The Tampa Tribune‘s Keith Morelli covers a lot of water in a story today on tropical coral reef restoratiion, and manages to do so without tripping over the global warming angle that makes some people’s brains cramp up. His story is fine, local, and presumably enterprise reporting on a confederation of agencies whose scientists hope to jump-start the healing of reefs “from Key Largo to the Dry Tortugas,” which sounds a little bit like a commercial for a rum-soaked resort.

Here’s the switch. He lists global warming as one reason for corals in difficulty, but at the same time mentions first that the latest rough patch for the local reefs was the January cold snap. Plus there have been dredgings, souvenir-happy recreational scuba divers and snorkelers, disease blight on coral, disease blights on sea urchins that graze on algae that harm coral, sunken ships, pollution… the list is so long that no matter who reads this they’ll find a reason to think it wise that somebody is working to protect them.

Included is detail on how the effort plans to boost coral health. The piece has one minor and tiny flub, which I’ll mention only because I am fussy and happened to notice it and am a fan of another kind of reef too. He writes that the local reefs are the only ones in the contiguous United States. His meaning is the iconic tropical, shallow water coral reefs in post cards. But does not the fairly recent discovery of deep, cold-water coral reefs mean that other states have coral reefs, too, although very different from those in this story?  It should have been more specific.

The story, one must add quickly,  overall is timely, well-reported, and gracefully written.

- Charlie Petit

This ran last Sunday in Montana’s The Missoulian but I just got around to checking that spot in the list of news feeds. Staffer Rob Chaney does a fine and enterprising job rounding up some local folks to put life in his tale of wolves, debate on whether to foster more of them or shoot most of those already there, and the deep reasons people can be at such loggerheads over them.

There is no fresh news here, strictly speaking. But the piece admirably puts faces and voices on the debate. It also, as far as I can tell, can be read by almost anybody at any spot in the spectrum of opinion and provide something with which to nod in agreement. Other parts might tick most anybody off, too, but the writer’s biases are not so easy to see.

Also to the writer’s credit is his high placement of one primary source’s plea to protagonists that they go beyond opinion and instinct and put data behind them.

- Charlie Petit

There it is, along with stories on a Turkish sheep that gave birth to a human-faced lamb, and a NASA probe that found trees on Mars, something at the entertaining but gonzo Russian news agency Ria Novosti that I can actually sort of endorse : Industrial whaling has no effect on carbon dioxide levels.

Is that not silly? Who would ever think that global warming’s cause is consequentially due to dead whales anyway? To say it has no effect may be strong, but who would think it might be worth worrying about? Some seem to think so. Take a look at these stories that prompted the Russian riposte:

• BBC – Victoria Gill: Whaling worsens carbon release, scientists warn ;
• Discovery News – Jessica Marshall: Whales, like trees, slow warming ;

The news has a legitimate-enough provenance. At the Ocean Sciences meeting sponsored by the American Geophysical Union, this year in Portland, Maine, a local researcher reported yesterday his calculation of how much CO2 might have reached the atmosphere due to whaling’s bounty over the last century – via the rotting of dead whales on beaches or at whaling stations, the combustion of blubber-derived whale oil, and the like. That is an interesting academic exercise and, given the sizes of whales, it should be no surprise that the theoretical high end of the calculation might translate to a lot of trees. And it is true enough that naturally dead whales or other megabeasts in the sea tend to sink to the bottom and leave their carbon there. And that fishing and whaling boats move the biomass to places with access to the air. But in proportion, how big is this?

The Ocean Sciences meeting’s organizers put on a press conference yesterday for this. That’s probably the only reason it is in the news.  But this story has such a giggle factor that reporters should recognize that up front and wire it up purely as a curiosity. Other reasons not to remove the biggest creatures from the sea are so adequate,  and the other primary reasons for global warming so far dwarf whaling, that to make a straight story linking the two as seriously entwined is overdoing it.

Grist for the Mill: Ocean Science Meeting Press Conference List ;

- Charlie Petit

You would think that an astronomer running a big observatory would get summarily fired only for something really awful, like selling the telescope to a foreign scrap dealer, or making up that discovery of a black hole made entirely of dark matter, or running off with the chancellor’s wife, or husband, or whomever, along with the money budgeted for a new ultraviolet spectrometer.

But one learns that for weeks now sketchy  reports in South Africa have told readers about a British radio astronomer, director of the South African Astronomical Observatory, canned and now under investigation. Suspicion is that he leaked to colleagues elsewhere some details of S.Africa’s strategy to land for the nation an international project, the Square Kilometer Array. Australia is SA’s big rival for it.  The project is a big deal, a billion-dollar interferometric masterpiece that, they say, would open new frontiers in radio astronomy and its resolution and generally peek into the cosmos like never before.

It is difficult from this distance to judge the merits of the case or the seriousness of the allegations. But it is notable to find such attention to an astronomer just for doing astronomer things which include talking about a potential observatory but that this time gets him the ax.

The story that brought this to my attention is in the on line Johannesburg Mail & Guardian by Yolandi Groenewald, but it is composed as a story mid-stream through an event about which readers already have a clue.

This apparently has triggered considerable international dismay. Nature wrote it up in its news pages a few weeks ago, which I missed. Here are some earlier reports in open media. Few of them, alas, get into the substance or depth of the accusations or into the institutional science context of the new affair.

• Mail & Guardian – Yolandi Groenwald (Feb 5) : NRF suspends top gun ;
• University World News – Karen MacGregor (Feb 7): SOUTH AFRICA: Top UK astronomer suspended ;
• Cape Times – Craig McCune (Feb. 1): Chief astronomer suspended ;

Here’s what’s particularly odd. South Africa is, as far as I know, a reasonably open, democratic, free speech-and-press-abiding nation with a cosmopolitan elite and a market economy. But these news pieces appear timid and circumspect. They are loaded with bureaucratic-sounding phrasings and evasions of clarity. They smell ever so slightly of an intimidated press. Maybe the topic is boring or routine, but it does seem to me that good reporters there should be digging around in the nation’s universities and funding agencies to see how they handle such issues as openness of inquiry, the slack normally given academics for talking among one another about academic matters, and the ways that governing institutions exert political control over scientists or any other scholars. One hopes a few reporters there have grabbed their shovels and are digging. Maybe a few have done so, with results. If anybody has a link to a more expansive take on this, let us know.

- Charlie Petit

Word is that the AP’s cadre of skilled science writers and editors are supposed to get a chance to look over stories from the hinterlands that touch on their beats. The system may have a hole here (and, as we’ll see, a big share of the world’s media have it too). Otherwise how explain a story on the wire, from Owen Pye in Australia, (note, see UPDATE below for more on a second version of the AP story) that puts in its lede the assertion that two rather enormous icebergs recently loosed from the Mertz Glacier’s floating shelf “could lower the levels of oxygen in the world’s oceans.”

All that due to one gigantic iceberg bonking an ice tongue and breaking it off, doubling the area’s gigantic iceberg burden. Right. I am guessing, but one suspects that questions about these icebergs and their blockage of a small part of the usually-open waters or polynya where cold, oxygen-rich waters sink and feed the global thermohaline circulation, led to a general conversation about said circulation and its role in oxygenating the abyss. And, there have been eras, I seem to recall, in Earth’s deep history when said abyss was so low in oxygen that the entire marine ecosystem was drastically different from today’s. And that if this kind of ice becomes a permanent lid on important Antarctic down-dwelling systems, things could get serious.  But I am just guessing. And one supposes it is possible that somehow two icebergs can make a statistically meaningful – meaning not only real but big enough to matter – change in deep water circulation and its O2 content across the globe.

The hole in the story is that outside experts were not consulted and asked about such passages as “There may be regions of the world’s oceans that lose oxygen, and then of course most of the life there will die.” Either tell us more, or don’t tell us that at all.

And if it holds up, then write it up even bigger than this.

*UPDATE!: A considerably more careful and calibrated story, with appropriate caveats and no warning of an oxygen-sapped ocean in the lede, has appeared on the AP wire supplanting the previous version I saw. The first link in this story now goes to a shortened rendition of the first version.  The shorter one, derived from the original, is still found sans byline at  its UK Press Association affiliate. Such a fast fix is commendable.

Looking further afield, at first glance several other outlets take more or less the same wild angle about possible impacts on deep water formation. But AP has the ocean bottom’s widespread loss of oxygen to itself.

A fair share of the world’s English speaking press, chiefly in the UK, seems to have gone full-tabloid berserk.

• BBC: Vast Antarctic iceberg ‘threatens marine life’ ; Whew, the lede qualifies this immensely, adding “in the region” and mentioning penguins. The story further says that while in principle the deep ocean circulation system is hooked to these icebergs, they alone are not enough to shut it down or alter the global climate system.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Andrew Darby: Iceberg as big as the ACT breaks away from Antarctic glacier ; No, not the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco but a state – the Australian Capital Territory – is the unit. Darby has a little more info, such as that the polynya that might get temporarily plugged is the headwaters for about 25 percent of Antarctic bottom water. And also that this is a natural event offering little reason to say it’s the sort of thing global warming should make more common.
• Guardian (UK) James Sturcke – Giant Antarctic iceberg could affect global ocean circulation ; Ice broken off from Mertz glacier is size of Luxembourg and may decrease oxygen supply for marine life in the area ; …….
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin : Luxembourg-sized iceberg threatens weather chaos after split ;  C’mon! Chaos?  And weather ordinarily is so orderly. But she says these slabs of ice might (big word, that might. You can hide a lot of nonsense behind “might”) “disrupts global ocean patterns and weather systems for decades, according to scientists.
• Daily News
• Sun (UK) : Giant iceberg ‘to change weather’ ; It’s the size of LUXEMBOURG, it screams. Ummm – isn’t that one of those countries famous for being little?
• Daily Mail: Why iceberg that size of Luxembourg could mean cold winters ahead for Europe ; Just nuts, but the illus showing where Luxembourg is, and the sequence of events in Antarctica, is hard not to notice. By the way, the story quotes or cites no specific authority for declaring this will chill Europe.
• Reuters – David Fogarty : Giant iceberg beaks off from Antarctic glacier ; And, it says, “could affect ocean circulation patterns.’
• AFP via Montreal Gazette – Marlowe Hood: Mammoth iceberg may alter ocean circulation: Study ;
• and finally, sane by comparison: ABC (Aus): A chip off the old iceberg ; Starts off by saying it’s NOT global warming. Next it says it could have an impact on global environment, but turns around and quotes another scientist who says there’s not enough information to say one way or the other.

Oh my. This will take some serious reporting to straighten out. Maybe it is Icebergageddon. We’ll see. At least they all agree:  it’s not a global warming story.

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill:

Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Media Alert ; Australian Antarctic Division Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Thanks to head tracker Charlie Petit for taking note, while I was traveling, of Amy Harmon‘s three-part series, Target Cancer, in The New York Times earlier this week.

This is a meticulous, thorough story of the early success of a new cancer drug, at “a watershed moment in understanding genetic changes that cause cancer.”

Well, that’s pretty darn optimistic. And startling from a newspaper that has been hammering us about the failure of the war on cancer for almost a year now, as I’ve noted here in the past. The paper was not deterred even by an AP story–which the Times published on page A24–that said the cancer death rate in the U.S. “is continuing to decline.”

So which is it? We’ve lost the war on cancer? (Bad news.) Death rates are declining? (Good news.) We’re at a watershed moment in dealing with cancer? (More good news.)

Readers of the Times might be forgiven for not knowing whether we’re winning the war on cancer, losing it, or whether we’ve pulled all of our troops out of the fight.

And the Times is only making it worse.

- Paul Raeburn

Way back in 2006 several outlets reported that grizzly bears were migrating into polar bear territory, and even producing hybrids, one of which promptly got turned into a trophy by an American sportsman with a rifle (see one sample story from the Canadian Press, and ksjtracker’s earlier post). A bit before that the general idea made it into a publication from the National Wildlife Federation Magazine in 2006, as seen in the remarkable pic. It goes with a story by Laura Tangley (Correction – she edited it. It was written by Ed Struzik) on a subpopulation, barren ground grizzlies, known to venture on to the ice. This story reports the intermingling has been known at least as far back as 1991.

It is still happening, and new burst of reporting heralds this fact as though it’s a new fact.   It’s been nearly four years. Few readers will remember the previous reports. So fair game.

The fresh version stems from a report by scientists at the City University of New York  and American Museum of Natural History who say the brown bear sightings are increasing, especially in Manitoba in areas thought to be exclusive to polar bears.

Stories:

• Globe and Mail – Patrick White: Grizzly sightings in polar bear territory inspire talk of ultimate ursine fight ; Oh not another remake of Godzilla vs. Mothra, of Alien versus Predator, of the Mummy versus Frankenstein’s Monster? Oh yes. The  teenage mind never dies (pre-teen, maybe, as in “Who’d win, Dad, if …??).
• BBC News – Doreen Walton: Grizzlies encroach on polar bear territory ;
• NPR – Science Friday (upcoming show) Ira Flatow : Grizzly Bears Moving Into New Territory ;
• Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas: Grizzly Bears Enter Polar Bear Territory ; Pretty good point – what to do if the two species do get into mortal combat. Both are protected. With which should authorities side..if either?

Grist for the Mill: AMNH Press Release via EurekAlert!.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Three different strategies on biofuel production are represented in Latin American press today. México is doing research on cellulosic ethanol to take advantage of its agricultural residues (good prospects of residual agave from tequila production). Chile is investing in getting ethanol from the algae that grows in its enormous coast. And Argentina,  with a small domestic demand, has gone past the US, Brazil, Germany and France as an exporter of biodiesel from soy.

El Universal de México y en mayor detalle La Jornada por medio de Jose Antonio Román nos explican el proyecto Babethanol encabezado por la UNAM, que investigará cómo desarrollar una nueva generación de biocombustibles a partir de residuos como el olote de maíz, los huesos de las aceitunas, el trigo, los tallos de la avena o el bagazo de agave azul, que se genera en grandes volúmenes como subproducto de la industria tequilera nacional.

En cambio según SciDev por medio de Paula Leigton, Chile prefiere invertir de las algas que puede sacar de su inmensa línea costera. 
La ventaja de las algas es que a diferencia la caña de azúcar o la palma, su cultivo no requiere el uso de tierra agrícola, agua para el riego, ni fertilizantes. Lo explica también en El País (Esp) Mónica Salomone: “Algas para mover aviones y mucho más”. Desde el meeting de la AAAS en San Diego también habla de sus limitaciones, y de que tardarán varios años a entrar en el mercado.

Argentina, sin embargo, ya exporta más biodiesel que los 4 principales productores (Brasil, EEUU, Alemania y Francia). Lo explica para BBC Mundo Verónica Smink: “El biodiesel despega en Argentina. Éste biodiesel se consigue a partir del cultivo de soja. Más fácil de producir, pero cuyos detractores aseguran tiene impactos en el suelo y precio de alimentos.

En 4 notas vemos representadas tres estrategias: etanol a base de residuos celulósicos, biocombustibles a partir de algas, y biodiesel de soja. Una solución a cada circunstancia.

- Pere Estupinyà

This week NASA administrator Charles Bolden got an earful in the Senate from some of its members, including several  from states heavily populated by space agency workers who help keep Americans packing space suits for jaunts to low Earth orbit. The recent, notional Obama plan to scrap the Constellation Program’s early phases along with a prompt mission to the Moon has many legislators worried that an essential part of America’s character – its human exploration program – is at risk. Not to mention pork. Oh. I mentioned that. Lots of Senators who think federal $$ for jobs stimulus are wasted simultaneously say that if its space jobs among my voters that  the dollars buy, keep’em coming.

Its best to start the media gleaning with the reporter who, odds are, is the widest read – AP‘s Seth Borenstein. The hearing before the Commerce Committee’s space subpanel comes shortly after he filed an enterprising analysis: Where to Next? For NASA no easy answer for next space destination ; He called around and got from NASA advance word on what would be news at the hearing. NASA still wants to get people to Mars, but won’t decide on where to go for practice until it builds suitable hardware for deep solar system voyaging.

This is worthwhile reading as a primer for his story today on the hearing itself: Senators to NASA chief: Go somewhere specific. A particular salute to Borenstein for baldly correcting one solon’s assertion that NASA’s unfolding plan ignores the recommendations from the Augustine Panel last year. Without attributing it to anybody he simply writes, “But the ‘flexible path’ of going to the moon, an asteroid or Martian moons next was first proposed by the Austine panel, and it was the Augustine panel that called the previous plans unsustainable.” He follows with a separate graf bolstering that with a named source’s agreement, but it’s nice to see a reporter declaring something more or less incontrovertible on his, or her, own two feet. It’s a risky practice, yes, but once in awhile everybody should take a plunge off the high dive. One  hears, by the way, that in the press gallery one reporter (not Seth) picked up the report and demonstrably pointed to the page where the Augustine bunch recommended what NASA now plans to do.

Also nice to read are the comments from a journalist who at one time might have reported the hearing, but instead took part: former CNNer Miles O’Brien.

Other stories from the hearing:

• NPR – Nell Greenfieldboyce: Lawmakers Say New NASA Plan Lacks Direction ; She has Bolden saying vision without resources is hallucination. And the Lousiana senator (with a rocket building center in his state) firing back that resources without a vision is a waste of time. Repartee!
• Florida Today – Bart Jansen: Angry senators demand answers from NASA chief Bolden / Bolden pleas for patience ;
• Wall St. Journal – Andy Pasztor: Senators Vow to Fight NASA Outsource Plan ;
• Space.com – Tariq Malik: NASA Chief to Senators: We’re Going to Mars ;
• Business Week – Jeff Bliss: Obama Will Work With Congess on Mars Plan, NASA Chief Says ;
• Orlando Sentinel – Mark K. Matthews: NASA chief: Our ‘ultimate’ ambition is Mars ;
• Ft. Lauderale Sun-Sentinel: NASA chief will fight moon-rocket supporters;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Yudhijit Bhatterjee : White House Space Plans Under Fire ; Says here Bolden got flayed. Does that mean he lost? Or only that the senators came with cats-o-nine-tails and flailed?
• Houston Chronicle – Stewart Powell: NASA chief vows help for Florida employees ;
• MSNBC CosmicLog – Alan Boyle: Bringing Back Mars Life ; Not much to do with the hearing. Just threwit in to be sure this post has something to with space science in addition to space adventuring.

Pic: A Constellation capsule imagined at an asteroid, source ;

- Charlie Petit

Australia seems to have its counterpart to the UK’s Telegraph, a newspaper that tends strongly toward news stories and columnists that cast doubt on the reality, serioiusness, or peril posed by human-caused warming and other climate change. It’s The Australian, one of the nation’s major dailies, based in a Sydney suburb, and generally put in a center-right slot on the political spectrum. Its stance on global warming prompted, at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and Media, a long take-down by John Bruno, a marine ecologist and professor at Univ. North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His point, or one of them, is that the newspaper’s reporting has all but abandoned relying on scientists as primary sources, and sticks with politics and opinionators.

If you’d like to sample The Australian’s enviro coverage, and its science coverage generally, here are its latest news lineups in those two categories. The environmental lot indeed is rich on the contemptuous side of scientific or governmental interference in how people and nature interact, while the science list is heavy on health and medicine.

• The Australian: Health and Science ;
• The Australian: Environmental Coverage. I don’t find a specific climate page at the paper laid out simply but here are its most recent headlines from its rss feed:

Belief in climate change dives ;

Labor in denial as ETS fairyland fractures ; Cap and Trade (emissions trading) is the topic.

Climate Wars Give Science a Bad Name ;

Owner has Roof Checked ; Gov’t insulation program may backfire and that’s no metaphor, says here.

Carbon pricing works in the long term ; An economist’s op-ed that is detailed, sensible, and dull.

Biofuels are an expensive waste ; Another op-ed from a London policy analyst.

Minister slams critics of UN climate panel ; Two sides here – a minister saying IPCC is ok, and a well-known skeptic geologist who says the minister speaks codswallop.

And for good measure, here is an Australian blogger who keeps an eye on media enviro coverage and takes a few whacks at The Australian:

• DELTOID – Tim Lambert: The Australian‘s War on Science ;

…. Sigh…

- Charlie Petit

Just pulled in this thing hooked by one of my long-line search trawls. In the Gazette-Times up there in Orry-gone, reporter Bennett Hall reports on an artist from Ketchikan, AK, with a worldwide following, who specializes in fish and science explanation, and his name is Troll I kid you not. For amusement and edification, and an encounter with such stupidly funny they’re smart witticisms as “Ain’t No Nookie Like Chinookie” and a reference to Darwin cruising the fossil freeway in his Evolvo, take a look.

This post dedicated to my brother Stevie, a fly-tying  born-to-be-a-fish-head of the first water who not once and I mean never saw a  stream, lake,  lagoon, or coral flat without itching to put rod in hand.

- Charlie Petit

Sometimes it’s just lazy or desperate journalism to cover a story by covering the waterfront – throwing in all the quotes and opinions one can rake together in a pile and leaving no cue to the reader on what to think. Nobody should condone lazy journalism. But we all at times may be forced into desperation. If one hasn’t a good handle on whose opinions are the most likely to be solid, and the editor says write it and do it now,  just turn that crank and squeeze out some sausage.

But at other times it’s neither. Plopping down disparate ideas without overt slant or judgment on plausibility can work just fine. The result  may illustrate  polarization. Today at The Hill blog at the Washington Post its Ben Geman,  does it that way. He starts with a reference to a Reuters report (here ) summing up the dire scientific conclusion of how much temperature is already in the pipeline even if the world does everything it mumbled in Copenhagen that it would like to do about emissions. Looks like we’re in for a rise in temp that borders on, or ventures into, catastrophe. Well hell, but we’ve heard that before. The next part of Geman’s story shifts abruptly to Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe’s latest declarations that climate scientists have falsified data to promote a myth – anthropogenic climate change – into a pivot-point for energy and environmental policy. Heard that before, too.

The contrast gives them life.

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit