, isn’t it – we gotta solve this together. There’s no real story or meaning, except perhaps mild irony, in some rich global warming activist who lives in a big house or travels with the rest of us in cars, planes, etc. Or even a poor one. (Although I gotta admit, to see a Friends of the Earth bumper sticker on a giant SUV would give me a snorty chuckle).

From AP‘s Michael Casey today we find Climate conference emits its share of carbon. The U.N., it says here, estimates that the meeting will pump 40,500 tons of CO2 into the air. Well, how much is that? Is it different by much than the usual ebb and flow of tourists generate visiting the city for a similar time? But fair is fair – Casey does quote one activist saying that if it’d get an effective deal done, “They should have a Copenhagen every month,” calling that a wise use of carbon.

One more thing – on Facebook a lot of news organizations are stashing their stories in one place. It’s at a gathering spot labeled TheClimatePool. There one sees, currently at the top of the list, dispatches on Hugo Chavez’s railings, fears by Tuvulu it’ll soon disappear, protesters outside the hall, Japan industrialists’ worries, absurd smog in China, and various lists of the top issues jamming the meeting’s gears.

- Charlie Petit

Is it worth an expensive surgery?

In Germany it is an obligation to have health insurance. The premiums follow income and everyone gets all the treatments or surgeries he or she needs… well… in theory. The reality is less simple: To counteract rising health care costs politicians cap the budgets for clinics, surgeries or pills. Thus physicians are forced to think economically, to ask whether a surgery is “necessary” or “worth it”. But who should make these decisions? And who provides the scientific data to prove that a surgery is not necessary?

Harro Albrecht (a former physician) addresses these issues of health economics and its ethical and medical implications in his piece for (last week’s) Die Zeit. And he accuses German health politicians as well as scientists for avoiding necessary discussion about “prioritizing”, which means to make medical as well as economically sound decisions. In Albrecht’s view prioritizing is “the basis for a just distribution of the resource medicine”.

His chief witness is a German-Swedish physician, who worked in Germany for years but leads a Swedish clinic now. In Sweden prioritizing is already a routine for him, whereas in Germany it is still a taboo to even talk about surgeries, which are “obviously” unnecessary or not worthwhile. Intracardiac catheters, e.g., are used much more often in Germany compared to Sweden. Not because there is a difference between cardiac patients, but because the capped budget in Germany allows (and encourages) the clinic to do more catheter surgeries. No one thinks about the necessity of the individual catheter surgery as long as the budget allows it. This may not be a major problem now, says Albrecht, but in the future (older) society prioritizing will be crucial, because expensive life saving surgeries won’t be accessible for every patient. Rationing will be the rule, not the exception.

But attempts to establish ethical and medical rules for rationing are not heard in Germany. The cost sensible guideline for cardiologist, developed with the help of the Federal Research Administration, was rejected by politicians as well as physicians. No one wants to discuss, whether it is really worth to spend 50000 Euro for the treatment of a special lung cancer if the patients gain 1.2 months by mean. Albrecht quotes the study of the US National Cancer Institute, that the US spend $440 billion each year for “such therapies”, and that oncologists should think about, what beneficial means.

But who should decide what a worthwhile therapy is or is not? The physician alone? Or an independent institution? Both the “IQWiG” and the “Gemeinsame Bundesausschuss” are institutions in Germany, who should judge about the usefulness of therapies. But until know they don’t see their assignment in prioritizing but to find “efficiency reserves” – which means to compare the prize of pills and point to the cheaper one. Only (politically) weak instruments like the National Ethics Council are currently thinking about prioritizing. Is this “Political cowardize”, quotes Albrecht a social law expert from Bochum? Might be, because it looks like political suicide for a politician if he tells Germans, that they may not get an expensive surgery, that doesn’t save a substantial amount of lifetime. This is hard to communicate in a nation, which had the luxury to be able to think that economics and health care have nothing to do with each other. Good, that Albrecht tried to do it anyway – although the reader’s reactions do not differ from the voter’s.

Also: Swine Flu a hoax?

As much as I liked Albrecht’s article, I cannot understand why the Online edition of Die Zeit republished an awful health politics article from the Berlin Tagesspiegel (Tagesspiegel and Zeit belong to the same publisher Holtzbrinck and exchange articles from time to time), which lacks all the basic principles of journalism. The author heavily quotes a German politician, who thinks, that the worldwide actions against the swine flu pandemic is a hoax, “the biggest scandal of medicine of the millennium”. Of course this is news, because the politician acts as chief of an influential European health commission, so that the European Community will have to deal with his theory of a plot of the pharma industry and the WHO: Because the WHO is not under the control of parliaments, the governments should demand consequences, the politician is quoted. “The definition of a pandemic couldn’t be in the hands of an organisation, which is obviously influenced by salesmen of the pharma industry”, the author cites the politician, a former physician. So far so interesting, but the problem is, that no further proof for the politician’s, say, “idea” is presented. And one won’t find any critical comment of the Robert-Koch-Institute or the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute or any other German infectious disease research institution full of “real” swine flu experts.

This is the kind of reporting that spurs confusion and suspicion and doesn’t deal with scientific problems of predicting pandemics or with the difficulties of organizing a worldwide reaction to a health threat with a variable probability of incidence. Instead of making things convincing, the politician gives no proof for his theory. The article closes with the hint, that a comparable inquisition by the European Council finally lead to the discovery of illegal CIA jails in Europe.

- Sascha Karberg

.... Mid Troposphere CO2

While a throng of the world’s climate news reporters are either in Copenhagen or monitoring it from afar, a few went to the big fall meeting in San Francisco of the American Geophysical Union. One bit of new climate news popped up.  NASA-supported scientists unloaded surprising satellite  showing how persistent are the regional variations in CO2 levels. Ergo, carbon dioxide does not mix itself evenly as fast as had been surmised. More important to conversation about climate change is its non-surprise: apparent confirmation that when ocean temperatures go up a little bit so does water vapor in the air – greatly multiplying the heat-trapping greenhouse effect.

The AGU news room does not include many daily reporters any more, but the NYTimes‘s Kenneth Chang was there.  He gave it rather a cautious write-up, merely leading on a “wealth of data” on CO2 provided by an instrument called the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, or AIRS, aboard a spacecraft called Aqua that has been orbiting for more than 7 years.

*Correction: Ken Chang’s not here after all, as he notes in his comment. Did it by phone.

He puts well down into his piece the conclusion that – as has been expected but not fully proven – when sea surface temperatures rise as in response to CO2, the lower atmosphere above it becomes more humid. The effect, according to press handouts, doubles the warming effect that the CO2 would have alone.

What’s interesting is that the press release (see Grist) has a quote that seems to answer one objection to greenhouse theory that climate skeptics have raised – alleged uncertainty whether clouds and water vapor will exacerbate, or dampen, global warming due to feedbacks as CO2 begins trapping heat. The handout declaration is “The implication of these studies is that, should greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current course of increase, we are virtually certain to see Earth’s climate warm by several degrees Celsius in the next century.” The only thing that might stop it, the statement adds, is some unforeseen negative feedback that presumably could appear.

Chang, perhaps with good reason, does not report anything that strong. For one thing, the Times does not ordinarily lift quotes from press releases. Perhaps the source either took at it back or nobody said anything like it. Plus the general idea is not really news to mainstream science – but the confidence with which it is expressed from a new data set seems pertinent. Further, the general data set has been in the news before, if not the explicit links among CO2, sea warming, and water vapor (see this from Tehran Times).  If I find out more from Chang, I’ll let you know. But a few other outlets that more or less mindlessly regurgitate press releases, chiefly the Washington bureau of the South Asia-oriented service ANI, circulated it widely.

This could use some deeper reporting of the sort that takes more than one news cycle to put together and that might explain what happened and whether it matters much.

Grist for the Mill: NASA-JPL Press Release ;

Samplings of other AGU meeting stories:

• Wired – Betsy Mason: Scientists Still Waiting to Hear From Journalists Covering Copenhagen ; That’s right, they are sitting around the phones, ready to help unravel confusions, twiddling their thumbs.

• New Map of Mercury:
  

BBC – Jonathan Amos: Best ever atlas of ‘iron planet’ ;

Wired – Alexis Madrigal: First Global Map of Mercury ;

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Moon’s radiation tolerable for explorers ;
• Mountain soot and glacier melt:

Scientific American – Davide Castelvecchi: Subcontinental Smut: Is Soot the Culprit Behind Melting Himalayan Glaciers? ;

LiveScience – Andrea Thompson: Pollution May Be Melting the Himalayas ;

NON-AGU related glacier news – PBS Newshour/Independent TVNews – James Mates: In Himalayas, Evidence of Alarming Glacial Melting. No soot, but the insides of a glacier “rotting from the inside” ;

- Charlie Petit

Swimming Matterhorn

The Alps are an unavoidable topic for a newspaper published in Zürich. And it seems hard to find news about mountains millions of years old. The  Neue Zürcher Zeitung (published in whole Switzerland and Germany) reports, that the Alps are still growing – despite the (perhaps not so common) knowledge, that the “crash” between the African and European continental plates happened 50 million years ago, so that the plate movement already stopped. Well, snowboard freaks shouldn’t expect longer runs soon: the mountains rise about 1.3 Millimeter per year (0.05 inches). But why do the mountains grow if not because of plate tectonics? One can feel the surprise and fascination of the author Hans Dieter Sauer, that the answer to this (admittedly academic) question is: The Alps grow because they swim in the Earths mantle. Mountains like the Matterhorn or the Zugspitze lose one meter of stone every 1000-2000 years, Sauer reports. Like a melting iceberg slowly rises out of the water to adjust to the loss of weight, the alps rise according to their weight loss due to erosion. Sauer explains, that this was a hypothesis for years, but that it is proven now, because German scientists from the Research Center for Geoscience in Potsdam developed a new method to measure the erosion. Sauer doesn’t forget to mention in the end, that there is still some uncertainty and that the slight rising of the Alps might be due to the “recent” (in geological terms) melting of the ice of the last ice age, which plunged the Alps into the earths mantle.

Quick Picks:

Media versus Administration

Companies are allowed to cut the internet connection of employees to „protect“ them from distractions. The Department of Justice in Northrhine-Westphalia did the same, but some websites were still accessible, including the regional broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, the biggest public broadcaster in Germany) – until a few days ago. The minister of justice, Roswitha Müller-Piepenkötter, cut the connection to the WDR due to “substantial not work related distractions due to WDR videos”. This is legal, but the timing is bad, because the minister is heavily criticized these days by WDR reporting for mistakes related to a recent jailbreak. The staff manager at the Düsseldorf Court calls this „censorship“. Department officials reject such claims, of course, but it makes one suspicious, that the move stopped those employers, who used the WDR website to post criticism of bad working condition in the Department of Justice.

Village versus Google

This, too, is not science but in a broad sense technology journalism: Die Welt (and a couple of other German media) report, that the small town Ratingen (close to Düsseldorf) charges Google 20 Euro per street photographed for Google-Maps’ Street View, which adds up to (it’s a small town) 6180 Euro. The mayor of Ratingen hopes to encourage other towns all over the world to do the same, so that the rising costs would stop Google’s attempt to complete its web service. The German mayor critizes, that Google does not allow tenants or house owners to delete pictures of their houses, which violates the „right of informational self-determination“.

- Sascha Karberg

Today’s journalism riddle: What do you lead with–number of cancer cases, or number of deaths?

If you’re a classic newspaper type, you get the deaths in the lede, no matter what. If a boat capsized, for example, the AP bulletin would look something like this: “Boat capsizes, killing at least thirty-two. MORE.” Never mind who, what, when, where, and why–the deaths get in the lede, and you worry about the details later.

Today’s story concerns studies from the Archives of Internal Medicine concluding that CT scans could be causing 14,500 deaths a year and 29,000 cases of cancer.

Thomas H. Maugh of the Los Angeles Times doesn’t get the deaths or the cancer cases in the lede, and consequently they are not in the headline. But the 14,500 figure is in the deck underneath the headline. Here’s what it looks like:

Overuse of CT scans will lead to new cancer deaths, a study shows

Each year that today’s scanners are used, 14,500 deaths could result, researchers say. When healthy people are exposed to the radiation, the imaging may create more problems than it solves.

And then the lede: Widespread overuse of CT scans and variations in radiation doses caused by different machines — operated by technicians following an array of procedures — are subjecting patients to high radiation doses that will ultimately lead to tens of thousands of new cancer cases and deaths, researchers reported today.

That does the job, and the Times obviously chooses deaths over cases of cancer. But why not put the exact figure in the lede and the headline? It would make the headline only one word longer (adding just the number), and it would make the lede shorter. “Tens of thousands of” cases and deaths is imprecise, and it’s longer than 14,500 deaths. Maugh manages to squeeze deaths and cases together here, but he doesn’t give us the 29,000 figure until very low in the story.

Otherwise, Maugh does a good job explaining the risk, and it’s nice to see him apparently in the paper with a moderately long story, rather than confined, as he usually seems to be, to a few paragraphs on the LA Times health blog.

And here’s something interesting: The Wall Street Journal plays dueling banjos in its pages and online–the paper carries a story, and so does the health blog. A sign of bitter internal discord? Or a good idea?

No bitter discord, it turns out; the blog mentions and links to the newspaper story. But I’m not sure it’s such a good idea, either; the blog makes the paper look bad.

Shirley S. Wang, in the newspaper, buries the 29,000 cases and never gets around to telling us about the 14,500 deaths. Her lede? “The risk of cancer associated with popular CT scans appears to be greater than previously believed.”

Weak. I didn’t happen to have any belief on this question. (And why is it a matter of belief, rather than fact?). So that lede tells me nothing. And it gets worse. What do the findings mean? They “support caution,” she says in the second graf. That’s all? Aren’t we already cautious?

She finally gets to 29,000 nearly a dozen grafs in. (That was a test: Did you catch it? Better: She finally gets to 29,000 in the 11th graf. More precise, and shorter.)

I like Jacob Goldstein‘s post on the Journal’s Health Blog better. He doesn’t put either figure in the lede, but note how cleverly he puts the new findings in the context of other research, and says something about their relative importance: “We’ve been writing for a while now about the risk of cancer associated with CT scans…” he says, simultaneously conveying that this is just the latest in an ongoing series of stories, and engaging the reader with a very approachable tone. Then he writes that the new studies “add a bit to the discussion.” Then we get the 29,000 cases of cancer, but already with context and some sense that this is not the last word on the subject.

Others:

Reuters: Radiation from CT scans may raise cancer risks. Deaths and cases in the lede, but the story says “nearly 15,000 deaths” instead of 14,500.

David Leonhardt on The New York Times Economix blog: This is a two-paragraph story, but immediately ties the news to health care reform. “CT scans are, in a nutshell, precisely what’s wrong with fee-for-service medicine: It causes wonderfully useful treatments and tests to become overused,” Leonhardt writes. The others would have done well to put the health-reform context high in their stories.

WebMD: Are CT scans sometimes too risky? Would not “CT scans might be risky” be better than this question hed?

Bloomberg: CT Scan Radiation May Cause Cancer Decades Later, Study Finds.

- Paul Raeburn

For the first time in nearly four years of Tuesdays, I read the NYTimes Science Times, set it aside to do other posts, and forgot to write it up before closing time. There is a humdinger in there on a surgery at enormous cost to take an enormous tumor from a man who is no doubt enormously grateful (with issues arising on health care priorities when someone else is paying), a head scratcher of an idea for a climate treaty, offered by skeptics of the need for such a thing anyway and  that somehow would be self-enforcing and easy to swallow ; a bicycle with a dynamo in its wheel hub, and more. Plus some gorgeous birds. Better go take a look for yourself:

Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Intelligence's drawbacks - expert Woody Allen

I should use a bigger font size for this article – for a reason: Werner Bartens from the Munich based but nationally distributed Süddeutsche Zeitung writes about the (causal?) relationship between reading and getting short-sighted, based on an NIH study, published in the journal “Archives of Ophthalmology”. Comparing data from 1971-72 and 1999-2004 the scientists from the NIH’s National Eye Institute in Bethesda, MD, found a growing percentage of people with myopia in the US, 25 % to now 41,6 %. Bartens provides all the relevant data from the study, e.g. that 7400 people were examined in 71/72 and about 10000 between 1999 and 2000. As interesting it is, that myopia is on the rise, the reason is largely unknown. Suspects are “changed light conditions” or an adaption of the eye ball to serve a growing need to look at things, that are quite near, Bartens quotes the head of a Munich eye clinic. In other words: Books are to blame? Bartens does not put it this way,and he makes it very clear that this is still just a theory. Even if the NIH scientists found a hint pointing in thatdirection: Afro-americans today get better education (which means: read more) compared to  the seventies – which might explain why the percentage of shortsighted afro-americans grew more compared to their white peers.

Bartens does not have the space to go deeper into the old nature/nurture debate over how much genes and certain life styles contribute to the “disease”, but here is a review article (pdf) for curious tracker readers.

Addendum: Who cares about a few more shortsighted people, if glasses and contact lenses are abundant? 37 instead of 25 percent more myopia in the US population raises the yearly costs for treatments from 2 to 3 billion Dollar (not Euro!), Bartens quotes the scientists from their article.

- Sascha Karberg

The iterative steps toward NASA’s next budget do not, for many good reasons, get heavy attentionn from large, general news outlets. But at NatureNews Eric Hand today reports a second-chance for Earth scientists who want to monitor the geographic distribution of atmospheric carbon – including info on who’s emitting the fossil sort, and where.

This is interesting. It occurred to the Tracker, while reading in the NYTimes account (see post below on Copenhagen) that China is pushing back against any int’l monitoring of its carbon emissions, that there has been news not long ago of doing this from space. Hand reminds us why : the launch failure earlier this year of a remote sensing satellite called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (earlier post here). As he writes, Congress has put into its NASA budget a line item to build another one, a fact that he further writes “could help to verify the emissions targets currently being debated in Copenhagen.” If, as expected, Pres. Obama signs the NASA $18.7 billion appropriations bill, this small item well inside it could provide interesting conrasts one of these days between what nations say they are doing to cut emissions and the facts in the air.

Other NASA budget bill and related stories:

• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: Senate sends NASA budget bill to president’s desk;  Mostly on the Constellation rocket program, with brief mention on the carbon observatory. As for human space flight, the bill orders NASA to stick with the Constellation program until Congress says otherwise.
• Orlando Sentinel – Mark Matthews: Shelby throws a sharp elbow in NASA fight ; Alabama senator thinks lobbyists might be trying to kill off the exploration program.

Related Carbon Monitoring Stories:

• Scientific American (Nov. 18) – David Biello: Sinking Global Warming: Is There a Reliable Way to Track Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels? ; A timely backgrounder on the big gap between asserted, national-evel CO2 emissions and data , including a mention of the lost, first carbon observatory.

- Charlie Petit

AP photo

Looks like Copenhagen’s COP-15 is lurching toward a COP-16 and maybe many after that before one might expect binding agreement that gets most of the important nations to sign on. Especially the US and China. Grim reading this morning top right in the NYTimes is provided by John M. Broder and James Kanter with the hed CHINA AND U.S. HIT STRIDENT IMPASSE AT CLIMATE TALKS. Developing nations led by the US (despite a tremulous Congress) want heavy limits on themselves but at least some sort of strict accountability from poorer nations too. Per capita, China remains poor. It says here its delegates not only want rich countries to double down, and they not only want to spared any obligations on cuts, they also don’t want the world even to be able to tell what they are doing. Broder and Kanter write with authority, and well they might. A glance at the Times’s site finds that just since September Broder has written about 30 climate policy and other pertinent stories, and Kander in addition to his general political reporting form Europe has done another two dozen on such things. With other veterans, including the soon-to-depart Andy Revkin, at the meeting, the Times is loaded.

Maybe the US and China, and developed and developing nations as blocs, are merely being stubborn and intransigent so that when the presidents and premiers show up later this week, they can claim credit heroically for a big handshake at the end? We’re watching a form of political theater? Maybe?

Fortunately for the psyche of such climate worriers as me, there is some Copenhagen climate-talk news reporting that steers attention briefly to something else. Here’s one for water cooler and pub speculation, from the BBC‘s exceedingly incisive enviro correspondent and blogger Richard Black: Climate ‘skepticism’ and questions about sex. The story has a “previous/next” function to take you to others of his informative missives, some on the challenges of reporting the meeting at all (there was a giant snafu queue lasting hours – just to get IN to the hall). This particular piece posits that  lists of attendees at any gathering or on petitions by skeptics are more overwhelmingly male than just about any other slice of the climate discussant gradient. He speculates on why. When I read his lede I thought immediately, “Sallie Baliunas!” the sunspot charting woman, but he has her too – as one of the few counter-examples. One thinks there is a chance that men, being more prone perhaps to obsession, are simply more common at extremes in general – maybe a meeting of climate scholars and debaters who are totally  panicked over CO2 would also be overwhelmingly wide-eyed-with-fear-and-doom gentlemen, while ladies are a bit more in the sensible, concerned middle?

Other Copenhagen Climate Meeting Stories:

• Guardian (UK)

John Vidal, Suzanne Goldenberg, Jonathan Watts : Copenhagen climate talks stall / Vital hours lost over claim Kyoto treaty being killed; Brown flies in early as time to clinch deal runs out ; It credits a Downing Street source to say a deal is still expected in time, but “it will take the leaders,” meaning heads of state, to put in the final numbers.

Bibi van der Zee: Copenhagen: 194 arrested after protesters set fire to barricades . Tear gas thrown at demonstraters like ‘huge grey wave’ during raid, as concerns grow of police crackdown.

• Times (UK) – Philippe Naughton : World leaders ‘could boycott failing Copenhagen talks’ ; The story reports a great deal of tension, but note the quote marks and that big verb-modifying “could” in the hed. One source in the whole peace, from an NGO, surmises that national leaders might decide not to come.
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin: Climate change talks enter ‘important moment’ ;
• Toronto Star – Allan Woods: Climate talks try ot avoid ‘Kyoto-style failure’;
• AP

– John Heilprin: US-China showdown looms over climate talks ;

- Arthur Max: Tense atmosphere clouds climate talks ;

• Reuters – Gerard Wynn, Michael Szabo: Ministers try to break deadlock at climate talks ;
• NPR – Christopher Joyce: Copenhagen Boycott Averted; Cash For Trees On Table ;
• Boston Globe – Beth Daly: Despite stalemates, hope flickers on climate ; Is flickering good or bad? She says hope dominates despair. So this time, it’s good.
• Wall St. Journal – Alessandro Torello: Climate Negotiators Under Pressure Ahead of Leaders’ Arrival ;
• Xinhua/ChinaView – Wang Guanqun: China strives to contribute more to global fight against climate change ; It’s datelined Copenhagen, but the piece is all boilerplate from Beijing. Presumably Mr. Wang edited it there too. He also has his name on this, datelined Beijing: China says rich countries responsible for slow Copenhagen talks progress ;
• Voice of America – Stephanie Ho: China Accuses Developed Nations of Backsliding on Climate Change Promises ; She files from Beijing, with true news about China and Copenhagen.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: At Copenhagen global warming conference, alarms on ocean acidification ; The dek calls it an orphan issue, Spotts’s story compares it to a toddler tugging on one’s hem asking, “What about me?” ; Spotts also finds a panel with Al Gore, and worries over the Arctic.
• Science News – Janet Raloff: UN Effectively Locks Out Reporters, Others in Copenhagen ; She was among those caught shivering outside  in the accreditation mess – and she reports she was in good company. So much for Scandihoovian reputations for efficiency and neatness.
• Time Mag – Bryan Walsh: Amid Copenhagen’s Climate Din, a Corporate Silence ;

And finally, one by a writer earnestly trying to sort things through for himself, and for his readers. This is news report, news analysis, essay, a plea for a great statesman from China, and perhaps a lament that our world is so complicated:

• Philippine Daily Inquirer – John Nery: “On the new and never previously seen star’ ;

Who from the US is in the COP-15 News Center, an incomplete list:

(This relayed by Seth Borenstein at the AP, mostly people he’s happened to lay eyes on. We’ll add others as we learn of them):

AP’s Borenstein, (update 12/16: Michael Casey? from byline) ,Charles Hanley, John Heilprin from US bureaus plus Karl Ritter, Arthur Max, Jan Olsen from European bureaus, NYT’s Andy Revkin and John Broder, Boston Globe’s Beth Daley, CSM’s Pete Spotts, Energy Daily’s Chris Holly, WaPost Juliet Eilprin, ClimateWire’s Lisa Friedman, Janet Raloff of Science News, Cheryl Hogue Chemical & Engineering News, Emily Gertz (freelance), David Kestenbaum NPR.

Others (from bylines): NYT James Kanter, NYT Elizabeth Rosenthal, Time Mag. Bryan Walsh ;

*UPDATE: From others (see comments), additional US reporters there reportedly include:

Scientific American David Biello, Mother Jones Kate Sheppard, NPR Richard Harris ;John Hiskes of Grist, Kate Sheppard and David Cone of Mother Jones, Chris Mooney of The Intersection Blog at Discover.com, Alex Pasternack and Matt McDermottof Treehugger.

- Charlie Petit

Two U.S. outlets this week ran large packages on river restoration. One, a lot of US tracker readers probably saw, in the nation’s leading newspaper with the somewhat saucy flavor to the news. But another, in the far smaller outlet out in flyover country with, one assumes, no ladies in scanties in sight, is notable too.

Truckee River restoration stories:

• NYTimes – Leslie Kaufman: Onetime Nevada Brothel Could Become Conservationists’ Oasis: In the plain of the Truckee River, where the Mustang Ranch once stood (and from which it has relocated), bulldozers are undoing the straight ditches dug decades ago and putting in some big meanders like it used to have. The brothel angle is trivial to the tale’s meat – but must have helped convince editors to approve the travel? The Times’s photographer spent as much time documenting the area’s naughty past, it appears, as the scrapings of bulldozers heralding its future.
• Reno Gazette (Dec. 2) : Truckee River being diverted near Mustang Ranch ;

Big Darby Creek (Ohio) restoration story:

• Columbia Dispatch – Spencer Hunt, Tom Baker: Crooked Creeks ; Restoration projects help reduce pollution, reintroduce sensitive species to streams ; I can’t reproduce it, but this has a terrific info-graphic which is, essentially, the whole story. One can see it at the link preceding.

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- Charlie Petit