Yesterday, I noted here that the New York Times, among other respected outlets for science journalism, had failed to cover the largest-ever study of the potential for cell phones to cause cancer.

Today, the newspaper continues to ignore the study, but Tara Parker-Pope shows up with a story on her Well blog. And she gets it wrong.

She begins by backing into the story, often a bad sign of what is to come: “A long-awaited study of cellphone use and brain health has finally been released, but the data are raising more questions than answers.”

She doesn’t get to the lede until the third graf, when she writes, “The final paper states that overall there is no link between cellphone use and brain tumors.”

I don’t think so. The study was inconclusive. It neither found nor disproved a link.

The Times was a day late, and it fell short.

- Paul Raeburn

Just for the heck of it, I went looking at Fox News for one kind of climate news, and found another equally or more interesting.

This started on seeing on the AP wire a short item on global temperatures this year – neither a paragon nor a flub of journalism, just a routine transmission of some interesting news. It has no byline. It passes word from the NASA’s Goddard Inst. for Space Studies and the Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Correction: AP mentions only NOAA, not NASA) that 2010 was the warmest April ever recorded and that the first four months this year were the warmest Jan-April ever, too. For what it’s worth, then, the globe is on track for its warmest year on record. This is sufficiently interesting (insert boiler plate here about four months being too short to illustrate or disprove a trend blah blah blah) to be news. Others have it too – including at USA Today Doyle Rice who adds some info on US temperatures in 2010.

But, with that parenthetical blah blah blah up there in mind, I then checked at Fox News to see if it even posted this news. It might be there but I cannot find it – and for all the static its evening “fair and balanced news” talking heads get about their political insistance in almost everything, I don’t really assume they’d suppress it. But I didn’t see it.

What IS interesting is that nosing around at Fox I found this, which it got from the small service LiveScience:

• Live Science – Brett Israel: South Pole Has Warmest Year on Record – Averaging -54.2 F ; (Maybe using this is Fox’s sly little joke about global warming bringing the temp all the way up to minus 54.2 degrees, so hah! ?).

Israel helpfully  mentions that the observation was reported first from McMurdo Station by a newspaper paid for by the National Science Foundation.

So – the result of this shaggy dog story – is to have tracked down the original news item from Antarctica, one of the favorite places to ever have been for most science journalists who managed to get there. To wit:

• Antarctic Sun – Peter Rejceck (April 30): Highs and lows / South Pole experiences warmest year on record in 2009 ;  Editor Rejceck explains, amid a data burst, why the recent “warmth” trend threatens to put a small crimp in plans by those hoping to join Pole Station’s 300 Club. Perhaps, if the warming goes on,  they can crank up the sauna just an oonch to get the required increment?

With this news go-round done, let me just wish all those people on the White Continent’s deep interior as fall there fades toward winter, a warm and safe stay-over.

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Press Release ; NASA Goddard Int. for Space Studies Surface Temperature Analysis ;

- Charlie Petit

The big lead story in this week’s Science Times is a big handsome yarn, based on reports in last week’s Nature, from John Noble Wilford. He turns discovery in Morocco of soft-bodied creatures in the early Ordovician into a saga on survival and extinction. The news, picked up widely, is that the famous Burgess Shale of the late Cambrian, celebrated as having a fauna that seems to have disappeared 500 million years ago, has an analog with very similar creatures from about 480 million years ago. Wilford is an old hand at such material. He turns it up a notch as the piece closes, offering as a puzzle why it is that, with all the near-catastrophic extinctions in the geologic record, some lineages (horseshoe crabs an examplar) persisted right through from Burgess time to now.

We didn’t track the news when it broke. Here are two samples of other outlets’ coverage of the N. African fossil bed:

• Stamford Advocate – John Burgeson: Fossil sheds light on life 480M years ago ; For Burgeson it’s a local story, which he handles well.
• BBC – Victoria Gill: Fossil find resolves ancient extinction mystery ;

Other notable headlines:

• John Tierney: Doomsayers Beware, A Bright Future Beckons; We all know the world is doomed, or seems like it. Leave it to the Times’s curmudgeon to try to lighten things up. He reviews Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist, mentions the likes of Julian Simon, and concludes  that all enviro-lefty gloominess needs is a good dose of faith in the markets and in human ingenuity to see us through. Really, this article ought to be one half of a debate squaring him off with, oh, Jared Diamond or somebody else who sees history as both downs and ups.
• Claudia Dreifus: A Conversation with Jeffrey L. Bada ; The longtime colleague of Stanley Miller, he of Urey-Miller experiment fame, talks about the ubiquity of organic chemistry and the seeming inevitability of life arising many times, many places in this universe.
• Henry Fountain – Far From the Ocean Floor, the Cleanup Starts Here; Even the devil needs sympathy. With the Congressional (and media) demonization underway of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton (with some left over for gov’t oversight agencies) Fountain provides a service. Whatever the suits in the front office did or didn’t do, there is a few brigades’ worth of these companies skilled strata working their butts off to end the nightmare in the gulf. They are using expensive tools, spending lavishly, displaying some genuine expertise, trying almost anything to block that pipe. This takes us into their embattled war room.
• Gina Kolata: The Right Way to Warm Up Is (Your Answer Here) ; A partly first-person yarn on a topic that is not all that new and has been widely reported – but merits this and more attention. She doesn’t quite say so, but the theme is that a lot of what passes for medical science in sports is pure bunk and old wives’ tales.
• Jane Brody: From Kind Words, Lessons on Condolences; Brody says a graceful thank you to those who reached out, upon the loss of her husband.

- Charlie Petit

Thank You to the NSF Science360 news service. It is built alas mostly around press releases (an alas only because of the dispersion and fade of old line media and the void it left for filling). But I just got a tip from it and then read this morning through a most provocative special report in New Scientist. It won’t settle anything, but it dives forthrightly into that murky intellectual world occupied by deniers. It lists the biggies that are high on the popularity list of stubbornly aggressive fixations on consensus rejection : HIV does not cause AIDS, greenhouse gases are not raising global temperature, vaccines do cause autism, evolution does not explain anything about our existence. It mentions some that got little traction, such as that there was no Nazi campaign to exterminate European Jewry. “Obamacare” as a stalking horse for socialism and an end to American liberty comes up too. And did you know that some still deny a link between smoking and lung cancer?

Five writers chew over them at some length and with passion. It’s entertaining and depressing. Some castigate deniers as not only irrational, but a recognizable breed. Not that we can do much about them other than try to persuade the larger public not to sign on. One writer, Michael Fitzpatrick, argues strenuously that it is dangerous to lapse into denierism (that’s my term, akin to agism and sexism, meaning a special prejudice against denialists and using the term as an epithet). Another, Michael Shermer, in somewhat the same vein writes of the hazards of trying to suppress denialism. The special won’t change many minds, but it is a collective shout for sanity among those of us convinced we can tell the difference between the obsessive rigidity of denialism versus a healthy insistence on rigor and a respect for the term “maybe not.”

Unrelated topic, except in mood: Want to read something else about human nature? It ought to be vaguely salacious and mostly funny but it’s not and it too is depressing. While at New Scientist’s site one may spot this update – and one of the mag’s “most read” stories – on the repercussions on one campus by  a paper on the sex habits of bats. Sheesh.

- Charlie Petit

For his “Science Snapshot” column USA Today‘s Dan Vergano seems this week to have consciously set out to do something deeply innovative and daring for a science journalist. He shares with readers how things work in science as it is practiced. This is not to be confused with the headline news version of science as a progression of strides forward spiced by breakthroughs,  revelations, and works of staggering genius (or, alternately, evil genius inventions).

Rather, he looks into a staggering pull-back as disappointed anthropologists and archeologists gradually deflated their enthusiasm for a potentially landmark, paradigm-busting discovery in the lithified sediments of a dry lake bed in Mexico.

Nice job. One wonders whether the exercise will do much to rectify the public’s – not to mention journalism’s – misapprehension of science not as a doubting wander along the weedy margins of ignorance, but as an exercise in confident, step-by-step progress. Probably not.  But a little bit. Can’t hurt.

Pic/bumper sticker, source ;

- Charlie Petit

A new study concludes that cell phones do not cause cancer. Or it doesn’t conclude anything, or maybe it concludes that they do.

No need to go far to collect these varying points of view. The AP story puts them all forward–and in just a few taut paragraphs. In typical style, the AP compresses the news. Unfortunately these lean, muscular paragraphs are so confusing as to be almost unintelligible.

AP writer Frank Jordans must have known he was on shaky ground, because he ledes with this brilliant insight:

GENEVA – If there’s one lifestyle tool that’s ubiquitous, from American cities to remote villages of the developing world, it’s the mobile phone.

Didn’t know that, did ya?

We get to the news in graf three where Jordans tells us that the study “suggests frequent cell phone use may increase the chances of developing rare but deadly form of brain cancer.” There you have it: Cell phones might cause cancer.

But, no. In the next graf, we have this: “Even the study’s authors say there is no way yet to tell how big the risk is, if there is one.” Reassuring. Maybe no risk at all!

And now in the next graf, we get this: “Experts were nearly unanimous in saying the results of the study are inconclusive.”

Sadly, the story continues that way, alternately disturbing and reassuring. It’s of no use whatever to the reader, who gets no help figuring out whether to be concerned about this story or to use it to wrap up tonight’s fish.

Admittedly, this is a complex story. Nobody wants a study to be inconclusive. But if that’s what it is, that’s what it is. Raising all the things that might be true–or might not–does not clarify the situation.

But Jordans doesn’t stop. Midway though the story, he gives us this zinger: A British official says, ”We can’t establish without any doubt that there is no link.” Arrrggggghhhhhh!

I advise you not to read it; it might be more hazardous for your brain than a cell phone. Or it might not.

Reuters does a far better job, opening with several grafs that clearly say the study was inconclusive. “Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years, hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumours, said on Sunday their research gave no clear answer,” Kate Kelland writes. She explores what that means, noting that while it found no evidence of a link, it also did not disprove a link. That’s what inconclusive means, and Kelland managed to elaborate on that without confusing things.

I can’t find a story on Scientific American‘s website, where I’d hoped to find a good one. Nor could I find one on Wired‘s site, or that of the New York Times. How could these folks pass this one up? They should know, as well as anyone, that this thing is going to be tricky to report, and that we need the better news outlets, like these, to give us a proper accounting of the research. Besides, this was the largest and longest study of cell-phone use we’ve seen, including data from 13 countries. I’ll listen to any reasonable argument about how it should have been played, but I don’t think it was reasonable to pass. (My apologies if I missed these stories; I used the search engines on the site, and I used Google site-restricted searches to look for them.)

While these folks were apparently MIA, some science reporters did do a nice job.

James Geary, who wrote about cell phones in the March, 2010 issue of Popular Science, had the huge advantage of bringing a lot of background to this story. His online story emphasizes the weaknesses in the study, which, Geary’s sources say, suffers from a poor design. This exemplifies the virtues of beat reporting. Because Geary has been following the issue, he was able to write a far more complete and authoritative story on deadline than were many of his colleagues. And Daniel Cressey at Nature news does a nice explication of the study and also points to the deficiencies in the news coverage.

A further complication with this story is that it was embargoed until today (Monday), but the story leaked out over the weekend. Apparently the British press was feeling frisky. (Ivan Oransky, executive editor of of Reuters Health dissects the broken embargo on his excellent Embargo Watch blog.)

Grist for the mill: The press release from the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

- Paul Raeburn

Several outlets had news in the last few days that, on the outskirts of a distant galaxy, users of the Chandra X-ray Telescope think they can see a supermassive black hole – the monster kind that usually sit in galactic cores and, during their youths, probably powered quasars – zooming all by its lonesome and headed into the intergalactic wilderness.

At Space.com Clara Moskowitz writes it up with some worthy verbs and a useful adjective. She says it is humongous, and is  hightailing it out of its home galaxy, and that it gobbles up matter (which shines briefly before the final gobble). Very nice. But she also says it is careening through space. Wrong verb, one demurs, on two counts. The first, a lost cause in our evolving language I must admit, is that careen means to lean something – specifically and originally a wooden sailing ship on a beach at low tide to clean or repair the hulls. Second, even in its bastardized modern usage, careen implies something zigging and zagging (as in a motorcycle that leans with each turn). This black hole is following a fairly clean trajectory. The original and still better verb for the purpose is to career.

Other careering humongous black hole stories.

• Christian Science Monitor – Nancy Atkinson: ‘Supermassive’ black hole gets flung from galaxy;
• Telegraph (UK) John Bingham: Student discovers previously unseen cosmic phenomenon during finals project ; Nothing original about this device, but it works better than to tell the story straight. Bingham orbits the story around a young woman alertness – and probably gets more readers’ attention that way.
• Discovery News – Larry O’Hanlon: Supermassive Black Hole Kicked Out of Galaxy ;

Finally, Astronomy News Scoop Dept:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: Planets in nearby system are off-kilter, measurements show; Upcoming in Astrophysical Journal, where Cowen spotted it, a report from astronomers at the University of Texas on well-known extrasolar planetary system Upsilon Andromedae. Its planets are not all, or even very close to, the same plane. One is unsure that this “shatters the notion that planetary systems” all have a flattened arrangement. Not sure anybody ever said they’re ALL flat. But it is the classic expectation, and this shows at least some are more on the higgledy-piggledy side. And Cowen has it first.

- Charlie Petit

At Daily Kos one finds from Mark Sumner, aka “Devilstower,” a fine, muscular rant against how major media outlets – his gaze is fixed on broadcast but his critique fits print and on line as well – muffed reporting on the hurricane Katrina, is now rolling over into ineffectualness in its handling of the gulf oil spill, and for good measure, messed up sharing with the public the true depth of US mishandling of the Iraq war and its impact on civilians.

This is a polemic, or opinion piece, so is not standard reporting. One could argue with details of scale – he implies that the US public never got told by the big TV networks how appallingly extensive was the damage from the hurricane and still hasn’t heard from them that much of the devastated region remains wrecked – a blot on the US and its government. Those things won’t come as a surprise to most Tracker readers, who tend to have heard it from media reports. It’s not been a complete blackout. But one has to agree that American reporters and their editors did not cover the hurricane’s lasting impact very well or often.

Same with the oil spill. Many reporters have, in fact, been overly dependent on official statements and on kibitzing on tiffs among government officials, industry, environmental groups, and others rather than trying to see the situation with their own unvarnished eyes. But some reporters have dug in – notably Rick Harris at NPR for last week’s report on the larger and more likely true estimate on the spill’s size, and weekend reports chiefly in the NYTimes (link below) on huge accumulations of oiled water plumes well under the surface. There has been enterprise, but surely not enough of it.

A particular kudo to Sumner (a writer with roots in sci-fi largely, his autobiography here) for starting his report with an anecdote about a Brit camera crew, working for a UK program about cars and without a particularly investigative streak to its soul, that drove through Louisiana. It came back with footage far more (it says here) damning than almost anything on US commercial TV. One might say he backed into his lede – but it worked for me.

One other thing. It was no snap to figure out who the byline on this piece in Kos, Devilstower, actually is. It’s there but hardly jumps out. Sumner tells me it’s a holdover from earlier days and that he plans to stop using it soon – and go with his real name up front. That’s good. It’s one thing to abide anonymity in commenters, even though that’s bad practice in itself. Worse is to condone it in writers of articles, including on blogs. If a writer or his or her family are subject to substantial, physical threat should their identity be know, or are whistle-blowers who work for those their exposing, one can accept it. That seldom happens. Most writers are not Batman, Mr. X, or Camillus. A pseudonym is more often like filmdom’s Alan Smithee – a name put on something one does but doesn’t want to defend publicly without a mask. Similar with biting commentary on media. It’s best to stand up and  sock what remains of it on the jaw not to stab it anonymously in the back if one wants to get its useful attention.

See also:

• NYTimes – Justin Gillis: Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf ;

- Charlie Petit

One must salute an enterprising piece of multiple-bureau reporting that is moving on the Associated Press wire. Michael Casey, William Foreman, and Jason Starziuso provide an up-to-date, detailed, and distressing report on the shooting, poisoning, snaring, and other lethal ways that elephants are dying in Africa and their tusks are making their way to eager buyers, largely in China. The familiar part is that queasy feeling in the pit of one’s stomach as the statistic and examples roll by.

It’s an old story. But as with many old stories, too important not to re-report regularly. Right now, this says, poaching is taking 60.000 elephants annually. It’s not clear whether that’s all African or includes Asian elephants. Either way it’s a testament to human greed, which is somewhat forgivable because it is built-in, a two-sided key to prosperity, and inevitable. It also is testament to corruption, ineffectiveness, and indolence by governments – which one can at least imagine performing differently than they are now.

Related News:

• AFP (May 5): Two tonnes of elephant tusks seized in Vietnam ; Headed for China, started in Kenya.

- Charlie Petit

There is much to admire in yesterday New York Times Sunday Magazine with its theme being how much people, and what they do for a living, are really worth. One stands out for us: Putting a Price on Words by Andrew Rice largely on the value of journalists and journalism. It starts off with pithy but familiar news about the tottering status of old journalism. It reviews the shaky finances of most and perhaps all the on line and other new-media venues for provision of professional reporting that at least tries to provide even-handed and independently reported accounts of events and issues.

(As an aside, last night I had dinner with five other media-savvy friends and acquaintances, a sort of solon at a local restaurant that old pal Wallace Ravven organized. I asked how many now subscribe to a newspaper that physically arrives at home. I think five hands went up (we’re mostly, um, of a certain age). How many expect to do still do so in five years? No hands at first, then two shaky ones. Me, I’m only looking for a polished Slate/iPad/Kindle etc. app to my newspapers that lets me pay a conscience-salving fee so I can cancel delivery and read them on line without feeling I’m a leech on the industry I serve.)

Back on topic: One part is disturbing, an news-writing business that uses a computer algorithm to generate headlines, or topics, that would attract ads, and then assigns writers to back them up. More comforting,  Rice mentions prominently a few innovative efforts to find a business model with enough revenue to deliver old-fashioned news but in a 21st century manner.

One is The Faster Times. I’d heard of it, I think, but not read it. See Rice’s piece for detail on how it links clicks and ad revenue to the wallets of individual reporters, a way to hire them without any set salary. Rice says it includes science in its news coverage. So I took a look. The impression of its quality is decidedly mixed. Here are two science-beat stories promoted on its home page today:

• Nathan Hegedus: Will Hurricane Season Mean “Oilmageddon” For The United States?” ;  Hmm. Hegadus’s piece is, in turn, derivative (as he says, providing a link) of an unsigned piece at a blog site called Sharkdivers. It confronts a serious question – what happens if a hurricane comes along with the slick still thick and large on the surface? But rather than ask around, the blog makes up the answer – atomized oil droplet blown inland, a biblical scale eco disaster as it covers the landscape with oil micro dropletts (sic).” Hegadus expands on this, quoting a few other blog sites and AccuWeather, Bloomberg, and USA Today, including his second hand use of a suggestion that a storm surge would “bring a wall of poisonous, toxic water and oil well inland.” There is no sign that the Faster Times’s reporter did any first hand reporting. This sort of “journalism” would, or at least should, never get into print at a conventional metro newspaper.
• Eli Kintisch : Geo-engineering/ How Zillions of Tiny Bubbles Could Save the World…Or Kill Us All ; This one’s a lot better. Kintisch is a proven science journalist with a day job at AAAS’s Science. His topic is an imagined way to alter Earth’s albedo without doing anything toxic to the ocean – just a bright, suspended micr0-foam of teensy air bubbles. That could save us, but a variant on the idea, to use genetically engineered microbes to make the bubbles, could irreversibly overdo the fix and freeze us. As though breaking free of Science’s sober style, Kintisch writes this in breezy and colloquial  language, in first person, bloggy,  but at least the main reporting is Kintisch’s (he wrote a book on Geo-Engineering). For my taste, the wise-guy insider patter is too heavy and the dichotomy between miracle salvation and utter doom false. That is, sensation gets the edge over substance. But it does qualify as science journalism.

As a model for a new way to make a living as a science reporters, The Faster Times has not made its case based on what’s up now. Two near-hyperbolic stories, neither with the balance and multiple sourcing needed to also serve readers wanting serious, sober accounts.

Another site mentioned in Rice’s NYT account is True / Slant. It boasts nearly 300 contributors who comment on and report news. It says it provides a “news conversation,” which sounds friendly if one likes the news discussed with a progressive flavor. One finds no science category on its topic list, but health and environment are there. The environment feed right now is mostly on the Gulf spill, and mostly, from what I can see at a glance, derivative of, or an aggregation of, news accounts from more established media. One somewhat recent environment report, A Dying African Lake, Polluted, Overfished; Bad And Getting Worse by Joseph B. Treaster last month, reflects original and on-scene reporting. Treaster is an accomplished pro. He’s identified with the Knight Center for International Media, University of Miami. This suggest somebody aside from True / Slant paid for his trip to Africa. Maybe not and I hope to get correction if not so.

The real story here is that, while most of us sit around in coffee shops or diners grousing about media and proposing ways that it could save itself, a few entrepreneurs are trying a lot of those ideas and more. Let’s hope one of them catches fire, and provides ways other than through the generosity of non-profit  foundations (nothing WRONG with those, but one doubts they can do it all) to send reporters where they need to go and to give them a living wage while they do first-rate journalism as objectively as they can.

*UPDATE: As seen in the first comment, Charles Q. Choi thank-you-very-much tips us to the current Atlantic, where longtime writer James Fallows digs deep into Google’s campaign – after years of getting blamed for much of the web’s erosion of old fashioned print media – to help serious news reporting rebuild and thrive without reliance on paper editions. Fallows does not deal explicitly on science or other specific beat reporting and does not (CORRECTION: yikes, left out that “not” for the first 18 hours of this post’s life) need to. But he once hired me when he was editor at US News & World Report, and built up one of the best teams of science-medical-environment reporters in the business before the publisher sent him packing and before his successors, under pressure to be sure, dismantled all but the medical side of that team. So he does have an affinity for what science reporters  do. The report also introduces one to the man who spearheaded the creation of  Google News (as well as Google Alerts), a truly marvelous tool for finding stories on selected topics – and vital to those of us at the tracker in providing ability to serve the industry while, one must say,  living off its fatal addiction to giving its product away.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The study published in Science about Lizard’s extinction due to climate change had coauthors from Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Spain, Brazil, Colombia and Chile (apart from US and other countries). We’ve run a track to see which of these scientists are present in the stories written in their countries, and if the local species are mentioned apart from the overall 20% of extinctions in 2080. We’ve only found localized bits of reporting in Brazil, Mexico (where 12% of the species have already disappeared in certain areas) and Spain. The Spanish reporters have done a good job, stressing different aspects of the research, maybe because the study was presented in a press conference during the Media For Science Forum that took place in Madrid last week (the Spanish-lang tracker was there, and he will comment on the meeting soon). In nearly all the stories, we found a lack of due caution in presenting a study proposing a new hypothesis. Although the research is methodologically robust and published in Science, we know that certainty cannot be inferred until independent studies replicate the results. And on new claims, it is more common that they fail that test.

While searching, we’ve found a recent story in Costa Rica about a possible strategy to fight against the fungus that is causing extinctions in Central American amphibians. And a very informative article in Argentina describing its biodiversity hotspots.

Quizás tu primera reacción al escuchar que el cambio climático se está cebando con las lagartijas y podría erradicar el 20% de especies de este saurio de aquí al 2080 sea de desconfianza: “¿otra alarma exagerada sobre el calentamiento global? ¿no han estado los lagartos poblando la tierra y sobreviviéndola durante millones de años?”. De hecho los anfibios que necesitan de sus charcas y condiciones climáticas más específicas parecen más vulnerables a los cambios rápidos de temperaturas como los que estamos viviendo, pero a las lagartijas las presuponemos mucha más resistentes. Luego, al ver que es un estudio publicado por la revista Science y que participan un extenso número de científicos de una docena de países, empezamos a darle más crédito y prestarle mayor atención. Y quizás sí, a la espera de nuevos estudios científicos que lo confirmen, éste podría convertirse en uno de los artículos de referencia que colocará también a los lagartos como un nuevo indicador –parecido al que ya son los anfibios- sobre la severidad del cambio climático.

Desde luego quedan interrogantes. Sobre todo el peso de otros factores como pesticidas o deforestación, pero los autores aseguran haber demostrado un vínculo directo entre extinción de lagartijas y cambio climático. El estudio se presentó la semana pasada en rueda de prensa de la AAAS durante el congreso media for science forum organizado en Madrid; y quizás por eso los medios españoles lo han tratado con muy buen grado de detalle.

En El Mundo (España) Pedro Cáceres: “El calentamiento global acaba con los lagartos” empieza el primer párrafo con un mensaje clave para puntualizar que el cambio climático está definitivamente detrás de esta observación: las lagartijas están desapareciendo incluso en sitios que no han sufrido alteraciones y no esperaríamos tal disminución. También explica que el investigador español participante del estudio califica de “sombrío” el panorama para las lagartijas, y no siente esperanzas de recuperación de aquí al 2050.

El País ofrece una extensa nota de Alicia Rivera y Arturo Barba: “Demasiado calor para los lagartos” que inician explicando muy claramente el porqué de su extinción: “Los lagartos y lagartijas se ponen al Sol para regular su temperatura corporal adecuada y, cuando hace demasiado calor, buscan refugio en algún lugar más fresco. Ahora, en condiciones de calentamiento global, este mecanismo termorregulador vital los está matando: si pasan más horas de lo normal refugiados, tienen menos tiempo de alimentarse en su entorno, comen menos, se debilitan, se reproducen menos y corren peligro de extinguirse”. La pieza es muy completa, utiliza declaraciones de científicos de diferentes países,  y cubre un espectro amplio de consideraciones. Quizás por eso le podríamos pedir un cierto componente de escepticismo,  necesario en un estudio que presenta una nueva hipótesis.

ABC presenta por medio de Araceli Acosta un titular poco preciso: “Lagartos y lagartijas, primeros en extinguirse por cambio climático”. Nadie ha dicho eso, y muchas especies -las de anfibios son un claro ejemplo- ya han sufrido los efectos del calentamiento global bastante antes. Además, el subtítulo “Los saurios no pueden adaptar su temperatura corporal a la que hay en el exterior” tampoco es demasiado acertado, porque si bien es un factor importante en el mecanismo de su desaparición, no es la causa principal. El texto de la nota está muy bien trabajado y enlazada las visiones de los autores presentes en Madrid.

Público – Manuel Asende “El calentamiento global extermina a los lagartos”. No presenta una nota tan desarrollada, pero es el único que busca una opinión independiente (en este caso un biólogo de Harvard), diciendo que se debe “tomar en serio” el estudio pero reclama un “escepticismo cauteloso” y más investigaciones.

La verdad, hemos tenido menos éxito de lo esperado en nuestro rastreo de la prensa Latinoamericana. En México periódicos como La Jornada,  El Universal, o Diario de Tucumán si recalcan la parte del estudio que más atañe a México: el 12% de especies mexicanas ya han desaparecido. Pero con noticias de agencia sin posterior elaboración. Lo mismo hace La Crónica en “El calentamiento global ha extinguido el 12% de especies de lagartijas del país”, pero ofreciendo un considerablemente mayor contenido, como datos específicos y opiniones del experto de la UNAM relacionado con la investigación.

O’Globo de Brasil también recurre a su científico coautor del estudio en la nota –sencillita pero muy clara- de Renato Grandelle: “Lagartos já estão em extinção no mundo todo devido ao aquecimento global”. Allí aparece un dato que no conocíamos: la población de lagartijas disminuirá un 40% en el 2080 (sabíamos que el 20% hacía referencia a especies). Nos extraña esta mezcla de datos, porque no creemos que este 40% se deba sólo al calentamiento global, como posiblemente interprete el lector.

En Chile, quien busca a su científico local es el portal Universia en una buena nota con información de la la Universidad de Concepción, donde dice que las lagartijas de Chile no están en tanto peligro como las de otras áreas.

En Argentina no hemos encontrado ninguna nota destacable, pero hallamos en el suplemento Futuro de Página 12 un muy buen texto de Raúl Aizogaray titulado “Dónde mueren las especies” sobre la pérdida de biodiversidad y los puntos calientes del planeta. Muy informativo y bien documentado, y con una clara llamada a la actuación.

Y en Costa Rica algo parecido: buscando lagartos leemos en La Nación una nota de Alejandra Vargas sobre una posible manera de luchar contra el hongo que coloniza  la piel de los anfibios y los elimina por gran parte de Centroamérica. Se ve que el hongo no es necesariamente letal, y la mortalido depende del grado de infección. De alguna manera, se podría llegar a “convivir” con el hongo. Como si fueran casos humanos, lo importante parece detectar el problema a tiempo y actuar antes de que la infección genere problemas graves. Nos hubiera gustado escuchar también qué tipo de intervenciones están los científicos planteando.

Periódicos como Prensa Libre de Guatemala o El Universo de Ecuador también presentan el estudio soblre la extinción de lagartijas que bien puede convertirse en una referencia si posteriores investigaciones logran reproducir sus resultados, o quedarse relegado al olvido si aparecen otros apuntando a factores diferentes al cambio climático en el innegable descenso poblacional y de especies de estos resptiles.

– Pere Estupinyà

Now I know what to call it when Barcaloungers, La-Z-boys, or similar recliners  induce persistent near-vegetative torpor in otherwise vigorous people – especially husbands and particularly so if there’s also a big screen TV in view and chips at hand. It is “tonic immobility.” It has something to do with the supine position, belly up. That’s the way it works in sharks anyway as the Star-Bulletin‘s Jim Borg tells his readers today.

This is good reporting – not investigative, but polished. It is nature reporting with a flash of the workings of scientific method. It reveals something new and interesting. In this case it is about sharks, their brains,  and their feeding habits.

- Charlie Petit