Must be synchronicity. The story featured in the post one scroll up is an apt set-up for another spot of princess news in the UK, but with some facts to underlie the reporting. Several outlets are writing up an archeological and forensic anthropology story.  It concerns remains suspected to be the oldest yet found of a certified English royal, Princess Eadgyth (Edith) who died at age 36 as a queen, in Germany, in the year 946. She was, it appears, was known during her time in England as not only beautiful, but beloved for her kindness and generosity (not so much of this warrior princess stuff for her, although maybe she was blond).

The news is that what had been thought to be an empty crypt in a German cathedral held a lead casket with her name on it and, inside, a cloth-wrapped skeleton. Tests are underway to learn more of their age, isotopic signatures, and the likelihood they are the real princess’s bones.

From London the  AP‘s Raphael G. Satter does a nice job of first mentioning that this royal-beauty-died-young can be compared to Princess Diana, the rejection of this comparison by one of the researchers studying the remains, and that same researcher’s decision to reverse course upon looking into the place Eadgyth apparently held in the hearts of family’s royal subjects (her brother Athelstan was, says here, England’s first king. She moved to Germany to be wife of Otto I, Holy Roman emperor).

As seems usual at the Daily Mail where David Derbyshire carries a heavy load of science writing, he starts off with emphatic declarations of sensational fact, then backtracks a bit while getting around to telling the news more sensibly. It’s a distinctive tactic. Readers will be beguiled to learn in the first graf that the lady’s crumbling remains have been unearthed – with no qualifiers (plus, it is unclear whether they were in an earthen grave).  And after some further assurance of her pedigree at the “dawn of the English nation”  he adds that it is “hailed as one of the most exciting historical discoveries in recent years.’

Then, he mentions, the remains actually are back in her native Wessex “for scientific tests to fully confirm her identity.” Or not confirm it, of course. Which means maybe. Plus, other stories say only a few small samples are back in England. Anyway, maybe maybe is against the reporting rules for ledes at the Mail? One notes that the U. of Bristol press release down below in Grist lacks qualifiers up top too. That’s a reason, not an excuse. The certainty seen at the Mail crops is matched by a few other stories as well.

Other stories:

• Independent – Ann Wuyts: Queen Eadgyth’s remains discovered in Germany.
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Oldest remains of English royalty unearthed ; Ah, but in the lede he gets it right – the archeologists believe that’s what they are. Now they’re trying to close the case.
• Guardian – Maev Kennedy: Remains of Alfred the Great’s granddaughter returned ; One of the nicer pieces, filled out a tad beyond what the press release and what one suspects a school text on English history might provide. Maybe she was no warrior but she was member of a cult to a warrior king, it says here.

Grist for the Mill: University of Bristol Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A lot of us fans of Dava Sobel, science journalist, story teller, writer of deeply interesting books on intimate chapters in science and technology, even a playwright, might feel a pang of envy to go with the admiration while reading this small report. At the Express out on Long Island, near East Hampton where Sobel lives, senior writer Annette Hinkle composed a profile on her. It includes well-selected quotes with tips on how to do what she does and which a lot of readers of this post here try to do too. It advanced  a talk this member of the clan gives tonight on science reporting and related topics at the local library. It sounds so perfectly writerly and civilized. It probably is exactly that.

The pic, borrowed from the news article, says it was taken in Alaska. Can only have been, one realizes after some digital rummaging, during Sobel’s reporting for (perhaps among other things) a Discover Magazine article that ran last fall. It is on fisheries research. Read it to learn all about tagging lingcod for a huge marine census. During that rummaging,  I also found a nifty self-portrait Sobel wrote, at a site called ALIVE!

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A few weeks ago a freelance journalist published in El Pais an article claiming that medication for chronic pain is often poorly prescribed, and that a new drug (tapentadol) with excellent results had been presented in an European Conference in Lisbon. Some doctors and specialists contacted El Pais saying that the scientific literature doesn’t prove the “new” drug better than older ones, complaining about the statistics presented in the article on pain treatments, and asking if this was a case of hidden publicity or conflict of interest. The Press Ombudsman checked it, and wrote a severe critique accusing the journalist of having accepted a free trip to Lisbon by the pharma company that produces the drug, and not having contrasted the biased information given by them with other impartial sources. The text is truly rough on the journalist’s and is drawing comment in many science writers forums in Spain.

Cualquier periodista que trate habitualmente temas de salud debería leer el texto en El País de la Defensora del Lector, Milagros Pérez Oliva: “Avances médicos con intereses ocultos”. De verdad; si cubrís noticias de salud, leedlo. Merece la pena.

Antecedentes: El 22 de diciembre de 2009 una colaboradora de El Pais, Mayka Sánchez publicaba el reportaje “El dolor como quinto signo vital”. El él explicaba que en la mitad de los casos el dolor crónico era un síntoma mal tratado, y que en parte se debía a que los médicos no lo medían suficientemente bien, a pesar de que existen escalas para hacerlo. Después de dar una gran importancia al tratamiento del dolor, Mayka anuncia que “hay un antes y un después” de la llegada del tapentadol, un nuevo analgésico presentado en el último congreso Europeo del Dolor Celebrado en Lisboa.

Problema: Varios médicos contactaron con la redacción de El País quejándose de la mala imagen que el reportaje daba de los profesionales. Pero además, uno buscó información científica sobre el tapendatol, y dijo no estar demostrado que este medicamento tuviera efecto muy superior al placebo ni fuera más eficaz que otros fármacos contra el dolor. El lector pide a El País que investigue si se trata de un caso de publicidad encubierta.

Desenlace: Durísima crítica de Milagros Pérez Oliva al trabajo de la colaboradora Mayka Sánchez, acusándola de no haber contrastado suficientemente la información para comprobar que, efectivamente, el tapentadol no puede de ninguna manera presentarse como “un antes y un después”. Pero hay más: Milagros explica que Mayka fue invitada a viajar a Lisboa por el laboratorio productor del fármaco, y la acusa de proceder contra el Libro de Estilo del periódico. No insinúa conflicto de interés, pero es lo que la dureza del texto transmite. La Defensora del Lector culpa a Mayka de utilizar una única fuente (que además oculta), y utilizar sólo información sesgada de estudios realizados por las farmacéuticas productoras. Milagros explica que el reportaje refleja la estrategia con la que la industria suele intentar promover sus productos: hacer emerger un problema, movilizar especialistas, y presentar la solución: “El reportaje comienza describiendo el grave problema del dolor, basado en estudios financiados por la industria; presenta a continuación a la plataforma que va a luchar contra esta lacra, sin decir que está promovida y financiada por el laboratorio, y acaba informando de un fármaco que presenta como revolucionario, sin decir que es del mismo laboratorio. Para mayor abundamiento, el titular del reportaje coincide con el eslogan central de la campaña financiada por Grünenthal”.

Repercusión: En los círculos de periodismo especializado españoles se está discutiendo bastante sobre la dureza con que Milagros Pérez Oliva (exdirectora del suplemento de salud de El Pais) carga contra su ex colaboradora. Muchos consideran la crítica desmesurada, e inecesaria la referencia a que el viaje estuviera pagado, pues es una práctica habitual. La opinión personal del rastreador no es relevante. Sin entrar en valoraciones  o defensas personales, la Defensora del Lector demuestra una encomiable rigidez en defender el periodismo riguroso y no dejar pasar por alto una posible publicidad encubierta. Así debe ser; no puede suceder de ninguna manera que un periódico de prestigio como El País caiga en la trampa de un laboratorio farmacéutico. En un asunto tan serio, cualquier periodista experimentado sabe de sobra que no puede confiar al pie de la letra en la información que llega de las partes interesadas. Es de cajón. Quizás sólo ha sido un tropiezo de Mayka, y la crítica de Milagros la ha dejado marcada de manera injusta. No tenemos elementos para juzgar sobre ello. Pero sí valoramos lo positivo y aleccionador del texto de la Defensora del Lector, que termina con un “ese artículo es un ejemplo de lo que no debemos hacer”. Lo único que le pediríamos es que en lugar de crucificar sólo a la compañera Mayka, repartiera más abiertamente responsabilidades entre sus editores o responsables de sección.

- Pere Estupinyà

The Chronicle‘s David Perlman has an account today of progress toward a San Fransisco Bay Area early warning system for earthquakes notable for two things. First, it’s not the sort of earthquake prediction system that would be high on everybody’s wish list – which would tell us days, weeks, or more in advance. This one would ring bells or other alerts when an earthquake is already underway. But that might be quick enough to give public agencies and citizens a few seconds to act before the waves of shaking reach them.

Second, we have a marvelous new unit to ponder. Perlman quotes a UC Berkeley seismologist as estimating the cost of the full-up system at $80 million. Yikes, one thinks, our agencies are all broke. But this, the professor translates, is about “one banker’s bonus.” Tou-freakin’-ché, says I. Next time a local gov’t can’t afford a public necessity, it should send a cop over to the top floor of one of the tall fancy buildings in the financial district of NY to stick out his or her hand and say fork it over, bub.

Hmmm. My son works for a big bank in NY. I’d have heard if he’d gotten $80 million. Wouldn’t I?

Uh, back to reality. The story explains that similar systems are at work elsewhere and that even a few seconds can have a big payoff if the person or automatic system getting the warning is monitoring something important and that is not made to work so safely for the people involved if the bedrock is wriggling. Like a runway, a subway, or elevators. Maybe they could get safely stopped before all hell breaks loose. And the rest of us might have time to get under our desks or into a story doorway.

- Charlie Petit

In the Times today environment editor Ben Webster reports on a new study (see Grist below) and his lede says this: “Roof-mounted solar panels are ‘eco-bling’ that allow their owners to flaunt their green credentials but contribute very little towards meeting Britain’s carbon reduction targets, according to the Royal Academy of Engineering.”

The Royal Academy says that? Not exactly. It does have a very serious summary of the extensive changes needed to put a big dent in energy consumption by buildings, with most of its focus on commercial construction. Perhaps the leader of the report told Webster something of the sort about private residences. But the talk of bling in the lede does not, in the fast scan through it that the Tracker just made, reflect substance in the report itself (there is some hint of the sentiment on page 16 of the pdf report linked in Grist, but no singling of wind or solar for discussion). Further, while Webster takes a shot at solar panels on houses in his lede, the body of his story focuses on the far dicier idea that little house-scale wind turbines pay their way in carbon, euros, or any other fashion. It has nothing to back up the lede’s slam on solar installations.

One ought to be more punctilious on attributing opinions to their sources.

For all that, the story’s primary point – that investments in greener buildings are not always going where the money would have its biggest impact – seems solid. Indeed, one probably does gets more street cred’ by putting up solar panels, maybe even a silly little wind turbine, than by double-glazing windows and insulating attics.

*UPDATE – Other home wind turbine news (thanks for tip to Rob Irion) :

• Santa Cruz Sentinel – Kurtis Alexander: State regulators say no to Pleausre Point wind turbine :

Grist for the Mill:

Royal Acad. of Engineering Press Release ; Report ;

- Charlie Petit

Farming, as seen in a NYTimes story yesterday and commented upon in this tracker post, is generally given credit for the dramatic neolithic start to humanity’s population surge that, today, makes us by far the most dominant, by technology as well as sheer pounds, mammal on the planet (krill, says Wikipedia, still outweigh us). Running in media today is a different spurt of news providing Europe as a specific example of the transformative power of agriculture in human history.

In PloS Biology a professor at the University of Leicester in the UK and her team report that their analysis of today’s (male) European, collective genome shows that it was not just the art of farming but the farmers themselves that spread across Europe. They trace the migration to the Middle East – chiefly in or near modern Syria and the fertile crescent in today’s Iraq. By 6000 years ago the wave reached Ireland (perhaps, one suspects, pausing to let Ice Age glaciers melt away). The report clashes with other analyses that trace today’s European males mainly to a thin, earlier migration during the hunting and gathering of the paleolithic.

One twist catches plenty of reporting interest. The team’s parallel examination of female genomes shows they tend to date back, indeed as earlier studies suggest, to the paleolithic perhaps tens of thousands of years earlier. Oh, what dramas one imagines – the poor guys running around with spears losing the reproductive contest to the ones with tools for putting seeds in the ground (and, one imagines, these farmers also carried a few spears and the like). Isn’t that how it should work – the fellow who sticks around and builds a house catches more female attention than the one who says “See ya later, babe. Me and the guys’ll be huntin’.”

A number of reporters fall into an error by implication. They tend to say the results show that European men are descended from farmers, while European women arise from a hunter-gatherer lineage. That’s just, to put this gently, dumb. That divide may be at the root of Y-chromosomes and of mitochondrial DNA but that’s it. The bulk of the genomes of Europe’s indigenous men and women today are of course pretty much equally descended from both categories of ancestor. That’s what sexual reproduction achieves: a blend of mom’s and pop’s DNA. The press release does not spell out this caveat. It also loosely says such things as “most maternal genetic lineages descend from hunter-gatherers.”  Yes, but the “maternal lineage’ has a narrow meaning – all those mother to daughter links also usually were accompanied by baby brothers. And reporters should not have to be led by the nose to figure out that we’re All descended from All our ancestors and still carry DNA from many of them, men and women alike.

STORIES:

• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Europe’s conquering heroes? Likely farmers: study ;
• USA Today -  Dan Vergano : Gene analysis shows male farmers spread across Europe ;
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire: Most Britons descended form male farmers who left Iraq and Syria 10,000 years ago (and were seduced by the local hunter-gatherer women) ; Hmm. Wife-knapping and other forcible takings do, despite my own silly remarks above, seem another plausible scenario).
• Independent – Steve Connor: How settler farmers fathered Europe’s males ; He says “they came, they saw, they farmed and then they stole our women.” Another hmmm. Our women? The story settles down to serious reporting after its opening passage.
• Guardian – Ian Sample: Most British men are descended from ancient farmers ;
• Farmers Guardian – William Surman: Most British men carry farmer gene ; This is among the better, purely accurate headlines (even if there is no “farmer gene”) as it narrows the portion of male genomes that exclusively arrived in a ploughboy. The piece closes  with a harmless but ridiculous quote.
• Scientific American (blog) Katherine Harmon: Sowing their seeds: Neolithic farmers spawned most European males ; One wonders if Harmon or one of her editors dug up the illus – which The Tracker duped for this post.
• HealthDay News: In Europe, Most Men Can Trace Roots to Near East Migrants ;

Grist for the Mill: U. Leicester Press Release ; PloS journal article.

- Charlie Petit

Imagine an autonomous unicycle – a robotic one-wheeler that drives itself about with its own digital processor in control. BBC science reporter Doreen Walton has such a device in her sights, courtesy of a University of Surrey engineer who published his design in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

It’s a good enough report. The professor tells her he hopes that anyone attempting to build a self-righting and self-directed unicycle will use his design. Not to do so, suggests he, would be foolish.

Looks like somebody did it by themselves anyway. By sheer happenstance, over the holidays The Tracker met a young man at a party, in the business of commercializing inventions for the mass market, who is keen on a new client of his. Said client invented the enicycle. He did it to ride along with his girlfriend – who can manage a regular unicycle but he cannot. It’s like one of those Segway two wheeled stand-up scooter things, but with one fewer wheel. Sit on it, lean forward it goes front-ways, and lean back it stops or backs up. Turns corners too. No gymnastic skills or pedaling required. It’s rather slick, with a hub-enclosed electric motor, cleanly installed battery, and construction with an eye on style. Clearly its center of gravity could be as easily shifted robotically, hence this thing seems to have the same game conquered as is being played by the Surrey engineer. BBC’s report would best have acknowledged this thing.

It’s no secret. The enicycle is featured at this Gizmodo web site, among several. There one finds a rather nicely done video news report (also on You Tube) from a young Brit who meets the inventor and promptly learns, with the camera running, how to ride it.

Grist for the Mill: Enicycle ;

- Charlie Petit

Conventional wisdom seems to have been, to DC insiders and reporters who report on them, that after health reform reaches whatever fate is in store for it this year, the top White House legislative priorities will be climate change (and jobs job jobs as usual). The election yesterday of a fairly conservative senator in Massachusetts,  by voters who appear afraid they might lose what they have and afraid of anything new esp. if it’s from the gov’t, gives DC head-scratchers and media reason  to ponder not only health care  but climate change legislation. One is unsure anything fundamental on the latter has changed – greenhouse gas worries are a bit more bi-partisan than is government overhaul and stepped up regulation of health care. Still, the drums are beating. Their message is that odds for anything as sweeping as a big cap and trade bill have fallen a notch or two for the year – along with hopes that a carbon tax might get into the discussion.

One suspects the gist of these reports could have been written any time in recent weeks by news outlets in DC as well as around the country. But now there’s a news hook in that new guy from the Bay State. Reuters, in particular, threw a squad at this news.

US Climate Legislation Stories:

• Reuters – Richard Cowan: SCENARIOS – Political turmoil shakes U.S. climate bill: It could “sink cap and trade” for this year. But more specific energy-efficiency and carbon-lowering orders could get through. Nukes may get a boost. Nothing here on whether regional carbon trading agreements among states can or will advance the ball – which seems worth a separate story by somebody, somewhere. Reuters also carries this narrower piece by Tom Doggett: Senate not seen passing climate bill in 2010 , and a column from John Kemp: Massachusetts election kills cap-and-trade ; Kemp says bigger loser is the chance for an international agreement soon.
• Wall St. Journal – Siobhan Hughes: Sen. Dorgan: Drop Climate Bill, Energy Bill Has Better Chance ;
• Des Moines Register – Philip Brashier: Smaller climate bill may get closer look ; This one is in today’s paper but looks as though it WAS written before yesterday’s voting to fill Ted Kennedy’s old seat. It’s local angle is wind energy in Iowa, with a good sense of the broader landscape too including prospects for EPA regs. on greenhouse gases.
• Dallas Morning News (blog) Dave Michaels: Is climate change legislation still a priority for Team Obama? ;
• Financial Times – Kate Mackenzie: US cap-and-trade bill looks even further away ; She includes a link to a background analysis that ran a few days ago: Carbon emissions reduction without cap-and-trade;

- Charlie Petit

Pres. Barack Obama hasn’t gotten much encouragment in the news lately, what with his party’s Congressional authority fragile despite its big majority, wars going so-s0 at best, unemployment stalled at a high water mark, global warming policies largely in limbo, health reform balanced on the precipice, and poll results reflecting a nervous, skeptical populace ready to throw in the towel on any thing new, bold, or interpretable as expanding the role of government or just costing the public money.

At the Mercury News its longtime environmental writer Paul Rogers provides some measure of tonic. The new administration, by his counting, has managed to rewrite major aspects of environmental law and regulation in the US “from global warming to gas mileage rules, logging to endangered species.” He writes it from a California perspective, but his point have wide significance.

Grist for the Mill: League of Conservation Voters Press Release;  Presidential Report Card ;

- Charlie Petit

Maybe it’s the contrast between a land where violence rules and professional birders, a bunch that one imagines as quiet, solitary, cautious, punctilious sorts in tweeds and carrying binoculars and mist-nets, that makes this story ring for some reporters and editors. Whatever, discovery by a team from the Wildlife Conservation Society in a remote area of Aghanistan of a breeding area for one of the world’s smaller, drabber, and least-studied birds is getting a great deal of attention via large wire services.

All, one presumes, from one press release. It and accompanying material from WCS are linked below in Grist.

• AP – Michael Casey: Rare bird’s breeding ground found in Afghanistan ; Largely derived from the release, including its first quote which appears without any indication it’s off a handout. But Casey does reach an outside authority for a comment. He reports that WCS  “is the only conservation group doing scientific studies in Afghanistan.” There’s a story worth a long, separate and enterprising account.
• Reuters – Belinda Goldsmith (via Times of India): “World’s least known bird’ found breeding in Afghanistan ;
• ThaiIndian News – Gina Gomez: The world’s Least-Known Bird ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Breeding ground of rare bird discovered ; He used the release’s quote, too, and he properly id’s it as from a statement.

Grist for the Mill: Wildlife Conservation Society Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

In a commentary The Times of India calls it the Himalayan Blunder. This following strong accusations against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that its review process broke down in letting pass one researcher’s poorly documented conclusion that all or nearly all the glaciers of the Tibetan massif will be gone by about 2035. The Times of India further takes to task its native son, IPCC chief R K Pachauri, for “rubbishing” Indian government research indicating that, while they may be shrinking, the glaciers are not at all likely to vanish so soon. In a news story, the TofI adds that the original source of the speculation says IPCC never even checked it with  him. Another, by Nitin Sethi, appraises damage this does to IPCC and its head.

Well. That op-ed and its accompanying news update seems to about sum up the story. No time to be too reverent for all things IPCC, it appears. Whattayaknow – a giant UN bureaucracy can make errors. No surprise there. It’s the UN. And amends seem to be in the works. After all this is good news – south Asia may have more time to adjust to one locally vital aspect of a warming world.  But this doesn’t look so good in the climate politics arena.

Most peculiar is that the various reports pin the forecast, not on anything published in refereed scientific journals or other such literature, but a piece  by UK science writer Fred Pearce a decade ago in New Scientist – one that apparently got sucked into the list of enshrined results without ever getting a hard look. Notable it is that Pearce himself, again in New Scientist, last week led reporting into the IPCC’s apparent misuse of his old single-source and speculative piece of news writing. Pearce is a good reporter. But any way one cuts it, that was just a journalist reporting results of an interview.   This one does look embarrassing for the UN and dominant climate science no matter who’s looking at it -unlike the e-mail story with its core of insubstantial inferences and willfully pinched interpretations.

Other stories:

• New Scientist – Fred Pearce: Debate heats up over IPCC melting glaciers claim ;
• NYTimes – Elizabeth Rosenthal : U.N. Panel’s Glacier Warning Is Criticized as Exaggerated ; see further comments on her story in separate Science Times roundup post today.
• Times (UK) Jonathan Leake, Chris Hastings: World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown ; It says this stacks up to be one of the most serious failures ever in front line climate research.
• Telegraph (UK) Geoffrey Lean: Good news for the world: bad news for official climate science body ; He calls the prediction “one of the more alarming” that the last round of IPCC reports made. Maybe so – but the IPCC never itself included it among its primary conclusions while distilling the vast report volumes for brief consumption.
• Guardian (UK) : UN climate scientists review Himalayan glaciers claim ;
• NYTimes DotEarth blog Andrew C. Revkin : Heat Over Panel’s View of Asian Ice ; Andy, no longer employed by the Times but blogging at his old post, not only seems to agree that this is a blot on IPCC’s resume, but even worse perhaps to those who read this site – the UN’s passage on the matter is “dearly in need of an editor.” Slop manifest. He also links to another blog, by long time greenhouse science fact-checker (a professor not to be lumped among outright skeptics) Roger Pielke Jr.
• Hindustan Times – Chegan Chauhan: ‘IPCC has a lot of answering to do’; . He interviews another Indian scientist who didn’t believe the ice-soon-gone conclusion in the first place.
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton, Christian Kerr: UN glacier blunder a 300-year mix-up ; Another scientist featured here who worries over global warming, but thought this IPCC forecast was way off. It also has a rather distinctive speculation on exactly what went wrong, and who’s to blame. Russians are in the mix, but not at fault.
• Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik, Keith Johnson: Climate-Change Claim on Glaciers Under Fire ;

Could go on – this is getting extensive and growing coverage this morning

*UPDATES (Jan 20):

• AP – UN: Himalayan glaciers warning not backed up ; Datelined Geneva with no byline there, but with tagline credit to an AP staffer in New Delhi, Muneeza Naqvi. Largely a rewrite of reports by other outlets, with some credit toThe  Times of India.
• Guardian (UK) Damian Carrington, Ian Wylie: IPCC officials admit mistake over melting Himalayan glaciers ;
• Bloomberg – Gaurav Singh, Alex Morales: Melting Himalayan Glaciers Scientist Says He Was Misquoted ; The man who Fred Pearce quoted years ago now says he was misquoted in that New Scientist story? Without regard to whether that is true or not, that’s not the issue. Reliance on journalism as an authority, not a mere tip on what to look into, is the issue underlying the provenance of the IPCC’s passage on the fate of ice in Himalaya. Which this story phrases correctly: conclusions are supposed to arise from peer-reviewed science. And that means not from belief sifting into the science community via some kind of popular wisdom.
• AFP (via ABC Australia): Scientist denies UN glacier melt date;
• BBC – Richard Black: UN climate body admits ‘mistake’ on Himalayan glaciers ;

MORE UPDATE: Grist for the Mill (Jan 20) Science Magazine letter to editor, by researchers detailint their conclusions on how  “inadequately reviewed” material made it into the IPCC report.

- Charlie Petit

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