In her column in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “Unnatural Science,” Virginia Heffernan cites three examples from science blogs and comes to the following conclusion:

Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.

Do you hear that, science bloggers? That’s you she’s talking about.

Under the guise of reporting on the controversy that arose when ScienceBlogs added a paid blog by Pepsi (see my posts here, here, and here), Heffernan dismisses the entire enterprise of science blogging–and science bloggers themselves–as an ignorant, bigoted bunch of buffoons.

The issue, as you can see from my earlier posts, and many others on the web, was that Pepsi was being given editorial space for promotional copy. The guidelines of the American Society of Magazine Editors expressly prohibit that in magazines, and journalists have always maintained that there should be a wall between editorial and advertising.

But Heffernan sees no reason for concern, saying she was “nonplussed by the high dudgeon” of people who objected to the arrangement:

Most writers for “legacy” media like newspapers, magazines and TV see brush fires over business-editorial crossings as an occupational hazard. They don’t quit anytime there’s an ad that looks so much like an article it has to be marked “this is an advertisement.”

But that’s the point, isn’t it? In legacy media, ads are clearly identified as ads. That was not the case on ScienceBlogs. Would Heffernan be nonplussed by a column following hers in the Times magazine that was bought and paid for by Pepsi, but which looked exactly like hers and was not marked as an ad? The Times surely doesn’t dismiss “business-editorial crossings” as blithely as Heffernan does. Indeed, note the following from the Times company policy on ethics in journalism:

Advertising and “advertorials” (paid text or paid broadcast content) must not resemble news content.

Journalism ethics aside, Heffernan didn’t like the posts she found in ScienceBlogs, which was “preoccupied with trivia, name-calling and saber rattling.” She cites three examples from ScienceBlogs posts as evidence. Maybe it wasn’t all about Pepsi, she writes; maybe ScienceBlogs just wasn’t very good. Wrong. Whether the site was a good one or not, the controversy was about Pepsi.

More:

…does everyone take for granted now that science sites are where graduate students, researchers, doctors and the “skeptical community” go not to interpret data or review experiments but to chip off one-liners, promote their books and jeer at smokers, fat people and churchgoers?

She calls that “class-infected bloodsport.” You know, I hate to be churlish here, but Heffernan is chipping off one-liners, pursuing what she calls “the science-culture battle,” and jeering at those with whom she disagrees.

More:

ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd…

And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science”…

Heffernan sees no important journalism issue here, which puts her at odds with most other journalists. Looks as though she had fun, however, dismissing the entire enterprise of science blogging.

- Paul Raeburn

In the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Pathogens this week researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey and Philadelphia’s Fox Chase Cancer Center report finding a slew of viral, RNA-based genome sequences in a long list of vertebrates. That includes people. Among the most common are snippets put into our ancestors millions of years ago by relatives of today’s dangerous Ebola and Marburg viruses.

What’s important is that these are not leftovers from retroviruses that naturally insert DNA copies of their genes into hosts’s genomes, thus indirectly hijacking cells’ ribosomes to manufacture more viruses. These are genes from viruses that send messages directly to that machinery. Exctly how these viruses got partly encoded into vertebrate genomes is, researchers say, a matter for speculation. The paper triggered wide pickup, particularly in specialty press devoted to the more arcane discoveries in science, but also some in more general media. The paper, and the news articles I’ve seen, still leave me puzzled in some respects, which I’ll get to.

Stories:

• Wired News – Brandom Keim: Genome Surprise: Guinea Pigs Have Ebola! ;
• AAAS ScienceNow – Jennifer Couzin-Frankel: Deadly Viruses Have Been Part of Us for Millions of Years ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Genes from Ebola Virus Family Found in Human Genome ;
• Science Friday – Ira Flatow (with an author of the study): The Virus in Your Genes ;
• Philadelphia Inquirer – Tom Avril: Study of virus fossils offer clues to surviving infections ;

My Confusion: These stories cover much that is easily understood and significant, such as that these insertions and their persistence for 40 million years may mean they endow hosts with resistance to associated diseases.  And, the sheer weirdness of it is news. But…what exactly seems to have happened? All the stories I saw say the insertions may have occurred as long as, again and as the press release says, 40 million years ago. How they can tell that, I don’t know, but it has something to do with mutation rates and comparisons between closely related species. Still, is it supposed that these viruses all, separately, got into vertebrate lines as distantly related as bats, humans, squirrels, mice, guinea pigs, shrews, and others within that span? It seems from here that the wonder is not that it happened so long ago, but that it was so recent in evolutionary time. Yet these viral scraps are so near-ubiquitous. Common ancestors to all these vertebrates go much  farther back than 40 million years. Plus, why the fuss over the viral clan including Marburg and Ebola? Some stories say humans carry Ebola’s ancient baggage (Avril’s at the Inquirer, by the way, says explicitly we don’t have those – but do from another type of virus). They belong to this larger family of viruses that did much of the infiltrating, but is there reason to think it was actual Ebola etc. doing it? And if it only happened in the last 40 million years, was there a big burst of viral invasions so many hundreds of millions after viruses and vertebrates arose? Am I missing something obvious to all the other writers who actually reported this story?

I get why it’s interesting. Such as, that the fossil viral genomes in vertebrates may be a better clue to viral evolution than the genes of today, rapidly-adapting viral descendants. But the prehistoric narrative eludes me. Maybe Ira Flatow asked about this on his Science Friday show today, too late on the air for me to listen to it.And the paper itself is very long – so haven’t had time to wade through it.

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill:

PLoS Pathogens Paper ; Fox Chase Cancer Center (Phila) Press Release ;

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

(Brain Cramp alert – I managed, not for the first time, to write the wrong newspaper. It is the Inquirer, not the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Cobwebs in the attic…)

It’s a little bit of a squeeze putting this Inquirer story by Sandy Bauers on to the science beat, but only a bit. It is about John James Audubon, best known for his  bird paintings. Bauers skillfully presents a tale of historical research into a man and his long reported, long unseen, commercial painting. As Audubon was a naturalist, and as naturalist was the term in use (also, natural philosopher) before the word scientist was invented and Audubon was already in middle-age when that happened,  and as natural philosophy and naturalists led notably to such fields as geology, botany, and zoology, therefore this yarn fits this site’s license well enough.

Start reading it. I can’t imagine many who do so not finishing it. (Thank you Tom Avril for tipping us off ).

- Charlie Petit

The last few days have seen a burst of political ink on the foundering of a once sort-of-ambitious U.S. Senate energy bill -  now stripped of significant tactics aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. But it does have a few things of green tinge, including a $400 million program to boost use of electric cars. And that leads this morning to one story with a troubling suggestion that the platoons of environment and energy journalists in this country have not done much of a job challenging, verifying, or just plain chewing on the idea that electric cars cut greenhouse emissions very much. Don’t get me wrong – I think they do, but on intuition. It’s time reporters looked for facts or, as there likely are competing compilations of them, at least give readers an idea which “authorities” are most believable.

First a few of the straight news stories:

• The Hill (blog) Ben Geman: Senate energy plan bolsters electric cars ;
• The New Republic (blog) Bradford Plumer: Senate Energy Bill Drops — And Electric Cars Get  A Surprise Jolt;
• and for general background on gov’t subsidies for electric cars: E&E Climate Wire (via NYTimes) Saqib Rahim: Electric Carmakers Focus on Incentives, Not Carbon Prices ;

And now the showstopper for me:

• Inside Science News Service (Amer. Inst. of Physics)  : Eric Betz: Sparks Fly over Electric Car Funding ; In this long, analytical story Betz reports serious disagreement whether all-electric, battery-only cars are much of a benefit to climate stability. I’d heard of course people say if it’s a coal plant making the juice, such cars are no big whoop. And also, from various places, they still come out well ahead. This story cites a long MIT study as saying they have little green merit. I looked at the study. It’s true that it says so (and that Ford paid for the work, ahem). This one likes hybrid cars (and ahem II,  Ford makes some of those), but not all-electric ones and not even plug-in hybrids so much.It cites some electric car makers as arguing strenuously that their vehicles reduce emissions significantly – by implication, even in an all-up life cycle analysis.  The news story also cites alternate, credible outfits, such as the Electric Power Research Institute, as declaring plug-in electric hybrids a sensible tool against greenhouse emissions. Who you gonna believe?

If there are some serious reporters out there who have already looked deeply into whether a push to electric cars could have much impact, or are mere niche vehicles for urban-only local drives, I’d like to know. And certainly a few more investigative analyses seem to be in order.

One could ask for a similar deep look into the presumptions behind another, even bigger subsidy to new-fangled ways of pushing a car down the road – as seen in this:

• Reuters – Bernie Woodall, Kevin Krolick: Natural gas vehicles and proposed US subsidies; $4 billion? Really? Wow.

Pic: Nissan Leaf chargeport.

- Charlie Petit

The coverage of yoga by The New York Times this week has been nothing if not comprehensive. As I wrote earlier this week, the Times had three stories on yoga in last Sunday’s paper. It had another yesterday, and yet another today–five stories this week on yoga!

My earlier post noted that all three Sunday stories treated yoga flippantly or negatively, leading me to wonder why the Times seemed so frightened of yoga–or, at best, uninformed.

I’m happy to say that the two most recent stories are quite different. Yesterday, Sam Dolnick wrote about people who like to exercise in the heat, and he led with Bikram yoga, which is done in a heated room–no matter what the temperature is outside. He interviews a few people and manages to explain why they like it without making fun of yoga or of them. It’s just straight reporting. Then he goes on to interview runners and others who like to exercise in the heat.

Today Michiko Kakutani reviews Stefanie Syman’s book on the history of yoga in America. Unlike the review of the book in last Sunday’s Times–which dismissed yoga as the product of frauds and charlatans–this review simply assesses the book. Kakutani acknowledges that it can mean many things to many people, but allows that for some it is a serious practice:

Although there are many devoted students of yoga, who regard it as an exacting physical and spiritual discipline, there are also many trendy yoga consumers today, who regard it simply as another form of exercise like spinning or Pilates, as a hip new way to stay fit and lower stress, or even as a celebrity-inspired fad.

That is precisely the kind of balance that was lacking in all three stories last Sunday.

Congrats to the Times for writing straight news and commentary on yoga. And now–do you think you could write about something else for a while?

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) For more than 10 years REDES has been the leading scientific program on Spanish TV. It is directed and hosted by the charismatic Eduard Punset. Now his experienced team faces a new adventure: to put its accumulated knowledge into a monthly magazine,  selecting the best contents of the program and new stories from a vast group of collaborators. Today we track its 5th number. When REDES chooses a topic, the main criteria is neither its momentary newsworthiness, nor whether scientists consider it critically important. They aim to present scientific information that it in interesting and that has robust relevance to  the general public. The team hopes to get people thinking. They have been doing it  for more than one decade with the TV-program. No doubt the formula will be successful in print too. Stories in this number include: a great overview of quantum computing, psychopaths in our own company, the study of elephant behavior, an interview with Robert Sapolsky, human space exploration, the decline of Y-chromosome, and the function of sleep. Some of the topics are not extremely new, but the information is well presented and in context. The magazine has a mission, and succeeds.

Si en el post anterior analizábamos el contenido de una revista consolidada tras casi 30 años de andadura, hoy presentaremos una publicación que recién apareció en los quioscos el pasado marzo. Pero REDES no empieza desde cero, todo lo contrario. REDES acumula toda la experiencia de un equipo sólido que lleva más de una década produciendo el programa televisivo de referencia de la divulgación científica en España. Bajo la batuta del carismático presentador y escritor Eduard Punset, REDES traslada al papel una selección de los contenidos más interesantes aparecidos en el programa, y le añade entrevistas, reportajes y columnas de un surtido grupo de colaboradores provenientes tanto del campo de la ciencia como del periodismo. La editora de la revista, Beatriz Barco, nos dice “básicamente, lo que hacemos es intentar explicar, para un público generalista, como el que ve el programa de televisión, conceptos sencillos y que puedan ligar, de alguna manera, con la vida cotidiana de la gente. En este sentido, no pretendemos competir con otras revistas más “duras”, sino que la idea es invitar a la reflexión”.

Aquellos o aquellas que vengáis del campo más periodístico, debéis aproximaros a la revista REDES con un cierto cambio de chip. Rastreando entre sus textos quizá denotaréis cierta falta de rigurosa actualidad,  o percibireis demasiado posicionamiento del autor en alguno de los textos. Cierto, pero no olvidéis las expresiones aportadas por Bea “invitar a la reflexión” y “ligar con la vida cotidiana de la gente”. La revista REDES no es un suplemento científico de un periódico. Como el programa de televisión, no se rige necesariamente por lo último publicado en las revistas científicas, ni por lo que los científicos consideran más importante divulgar. El enorme éxito como comunicador de Eduard Punset y los productos que llevan su sello es la búsqueda constante –dentro de la ciencia- de mensajes útiles para el lector o espectador. No se trata sólo de darle información, sino de seleccionar temas y maneras de enfocarlos que le despierten el interés, la curiosidad, y las ganas de reflexionar sobre ellos. Pero vayamos ya a la revista, y comentemos algunos de sus artículos.

El artículo de carácter más científico podría ser el preparado por Javier Canteros “Superordenadores cuánticos”. Un texto excelente y tremendamente divulgativo que ofrece al lector un ameno resumen de los puntos principales alrededor de la computación cuántica. Muy acertado el comentario de que en estos momentos el reto ya es mayor para los ingenieros que para los científicos, pues como también dice Javier, por muy prometedores que sean los ordenadores cuánticos, no debemos pasarnos de optimistas porque tardaremos décadas a tenerlos entre nosotros (si es que algún día se consigue). Si pudiéramos pedirle algo más al artículo, sería algunas líneas o despiece sobre cuáles son los últimos avances al respecto.

Interesantísimo también el reportaje de los psicópatas, preparado por Mariana Rizo Patrón. Y claro ejemplo del “enfoque REDES” a las temáticas científicas: aproximarlo al lector hablando del 1% de psicópatas que viven entre nosotros sin ser detectados. Es un perfil de psicópata diferente al que tenemos en mente. El entorno puede hacer que la predisposición física a la psicopatía se manifieste con crímenes o en el entorno social o laboral. La falta de empatía está presente en ambos grupos. La pieza aporta muchos más datos, pero también le pediríamos algunas pinceladas de novedad, y que apoyara algunas afirmaciones con estudios o citas de científicos aparte de Robert Hare. El lector no tiene porqué confiar en algunas afirmaciones que parecen (insisto en lo de parecen) opiniones de Mariana.

Apoyarse en estudios es justamente lo que hace Albert Figueras en “Al cerebro le gusta… la naturaleza”. El tema suele tratarse con tonos especulativos, pero en esta ocasión está apoyado por resultados científicos. Esto es lo que marca la diferencia.

Para terminar, curioso paralelismo entre el final de dos artículos, “Superteorías” de Manuel Lozano Leyva, y “Con los pies en la Luna” de Gustavo López. Ambos plantean dos grandes retos científicos: unificar las leyes de la física el primero, y llegar a la Luna el segundo. Los dos reconocen que son empresas dificilísimas, y terminan planteando un “¿por qué no intentarlo? Seguro que merece la pena”.  Bueno… hay una gran diferencia entre ambos retos, y queda reflejada en la última frase de Manuel: “estos físicos teóricos son baratos”. Enviar humanos a pasearse por el espacio no lo es. Aquí es donde hacemos una pequeña crítica constructiva al extenso y muy bien documentado texto de Gustavo: Con un tema como éste, la perspectiva más periodística y dimensión social debe estar contemplada. Hay muchas razones por las que dudar de que merezca la pena gastar dinero ahora en enviar humanos a la Luna. Obama no ha cancelado el programa Constellation de Bush sólo por la crisis económica. Muy bien tratado el cambio de enfoque que ha supuesto encontrar tantas reservas de agua en la Luna, pero poco crítico con la viabilidad de que se pueda traer Helio 3 para ser utilizado como combustible de las centrales nucleares del futuro. A muy largo plazo, quizás sí, e instalar telescopios en la cara oculta también, pero en estos momentos las decisiones se toman con otros parámetros.

Pero en resumen; la revista es genial, y el índice de temas es de indudable atractivo para el lector. Vemos un tremendamente bien redactado reportaje sobre el funcionamiento de los árboles, una maravillosa entrevista a una investigadora de elefantes, una sección de noticias breves (que quizás son demasiado breves), relatos de ciencia ficción, una conversación de Eduard Punser a Robert Sapolsky, reportajes sobre el cada vez más esmirriado cromosoma Y, sobre antropólogos estudiando tribus de Tanzania, o sobre la función de los sueños. Y mucho más. Sin duda la revista REDES tiene el potencial de consolidarse como una de las referencias en los quioscos españoles.

- Pere Estupinyà

Ever have one of those stretches where everything seemed unusually vivid, profound, funny, and terrifying. Oh sure, smoking dope, but I haven’t done that in more than 40 years. Also the occasional lucid dream. This morning it came from reading the latest edition of the erstwhile gray lady, the New York Times. I found myself saying wow a lot. It has by some confluence of weather, weird fortune, rampant human frailty, and dog days of summer become this morning a dog’s breakfast mixed up from the distressing and diverting – esp.  for those with the interests that inspire the ksjtracker site.

It started with reading the utterly sober, worthwhile, and perhaps alas ultimately ineffectual, p.1, above-the-fold story of the day by Campbell Robertson. It is on the Gulf of Mexico’s long history of misuse by industry and disdain by local and federal governmental regulators. Prominent in it is the dead zone – the nearly anoxic depths off the Mississippi Delta where over-stimulated algal blooms, sinking,  are consumed by bacteria that in turn absorb and metabolize the water column’s oxygen into various organic  compounds. So fish die, or flee. I re-learned, near the end of it, that agricultural runoff is exempt from the Clean Water Act. Looks like an easy fix for the dead zone. This story is superb, even though one suspects it won’t change things all that much. It presents the recent, horrid oil spill as merely a large punctuation mark on a long history of neglect and abuse. And, like an algal bloom, it starts small with a vignette on a discouraged oysterman in its one-column wide, small-hed front page start. Inside it balloons into a richly illustrated tapestry of statistics, observations, and examples of a regional disgrace occurring right out in the open where hardly anybody should avoid noticing, but many do so anyway. Good reporting, remarkably all under one byline.

Then the psychedelic hopscotch started, reminding my why this is truly the nation’s greatest remaining newspaper, a scary or amusing thrill at every turn of the page. Examples that pertain to this site’s interest in environment, science, and medical news.

• William Neuman: Added to the Recall List; Millions of Frozen Mice ; It’s about frozen, newborn mice (mostly) as food for snakes. Tens of thousands of pet snakes worldwide fed thawed pink mice, many from one operation that appears to have had a salmonella outbreak, sickening children across much of the world. Wait till you read, late in the going, the scale of the secretive company that produces these mouseburgers. PETA may be at its door at this moment. (And speaking of dead mice, on this strange day, they also come up in A. O. Scott‘s film review of Dinner for Schmucks: What? We Might Be the Real Losers? in Weekend Arts.
• Anemona Hortocollis: In Medical School, Without a Pre-Med Degree ; Ostensibly, it tells us that a New York med school is pioneering the idea that to be a good doctor does not require science training, much, before medical school, and that creative arts, literature, etc. majors can catch up and do fine. No MCATS, organic chem, etc. Real message: the practice of medicine has never been intensely scientific (albeit, more so than “alternative medicine” such as herbal therapy, homeopathy, chiropractic….)
• Clifford J. Levy: As Russian Swelters, Even the Fish Can’t Escape ; Pity the poor trout, dead, and “drifting like buoys.”
• Sam Roberts: As Population Keeps Rising, Low Births are a Worry; A succinct summary of what we once called the population bomb, and its contradictions. It reminds me to wonder why, with China so often vilified, justly so, for environmental recklessness, it gets no occasional recognition for its singular enviro achievement, however brutally it was enforced: the one-child policy? India is poised to supplant China as world’s most populous. Nobody would have expected that, 30 years ago. (Actually, I noticed after writing this bullet, and prompting this parenthetical note, a letter writer  mentions the one-child policy today – second on this list ).
• John Schwartz: Lawyers, Far From Gulf, Skirmish on Spill Claims ; Who else sent a reporter to Boise for a hearing on where to have the BP trial? Napoleon Dynamite comes up. So does speed dating. Schwartz has a talent for spotting the absurd in every day situations.
• Emma Graves Fitzsimmons: Regulators Warned Company on Pipeline Corrosion ; A follow on that other spill in the US – along the Kalamazoo in Michigan.
• David W. Dunlap: A Workhorse of a Vessel That Helped Build the City ; About the old ship, suspected to be a brigantine, found at the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I’d heard of trunnels – but didn’t know that’s a derivation of “tree nail,” a type of wood peg.
• Denise Grady: FDA Links Hormone Spray to Breast Growth in Children ; In National Briefs, and she writes this as briefly as possible. I have no questions, either. This is plenty ’nuff.
• William J. Broad: Report Sees a Weaker U.S. In Nuclear Forensics Skills ;

And one more that’s about journalism, if not science. It dovetails with  previous posts, here and here , on the new aggression by science and environmental reporters in China:

• Andrew Jacobs: Police Toss Out Arrest Warrant For Chinese Reporter in Hiding ;

- Charlie Petit

And I thought algal blooms were a growing problem. News from a report in Nature today is that since the late 19th century, and mostly since about 1950, the phytoplankton of the open sea including algae have dropped by nearly half. So much for worries that jellyfish will take over the oceans – they won’t have anything to eat either.

This is a serious development, one fears. We should hope that discovery of a systematic error in long term record keeping or their analysis by researchers at Canada’s Dalhousie University will lead to less drastic conclusion. Or, perhaps, we’ll be persuaded that it’s not the rising heat content of the ocean that the report fingers as most likely suspect, but something else more easily curable (pollution by ships? Fishing sonars? Styrofoam pellets? Help me think of something plausible). Or, at last resort in this age of eco-guilt, maybe it’s not our fault at all?

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Plankton, base of ocean food web, in big decline ;
• AFP – Marlowe Hood: Declining algae threatens ocean food chain ;
• ClimateWire (via Sci American) Lauren Morello: Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950 / Researchers find trouble among phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, which has implications for hte marine food web and the world’s carbon cycle ;
• Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik: Vital Marine Plants in Steep Decline ; He ties the plankton news with another Nature report on general biodiversity shifts in the oceans.
• BBC – Richard Black : Plankton decline across oceans as waters warm;
• NPR – Richard Harris: The Food Chain’s Weak Link: Tiny Ocean Plants Dying ; His first sentence: “Microscopic plants in teh ocean, called phytoplankton, are among the most important creatures on Earth…”;
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Scientists Report Steep Decline i Algae Critical to Marine Food Chain ;
• Toronto Globe and Mail – Caroline Alphonso: Plants at base of ocean food chain in decline, study finds ;
• Spiegel – Markus Becker: A Food Chain Crisis in the World’s Oceans ; Seems overstated hed. Hope it’s never vindicated.
• Guardian (UK) Juliette Jowit: Scientists warn of global warming threat to marine food chain ;
• Nature.com- Quirin Schiermeier: Ocean greener under warming stress / A century of phytoplankton decline suggests that ocean ecosystems are in peril ;
• AAAS ScienceNow: Kristen Minogue: Critical Ocean Organisms Are Disappearing ;
• Christian Science Monitor (blog) Pete Spotts: Vital ocean phytoplankton a casualty of global warming? ;
• Discovery News – Emily Sohn: Ocean’s Most Abundant Food Source Disappearing ;  Fine tag line. A source tells her everybody loves a blue ocean, but “a blue ocean is full of nothing.”
• New Scientist (blog) Michael Marshall: Phytoplankton in decline: bye bye food chain? ; Partly a roundup of media reports.

Stray question – I read recently that oceanic algae produce about 40 percent of the oxygen entering the atmosphere. It would be worth asking the scientist whether they have checked other potential proxy measures of algal activity, such as the air.

Grist for the Mill: Dalhousie University Press Release ;

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate office, along with the UK’s Met Office, yesterday released their annual State of the Climate report. Some news agencies are leaping to tell us that the most recent decade, as NOAA underscores, was the hottest on record. Duh. Few would argue with that and it’s not news. The report, at a glance, says a lot more than that, and essentially all news agencies do report its other indicators that all say the Earth is warming – such as higher sea level, less sea ice, few glaciers, and higher humidity. The summary is garnering extensive coverage even though the report’s authors deliberately avoided any argument about why the Earth is warming.

However. The play given the  hottest decade bit of uncontroversial truth is not necessarily a convincing way to cross the climate “debate” off the list  of  things that informed people all across the spectrum think has substance. Yet, at the Australian, Paul Cleary puts it in his lede (under a hed saying Aussies are suffering among the worst roastings). The Wall Street Journal‘s Gautam Naik does likewise. AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid puts this in his second graph as his first specific message from the report.

If any of these reporters and others who did likewise hoped that stressing this aspect would persuade determined skeptics,  they are likely wrong and for a reason other than sheer stubbornness. Ditto for the press office at NOAA, which put out a release (see Grist) with the last ten year’s warmth its topper. The notion embraced by mostly-rightist doubters is that global warming peaked around 1998 and has been roughly level since then, ergo global warming has stopped. There is, to be sure, no rational reason to say that, as a glimpse of the temperature record shows a jagged, not steady line upward. But if that’s the assertion one wants to counter it won’t work. For the assertion itself conceded the last decade to have been warmer than any before. After all, if one spiked a fever an hour ago and it hasn’t gone down, this is probably the hottest hour one’s body has had for a long time – but it doesn’t mean the reading is still going up.

To truly confront the doubter’s analysis, one needs either to have evidence that the trend continued through the last decade, or mention that, stochastically, there have to be more or less flat decades even if the climate is headed for more warmth. Some outlets, such as National Geographic News‘s Christine Dell’Amore takes the first tack. She pointedly inserts a link to evidence that (while the NOAA report goes thorugh 2009) 2010 so far is on track to be the hottest, or at leasst near-hottest, ever. So the lurching march toward a seriously worrisome environment seems not to have stopped.

Other stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable,’ ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Ten key indicators show global warming ‘undeniable.”
• NYTimes (blog) John Collins Rudolf: State of the Climate: Hottest Decade on Record ;
• Time Magazine (blog)- Michael Lemonick: This Just In: The Earth is Warming! ; And Lemonick conceded his exasperation.
• Financial Times – Fiona Harvey : New climate data reignite debate ; It’s not a debate among experts, and the non-debate never went out. It’s sort of a muddle here what debate Harvey is talking about and how this reignited it. Her example of debaters on the skeptical side is one fellow from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His bio lists extensive political experience there as a professional conservative on environmental issues, but no particular training in pertinent fields. Her corresponding outside commenter from the “warmist” side of the aisle is a physicist and leader of a climate dynamics group at Oxford with a D. Phil in atmospheric, oceanic, and planetary sciences.
• Guardian (UK) Juliette Jowit: Global warming pushes 2010 temperatures to record highs ; She leads on this year, then turns to the report. Her remarks on US and UK figures and their details in variance shows – while she doesn’t report it deeply – she’s quite familiar with how the Met Office and NASA’s GISS in N.Y. handle global temperature stats differently.

Meanwhile, remember that igloo that was built for Al Gore outside the Capitol?

• Washington Post – Capital Weather Gang: Steve Tractor : D.C. record snow in 2010 not due to global warming ; Not global anything…

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Press Release ; State of the Climate in 2009 ;

- Charlie Petit

It is hard to find on the NYTimes site, but the paper picked up from Energy & Environment Daily’s Greenwire subscription service an engrossing explainer by Paul Voosen of the geology under the gulf that for years repelled oil explorers looking for deep deposits of oil as the shallow ones began to peter out. That same geology – dominated by capricious oozings, flows, billows, pillars, and intrusions of ancient rock salt evaporites – is now recognized as a bonanza for oil companies willing to drill deep into the salt maze.

Absent is, and too bad, illustration of the labyrinths of salt embedded in the sediment. That pic there is one I found at the British-based The Geological Society.

Pretty darned interesting. Whether, as Voosen comments, one does or does not admire  the search for evermore oil in evermore challenging environment on an evermore hot planet that hardly needs more carbon in its  air, “it is hard not to admire the intricate salt formations revealed by, and enabling, the plunge for hydrocarbons.” Speaking of plunge, elsewhere in the story Voosen perhaps got carried away in his admiration, describing salt that may “plunge upward” as its bouyancy leads it to make columns called diapirs. Can one billow upward while also plunging? Otherwise, no complaints about this paean to salt as slippery rock.

One question. It is impermeable, it says here, which is why it corrals oil into deep sand traps. Impermeable. Hmmm. Maybe good for sequestration of CO2??

- Charlie Petit

A salute to New Scientist and a Q&A that Catherine Brahic did with Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University and, in the same session, with a former head of the same unit.  Jones hasn’t said much in public in recent months, other than one interview that he may have felt bit him – in which he (reportedly) described thoughts of suicide when the attacks on his character and scientific ethics were at their peak last last year and early this.

I was considering making further observations of a general sort, but find that an editorial at N.S. covers the ground well.

- Charlie Petit

I learned a few things from the Washington Post‘s Eric Niiler about ants this morning – when I finally came across a piece of his that ran a week ago. Which is that just because almost every urban corner of California has been conquered by Argentine ants, leaving only odd corners and wilderness as havens for natives, it hasn’t taken over everywhere people are concentrated. In DC the plain old odorous house ant,  Tapinoma sessile, is driving some folks nuts.

This is what good old US News & world Report used to call News you Can Use back when US News was a real magazine. Niiler manages to provide info on how to get rid of, or at least discourage, ants in a year when they are on the rampage, but does so without encouraging the disgust some people may feel about them. He has lots of natural history here, too. They don’t cause disease, he says, and they don’t even bite. Squish one and it smells like burnt coconut. Nice job.

Pic source Joe MacGowan’s Insect Drawings

- Charlie Petit