NYT Science Times +: Two from the main sec., plus a child’s stroke; post-disaster tech; Pandora reverie;
The
Times’s science-enviro-med writing staff regularly overflows the section on Tuesdays. Today’s surplus includes at least one with more news bite than all the rest – Elizabeth Rosenthals‘s piece inside the main section on the latest embarrassment to strike that part of climatology dealing with speculations on global warming’s impacts and their pace. It looks as though, from reading this, that the IPCC has, deep in one of its huge tomes, a flimsy forecast on Himalayan glaciers. It has them gone in 30 years or so. With justification for such a dire vision exceedingly thin, this suggests, it is very likely to be withdrawn. This third, icy pole may well be melting fast – but probably not that fast. As it happens, the on line NYT Science portal includes a video report by Rosenthal and a production team including Emily B. Hager, and Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, on one glacier vital to local populations, this one in Bolivia, that really will be gone in 30 years. Also kaput in 3 years. That’s because, she says here, it melted away last year. Another nearby is going fast. This is a vivid report and fine example of how multimedia has changed the life of the print reporter.
It has become a mantra among science writers that maybe “false balance” was once a problem in coverage of climate change. But not any more, we say. This is because hardly anybody in established press calls up the demagogues, second-raters, and the occasional bona fide scientist among greenhouse denialists for opinion about journal reports on a fast-changing world. But one wonders. Why does this story today on Himalaya only report abstractly that this vetting flub on glacial melt has touched off another storm of told-ya-so’s among contrarions, echoing the e-mail thing. The report has nothing specific, but perhaps one call at least is warranted (but would be dumb for, say, the Bolivia video report). This event’s significance is mainly political. One at least wants to know how it’s playing in that arena and from more than one angle. The story’s focus is on dismay among main stream IPCC-type scientists that this could have happened. That leads, by the way, to another larger question that is not pertinent to this specific story: How often if ever has any wing of the generalized community of skeptics taken back in chagrin any of its myriad, often contradictory, reasons not to think we are sending the climate into horrendous change?
This is getting other coverage as well, rounded up today in a separate post.
Also up front in the NYT is an almost purely political-medical story, by Gardiner Harris on the obstacles the federal government puts on study of marijuana cigarettes v. cannabis pills or other meds for treatment of health conditions. It’s not old news, but the issues are. It’s a topic that merits a regular visit – and one suspects Harris was disappointed not to have been able to say anything fundamentally new about the clinical research aspects of smoking such dope.
As for the section, it is led by a story that at first The Tracker felt would not be worth the time. It’s of the annals of medicine genre, first-person division. Investigative, local NBC-TV Reporter Jonathan Dienst describes the stroke suffered by his young son. It and the boy’s continuing rehab offers a lesson to doctors and parents alike that while uncommon, strokes do strike young and apparently healthy children. It’s grippingly done and got its hooks in quickly. I read it in a rush, every word, thinking of our grandchildren.
Other Science Times Headlines:
- Carol Kaesuk Yoon – Luminous 3-D Jungle Is a Biologist’s Dream ; Yoon, trained in biology, provides another reason to see the movie Avatar. It nails, she reports, the intoxicating phantasmagoria that one finds by immersion in the intricacies of the wild biology of our world. She already wrote a book on this theme, and now says movie director James Cameron is deeply into the same angle she sought. (Alas, The Tracker tried to see it yesterday. All shows sold out at the local cineplex).
- Nicholas Wade: Genome Study Provides a Census of Early Humans ; Upshot: Hunting-gathering didn’t cut it. We farm, therefore we are. And, Craig Venter’s lineage played a role in this analysis.
- Henry Fountain: Managing Disasters With Small Steps ; On Haiti and on how to be ready to help a society rebuild, smarter, after its buildings and other big, made things fall.
- Roni Caryn Rabin: Deficiencies in Treatment of Depression ;
- Mark Derr: Scientists Find a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior ;
- Sean B. Carroll: When Built-In Antifreeze Beats a Winter Coat ; The biologist-writer fills us in on wintry insects.
Even more than usual, much more. Whole Section;
- Charlie Petit
