Last week a little blip of a scoop, and then today a bunch reporters more jump upon news that out in the asteroid belt a schmear of dust and scattered boulders has been spotted. It looks a bit like a comet tail. Diagnosis: two big’uns hit one another hard. This is the closest astronomers have come, it appears, to seeing an instance of what everybody who’s ever looked at the battered surfaces of those things knows. It’s a game of bumper cars out there.

The news breaks big in tomorrow’s issue of Nature. The gist is that the Hubble and the Rosetta spacecraft see enough drifting crud for astronomers to deduce what happened. I’d wait till then for a full roundup, and expect to update this post, but as the embargo’s up and the news got broken independently last week, I’ll start today.

Embargo Playtime: Last week the sharp-eyed Richard A. Kerr at AAAS ScienceNow spotted two abstracts on line to go with the Am Astron. Society Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena. Friday Oct. 8, at the on line briefs page called ScienceShot he ran “An Asteroid Smashup.” He knew the info, which he’d found on his own, was embargoed at Nature. Dick sent me a note saying his story thus beats, while evading but not defying or violating, Nature’s embargo that ran out today. He asked that I not post on his item – which I”d not have known about anyway if he’d not told me – for an experiment. Would his piece on its own leave a big enough ripple to trigger other reporter’s to follow?

Apparently not. Relying only on the meeting’s abstracts, there wasn’t much he could report. But the episode is another example of the artificiality of many journal embargoes. People in science are more and more  getting advance tastings of  research that some journals try to pretend is still corked up and sealed  in the bottle. Embargoes, always problematic if convenient to all concerned, are increasingly a construct that merely cows the press while amplifying coverage with an inflated sense of anticipation and frustration.

The news itself is pretty interesting, to be sure, and merits a bit of drum-beating. Violent collisions in our solar system are news – and serve to remind us that one day an asteroid will come knocking at Earth too. And the orchestrated roll-out of the news by Nature, along with press releases, does spoon feed to reporters more material for their stories. Most reports jump on the notion that the images show a giant X in the sky, as in marks the spot. I don’t see it as an X, just a few rays in a diffuse accident skidmark. The Hubble press release says it’s an X though, and reporters tends to go with that.

Other Stories So Far:

• Science News (via USNews & World Report) Ron Cowen : CSI: Asteroid Belt / Hubble and Rosetta investigate a space rock’s demise ;
• Universe Today – Nicholas Wethington: Hubble Sees Asteroid Collision in Slow-Motion ;
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Hubble’s Bizarre X-shaped Slow_Motion Asteroid Collision;
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: ‘X’ Marks the Spot: Hubble Reveals Collision Between Asteroids;
• Wired Science – David Mosher: X-Shaped Space Thing is Smashed-Up Asteroid ;
• Sky and Telescope – Kelly Beatty: Crash Scene in the Asteroid Belt ; Good for Beatty, who refers to an X-shaped feature, but mostly to the striations and general morphology of the debris field.

Grist for the Mill: Hubble Press Release and additional links;

- Charlie Petit

At Mother Jones Mark Schapiro has a welcome piece of reporting - on the crime and fraud starting to flourish along the underside of cap and trade schemes for limiting CO2 emissions. Interpol is on the job, con games promising to shrink carbon footprints for a fee are proliferating, and courts around the world wide are braced for a wave of litigation and criminal cases.

No surprise really. It’s long been clear that, quite aside from near-lunatic denial that humans could possibly change the climate, along with suspicions scientists are just in it for the grant money, a strong rock of truth motivates such aggressive ignorance. One does not have to be a free market zealot or outright libertarian to recognize that government supervision of capitalism is often inefficient, and to further imagine that any international scheme to organize the world’s economies, internalizing the costs of dumping carbon feely into the air, will have a hard time not collapsing in corruption, cronyism, and red tape.

If a solution looks odious, then it is tempting to believe that the problem is just not there. It’s like “What!??” Swim through those sharks to shore? I cannot believe this boat is actually sinking. You made that up about a reef  to sell me swim fins and then when the sharks get me to turn this boat into a socialist state!!!”

Anyway, Mother Jones and this article take a clear-eyed look at what kinds of chicanery and wickedness are spawned by cap and trade regardless of how important its aims may be. (And I still want to slap a huge tax on carbon, then send the money right back in equal monthly checks to every US adult. That’ll make average guys and gals whole while providing them massive motive to cut back and make money on the deal. That’d never pass but would be a budgetary zero-sum game changer. Solar panels, windmills, hybrid cars, and carbon-sequestering coal plants would sell like hotcakes).

Of course, there’s always a chance the UN and other international networks could keep carbon cap and trade fairly clean. The Montreal Protocol did a good job taking CFCs out of the economy. The Law of the Sea almost-treaty seems to have helped to clarify ocean sovereignty and economic coordination. CITES, the thing that regulates trade in ivory and bans sale of tiger bones and rhino horns, is a good thing. But cap and trade? That’s a monster challenge. Really, if some farmer in Zaire plants a mess of carbon-sucking trees and promises to plow them under and plant some more when they’re grown, what’s to stop the sale of those credits to more than one party? And that’s assuming the trees got planted for that reason – and that they were planted at all.

This is not the first article along these lines I’ve seen, but Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which had hand in this report, deserve a salute.

Other Cap and Trade Fraud and Gaming Stories:

• NY Times (Green Column) James Kanter: In Europe, Companies Work the Angles on the Carbon Trade ;
• …. I couldn’t find any more recent ones. But there are lots of blogs and opinion columns shouting that cap and trade is just a part of the global warming ‘fraud’.

Related Enviro Fraud News:

• Reuters – Brian Ellsworth: Brazil eyes microchips in trees for forest management ; One is unsure this system cannot be gamed too, but from the scene and thus with color and vigor, Reuters reports a program to be sure so-called sustainably-harvested logs are legit.

- Charlie Petit

I am sure there are some, but one does not find many instances in the British press these days saluting a cut to gov’t science support.  The Prime Minister and his party include it as part of a drive to throttle spending way down – no departments spared other than the National Health Service. Demonstrations and such have broken out featuring the white-coat-and-goggles crowd or what the cheekier newspapers regard as the boffin class.

To be sure, fears (and reality) of draconian cuts have simultaneously energized and enervated both the UK science press and science establishment for the last several years. But it does seem, from not only other side of the Atlantic but the farther edge of North America, that the tone is getting even more alarmed.

For a flavor of the mood there among science journalists as well as scientists themselves, check the angry outburst that New Scientist editor Roger Highfield ran this week in his The S Word column under the  hed,  David Cameron: Science isn’t even on his radar. With the nation still savoring two Nobel Prizes for a pair of Russian immigrants at the University of Manchester, Highfield takes full advantage of the irony that seems all but certain. A huge cut in the kind of research support, not to mention immigration policies, would undo the lures that led the men to English soil and to their prize in the first place.

It could happen here, too, one supposes. No telling what would befall NSF, DOE, and other science-heavy US agencies if there is further surge by the Tea Party and generalized fury in some US quarters against anything federal or most anything that involves tax money and, especially, faceless bureaucrats.

In the meantime, here are other samplings of Brit press as the science (and most everything else) budget axe is raised high – and with its precise targets to be spelled out October 20:

• Forbes – Parmy Olson (London Bureau Chief): What Happens When Governments Strangle Science? ; Given her publication and her publisher’s political and economic philosophies, this will reach a lot of free-market readers ordinarily inclined to welcome almost any shrinkage of government. “Science really is special,” Olson writes.
• Guardian – Jeevan Vasagar, Jessica Shepherd: Britain faces brain drain as cuts force top scientists to leave country / University heads warn proposed cuts to science budget threaten ‘an insidious grinding down of UK research community’ ;
• Guardian – Alok Jha: Science funding cuts: We won’t fill the gaps, say firms and charities ; Plus, Science..how will it be hit by the cuts?
• Telegraph – Richard Gray: Science funding cuts will cost UK economy billions ; Could mean, it says here in quoting some of those about to be hit, “game over” for British science.
• NatureNews – Joseph Milton: How vital is science? British scientists begin to mobilize in the fight against research funding cuts ; Interview with the cell biologist, Jennifer Rohn, who organized the march of the PhDs on the Treasury, carrying such placard slogans as “No More Dr. Nice Guy.”
• BBC: Science cuts ‘risk economic harm’;

Grist for the Mill: “Science is Vital” website ; Research Councils UK Report on science, economy, and bus. growth.

- Charlie Petit

The agglomeration of old and new and other news services continues, and I provide one more example today. But first, as background, last week I complained, a bit resignedly, about the use of the University of California’s news service by my local all-news radio station as a regular source of short, bright, science shots. I’ve noticed the Forbes/BusinessWeek collaboration on stories, one that sometimes picks up stories from yet third outlets.  And have discovered there is something called The Takeaway, a “national morning news program produced in partnership with the New York Times, BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International, and WGBH Boston”.

This morning on checking the Washington Post’s feed, I find a delightful yarn by Eli Kintisch on discovery of a potentially useful geothermal hotspot under West Virginia. Hot rock might make for a more benign energy export for that state than does black coal. It seems that a noted search engine company teamed up with university geologists to spot the spot.

Kintisch, some of you may recall, works for the AAAS and its Science Magazine. He’s a fine reporter. The story has right above its headline a little ScienceNow icon, representing AAAS’s news service, which it refers to as a partner of the Washington Post. I can’t right off the bat think of an ethical principle this violates. Still, it jars this old timer’s head. ‘Tis a little odd, a journal that historically ran research articles that Post reporters read, digested, reported upon independently after making some calls, and thus was among the institutions regularly covered by the newspaper, is now piping its copy straight to the Post’s readers.

It’s an exciting time to be a daily news science writer. Scary, but exciting. Something new every day. The story first ran at ScienceNow Oct. 4.

Grist for the Mill: Southern Methodist University Paper,  Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

It is good to see the Science Times back to its plump self at eight pages. Last week’s half dozen, one hopes, were a glitch not a trend.

Sparking the issue for some will be a striking, inverted symmetry. On one side, below the fold up front actually, is Denise Grady’s absorbing profile of a doc who grew up in Ethiopia, trained in India, and is now a top teacher at Stanford Medical School. He shows interns how to look, really look, at patients, not to mention thump their chests and watch them watch him and do other old-school physical exam things to figure out such things as that an obscure valve in a deep organ is off kilter. The mirror-image jolt comes on looking inside at a brief by Donald G. McNeilr Jr., on a US program to upgrade training in African medical schools. So here we have a medical man from the Horn of Africa edifying pups at Stanford, while this nation in turn pumps similar things up on that continent.  A connecting thread, if one squinches the eyes, is worry over the African brain drain of medical personnel. One of the drained brains is at Stanford. Dunno if Stanford is part of the program to train MDs in Africa.

For the lead story with the big art picture up front, Natalie Angier celebrates the quirky brilliance of Isaac Newton by dwelling on new appreciation for his biggest blunder : to spend enormous hours trying to make alchemy work. She describes it with what Stephen Jay Gould would have called historicist forgiveness. That is, what now is known to have been delusional or perhaps knowing hokum seemed reasonable enough by 17th century standards. This article is the second straight week of history as section lead. The last one was on the discovery of a way to refine insulin from animal organs. Both well done. The urgency and vigor of new science tend to work better as section mood-setters than looks back.

Other headlines to note:

• John Noble Wilford – Hunting One Language, Stumbling Upon Another. As good a news story cum educational lesson as one can find. Wilford’s vignette snapshot of a linguistics team in India finding a new, and endangered, language is a gem. This could have worked well as the art section lead – I put up in the corner a shot in a remote community. Fascinating are the beads and silver jewelry, the post-and-beam construction, the buffalo (cattle?) skulls….and a second photo’s capture of a luminous Christian icon painting in the background. What an exotic place.
• Sindya N. Bhanoo (Observatory short): Salt Infusion Could Be a Remedy for Damaged Cells ; Short form explanation, done well.
• Sam Grobart – In a takeout Container, a Trek to the Stratosphere ; Genius, wry lede, and a story that’ll have you clicking to the video link. Watch that thing. Interesting as can be. It’s already an internet sensation.
• Marilyn Berger: Cases: The Calm Before the Brain Injury Was Discovered ; I usually don’t bother much with scary medical emergency stories. But this one shows that my first item up top, about medical training, has another resonance in the section. Had Ms. Berger seen a good decisive generalist medical practitioner in the first place it would have saved her a harrowing close call.
• Gina Kolata: Taking Early Retirement May Retire Memory, Too ; This will grow on you. First impression as one starts into it: this study on retirement and persistence of alertness is so full of confounding variables, it’s gotta be shaky. Then one learns how the international data interact. Pretty convincing. If you’re fit for work, one thinks, don’t retire unless you have some really challenging hobbies or a busy club to help run or maybe some extensive volunteering lined up.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Holy Urey-Miller Time, the stuff of life in a fews flasks of gases? Yes, again. At the American Astronomical Associations Division of Planetary Sciences a U. of Arizona grad student and her adviser reported that upon simulating in the lab the processes that might shiver through the organic haze of Saturn’s moon Titan, they got prebiotic soup. Or cloud. Or something.

They saw amino acids and nucleotide bases form spontaneously. The University of Arizona press release declared the haze could hold the ingredients for life. They might have rained down to the surface there and, by inference, may have rained down on Earth 4 billion years ago or so and set the stage for the emergence of self-replicating, evolving organisms.

This is a pretty good story, if handled well. Only two real news outlets tackled it.

At Science News, Ron Cowen reports it under the hed, Life may have started sky high / Experiments suggest basic chemical ingredients formed in the upper atmosphere.  The headline and the story itself say, or at least very strongly imply, that this means not only ingredients for life but living things themselves may first have appeared in the aerosols above Titan’s plains rather than “in a primordial soup on the surface.” All I have is the press release, but it does not say that. It says they may have rained down and enriched just such a primordial soup on the surface. Further, it seems implausible that genetic machinery, vesicles or proto-cells able split and form new vesicles, and the molar concentration of the ingredients could have occurred in a largely gas-phase environment. Cowen is among the more accomplished and aggressive reporters on the space and astronomy beat, but one thinks he may have overreached a tad on this one.

After all, astrobiologists already have shown there are myriad other ways to imagine prebiotic chemistry moving rapidly on the early Earth to produces just such compounds. These include lightning-struck volcanic vents, chemically-rich waves or ocean currents washing across clay, and hydrothermal vents. Fairly complicated organic compounds, such as adenine, even form in interstellar space. The big conundrum in origin-of-life research has not been the production of raw ingredients.  It is their spontaneous assembly into self-replicating, metabolizing, and evolving thingies that might merit the adjective “alive.’

At Space.com, Mike Wall sticks closer to the script as glimpsed in the press release. The hed: Saturn Moon’s Atmosphere May Hold Ingredients for Life. That’s less imaginative, but probably the better bets in this case. But Wall pulls his punch, leaving unclarified whether the primordial haze was a full substitute for primordial soup, or merely a precursor.

Late Addition (see comments):

• National Geographic News – Victoria Jaggard: Saturn’s Largest Moon Has Ingredients for Life? ; Well reported, thorough, a gold star job. Jaggard got a long interview with the grad student who did most of the work, and gets an earful on all the things this does NOT mean, explicitly, about life on Titan or the Earth. And she throws in some interesting stuff about the geysers of Enceladus slapping Titan’s atmosphere around, somehow.
• Sky and Telescope – Kelly Beatty: Titan’s Hazes: A rich Brew ; Beatty sees story, not just news. He assembles this in chronological fashion – after setting the scene with the San Gabriel Valley’s smog – to recount how the experiments unfolded. ‘  Interesting aspect – he notes that a lot of the chemistry occurs hundreds of miles above the surface. That’s a doubly thick atmosphere – not only dense, but weakly bound by gravity and hence extensive in thickness. Hadn’t thought about that before.

Other DPS news:

Science News – Ron Cowen: It’s only a seltzer moon / plumes form Saturn’s Enceladus may be carbonated ; Clear,and fine lede: Eau my!

Plus one with ANOTHER carbonated planet, and more on hazy, prebiotic Titan:

• Astronomy Now -Emily Baldwin: Clues for life in underground Mars and titan’s atmosphere, a well-informed roundup for the science-savvy.

Still More  Earth and Planetary Science News:

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Tiny tubes point to ancient life ; They are in rock 3.3 billion years old, about as old as the most ancient known cores of continents, and seem to lie in the remains of an ancient volcanic, seafloor spreading center. Story is fine, but other scientists, including UCLA’s Wm. Schopf, say they can see similar fossil thingies in rocks even older – 3. 5 by or so. Others have called the signs mere chemical reaction remnants and impurities. Amos writes his story too short. To be useful, it needs more context, including on arguments underway for several years now over when life first arose. That would give readers a sense of what is merely new here and what is not only new but surprising.

Grist for the Mill: U. Arizona Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(Note: this post originally run Friday, Oct 8, now freshened by update below).

Yesterday’s NY Times front page carried a report by Kirk Johnson, inspired by a study in the Public Library of Science ONE journal and now quickly followed – perhaps preceded too – by other outlets. New evidence, it says here,  seems to move science a lot closer to solution of the mystery of honeybee colony collapse in recent years. The Times was hardly alone in covering it, but it gives the news its biggest splash.

The story is sketchy but reading it convinces one that that’s only because the science itself is incomplete. The heart of it  is that a fungus, which many had already put near the top of the list of suspects, appears to become fatal mostly and maybe only when a specific virus co-habits a bee’s gut.

*UPDATE of post originally up  on Oct. 8: Many thanks to the comment, below, from reader Joseph Davis, a DC-based writer and active member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. Do read the comment, but to give it more prominence, here is its heart:

• Fortune Magazine ; Katherine Eban: What a scientists didn’t tell the New York Times about his study on bee deaths ;

Now, back to the original post….

Giving the news extra propulsion is the unusual research alliance behind it – a collaboration of an Army team concerned mostly with identifying pathogens that might affect troops, and a more standard team of agricultural entomologists at the University of Montana and Montana State University. That, and the happenstance way that led the two groups to join forces add up to a story that is about far more than viral genomes and the lifestyles of funguses. This news is not just news, it is a story.

One clear flaw. The Times’s hed is too assertive: Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. Johnson’s piece is congratulatory in tone. But it doesn’t quite back up the headline’s confidence. He writes that the work “appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.” Suspects are not yet convicts, and that “appears to have” puts a lot of play in the gears. I don’t much care for a “breakthrough,” especially one that only appears to be such a thing. Exact verbiage aside, the statement is well short of declaring a done deal.

I’m glad I waited a day, allowing other outlets to land with stories of their own. It is unclear which ones would have come out anyway, and which pubs learned of this only from NYTimes. PLoS ONE is not an obscure journal and a press release is in circulation. One is quite sure this would be news in any case and while it’s hard to be sure, some were probably ahead of the Times.

Other Stories:

• NYTimes (blog) Kirk Johnson: Giving the Honeybee Its Due ; An appreciation.
• NPR – Alison Aubrey: Study Links Honeybee Deaths to Fungus, Insect Virus ; She puts high in it one source’s declaration that this work is intriguing but doesn’t crack the case – “not even close.”
• Telegraph (UK) Ian Douglas: Study finds causes of Colony Collapse Disorder in bees ; As with the NYT, and despite the Brit style proclivity to leave caveats to the body of a story, this hed is too cut and dried. As the lede says, it is only a claim. Douglas does a fine job dissecting the study and the various hypotheses and candidate explanations it explored, and how it did so. His final paragaph is notable for its essay-like surehandedness, contrasting previous “shoddy” work to this “high quality study conducted by diligent researchers,” all without crouching behind quotations for authority. The man is a gardening columnist, it appears. And the story is directly associated with a sales pitch for beekeeping products at the Telegraph Garden Shot. That’s not an obvious conflict of interest. But it is a jarring commercial tie.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Report: Virus, fungus new suspects in bee disease ; Short, to the point, and correctly labels a prominent quote from a Montana researcher as “from a statement.” We’ve said this before at this site – if a reporter does not hear a quote with her or his own ears, it is ethically best to give at least a hint how it came to attention.
• New Yorker (news desk blog) Elizabeth Kolbert: The Army’s Honeybee Theory ; This one, a shorty, is hung on the NYTimes as it’s main source. As Kolbert notes, she wrote a large feature for the magazine on the disorder.
• Missoulian – Perry Backus: University of Montana bee scientists may have found cause of Colony Collapse Disorder ;
• New West (Montana) Jule Banville: Mysterious Disappearance of the World’s Bees Possibly Explained by Montana Researchers ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Bio warfare scientists help solve mystery of dying bees ; See bullet above on the Telegraph regarding Brits, caveats, and heds.
• Baltimore Sun – Frank Roylance: Edgewood Arsenal helps attack bee mystery ; Not long, but Roylance finds a source distinctly put-out by reports that this study is at all conclusive.
• CBS (blog) John Blackstone: Bee Mystery Solved?, a paean to researchers and the one he met personally a few years ago. See also what is posted by CBS excloo, and thus one presumes claims to be the first out with this news, Exclusive: Microscopic Combo Suspected in Killing Bees ; Blackstone, too, says here the researchers are not ready to say they’ve solved it for sure. The story is unusually  thin on info,  – mentioning only a “parasite, a type of fungus…and a virus.” No mention here of the Army team or of the article in PLoS ONE.

Grist for the Mill:

PLoS ONE article ; University of  Montana Press Release ;

Top Right Pic Source ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Less than two months before Cancun’s conference on Climate Change, UN climate talks in Tianjin ended up with mutual accusations between China and US regarding emissions reduction. Compared to last year stories leading up to Copenhagen, reporters in Latin America seem to have less to say about CO2 levels, and more about the costs of  adaptation. The message seems to be: We agree that mitigation is the key issue, but we are already suffering the effects of the climate change you caused. We don’t believe you are going to solve it soon. Please, start compensating us.

A escasos dos meses de la cumbre del cambio climático en Cancún, y recién finalizada la reunión preparatoria en Tianjin, empezamos a calentar motores para informar sobre la política internacional respecto al cambio climático. ¿se repetirá la pesadilla de Copenhague? ¿tendrán un rol más agresivo los reporteros de los países pobres? Parece que ambas preguntas tienen respuestas afirmativas.

De momento, la reunión internacional de Tianjin ha concluido con una decepción parecida a la que un año atrás se realizó en Barcelona. El País (España) informa por medio de su enviado especial José Reinoso de que China y EEUU se acusan de bloquear el control de emisiones, paralizando así cualquier expectativa de acuerdo. El Mundo y muchos otros medios coinciden. En cuanto a compromiso de reducción de emisiones, aquí nadie de los grandes quiere dar el primer paso serio, y no se vislumbran grandes progresos. Sin embargo, parece que sí se ha avanzado en la creación de un fondo de ayudad económicas para apoyar a loa países pobres. La idea es: “no sabemos cómo salir del embrollo que reconocemos haber cometido, pero por lo menos compensamos a los países que lo están sufriendo sin responsabilidad alguna”. Éste sí es un punto que debe ser tratado en detalle por reporteros de algunos países latinoamericanos. Y ya hay varios que han empezado.

Muy bueno el análisis en El Periódico (Guatemala) de Carlos Rigalt “Los diferentes rostros del cambio climático”. Ácida pieza, que aglutina varias fuentes para solicitar acciones concretas frente a la reincidencia de desastres naturales. La frase final del recomendable texto es: “el cambio climático ha sido provocado por las emisiones que han beneficiado a personas y sociedades ricas y ha perjudicado a las más pobres.  Quizás haya llegado el momento de empezar a cobrar”.

Excelente también en La Nación (Costa Rica) el documentadísimo reportaje de Alejandra Vargas “País capta menos del 1% del mercado mundial de carbono”. Informando desde Washington DC, Alejandra explica que Costa Rica está haciendo enormes esfuerzos en protección de bosques, pero como esto no cotiza bien en el mercado de carbono, está recogiendo sólo migajas en compensaciones económicas. Recomendable lectura también para comprender el juego del mercado de carbono, y sobre todo, como gran ejemplo de tratamiento localizado de la problemática del cambio climático. El reto periodístico está realmente en explicar qué está pasando específicamente en nuestro país, tanto a nivel de ciencia, política, protección, y economía alrededor del cambio climático.

Seguiremos con mucha atención lo que se informe desde México. De momento, El Universal (México) explica que el gobierno pretende impulsar un acuerdo global, y presenta en primera página de la edición de hoy un extenso artículo de Liliana Alcántara: “Clima errático revive males desterrados”. Se refiere a las olas de calor, y las epidemias causadas por virus y bacterias que le acompañan. Científicamente no está tan claro que el cambio climático sea el principal responsable del aumento de malaria, dengue, fiebre amarilla o cólera, pero sin duda es un factor a contemplar de cerca y por el que solicitar ayudas de adaptación. Gran texto de nuevo.

Veremos cómo avanza la cobertura en cambio climático en los próximos dos meses, y compararemos con la previa a Copenhague de hace un año. Todo parece indicar que los periodistas ambientales latinoamericanos ofrecerán una información más localizada respecto sus países, y serán más inconformistas en sus notas.

- Pere Estupinyà

I have never been a radio newsman, or broadcast specialist of any kind. So I know little about how that business works. It nonetheless struck me as interesting and peculiar at the same time to hear KCBS, the top local all-news station in the San Francisco area, suddenly start telling me today a little bit about drought resistant plants and the successful isolation by researchers of the receptors that get the signal that makes a plant husband its H2O.

I’d had no idea this Saturday morning I’d be doing a post. We spent the day in San Francisco, under startlingly wonderful skies with our daughter and one of her sons, an eight-year-old named Joe, watching an air show featuring incredibly loud, impressive Navy Blue Angels pilots and a lot of other stunt fliers as part of the annual Navy-centric Fleet Week in the city. We watched with a shoreline throng from near Fisherman’s wharf, thousands of boats were on the bay, and our ferry back to the East Bay practically had to shoulder its way through the nautical mob. I was feeling pretty jolly.

But that radio program knocked be back into tracker journalism-critic mode in a flash. Almost as soon as I got home after dropping Joe and his mom off, I poured myself a beer and looked into this Science Today program that brought such an obscure, if interesting, topic as plants’ drought response receptors to KCBS’s  large audience.

If KCBS pays even a dime for Science Today, it can’t pay much more than that. It turns out the segment is entirely from a University of California outreach effort. The specific program is I heard is here. This is hardly the first time that a major news outlet, print or broadcast, has jobbed specialized medical or science coverage out to a local research institution such as a medical center for health tips. But this, like other instances, is nonetheless discomfiting. Not awful, but somewhat sideways from what a professional, major news outlet usually does. And while I’d missed it, it’s been under way for three years or so – as seen in the site’s about item.

I’m a Cal grad, love the dickens out of UC Berkeley and the whole multicampus university. Its press officers over the years have included some of the most sterling people I know. But they don’t do journalism. It’s science writing and broadcasting, but not journalism. And I don’t really see any bad guys at KCBS, either. If they think getting science to their audience is a good thing and can’t budget themselves a science reporter in house, UC is a pretty solid bet. At the same time, the decision to do a segment about incremental progress in hormone receptor botany is pretty weird news judgment.

The program is merely a sign of the times, I reckon, another illustration of frustration by research institutes generally that fewer and fewer reporters in public media pay any attention to their press releases. They are, as we all know, finding ways to pipe their science news directly to the public. They see a void and are filling it. UC’s response, apparently, includes this direct access to KCBS’s audience. Unless I missed it, KCBS does not even identify the program’s source, in any prominent way, as the University of California with its explicit mission to highlight UC research. This a long way from the old days when I remember listening KCBS on a car radio and hearing the very story I’d put in the morning SF Chronicle regurgitated, with a little rewrite but same quotes and themes. They didn’t say then where they got it either. But by taking such news straight from the source and its press agents, there is no disinterested reporter chewing on the newsiness of it at all.

- Charlie Petit

For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts at ScienceBlogs and at Forbes, you might be interested to know that this is not a new phenomenon. Long before “blog” entered our lexicon, E.B. White, the eminent prose stylist–who, to my knowledge, was not especially known as a defender of journalistic mores–railed against a similar situation in Esquire magazine–in 1976!

David Cay Johnston reminds us of the episode, in a post on Romenesko:

In 1976 a company with an impeccable reputation, Xerox, paid $40,000 plus $15,000 in expenses to Harrison E. Salisbury, a journalist of impeccable reputation, to write a 23-page essay about our nation for Esquire magazine. Xerox had no role in editing the piece, it just book ended Salisbury’s eloquent words with its ads in what Time Magazine reported was planned as “the first Xerox special in print.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Here’s what E.B. White had to say, in part:

“Whatever money changes hands, something goes along with it–an intangible something that varies with the circumstances. It would be hard to resist the suspicion that Esquire feels indebted to Xerox, that Mr. Salisbury feels indebted to both, and that the ownership or sovereignty of Esquire has been nibbled all around the edges…A funded article is a tempting morsel for any publication–particularly for one that is having a hard time making ends meet. A funded assignment is a tempting dish for a writer, who may pocket a much larger fee than he is accustomed to getting.”

The entire post is worth reading; it’s not too long. I urge you to take a look. Also, note the details concerning the founding of The New Yorker.

- Paul Raeburn

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA,  gets a remarkable and engrossingly deep look by the journalists working for Science today. It is now 20 years since passage of procedures by which U.S. native tribes can demand return of human remains and archeological items taken from public lands and since placed in museums or other institutions. It has from the start meant not only that deep ethical wrongs may be corrected, but that research on the prehistory of North America can be hindered. Looted graveyards and displayed remains in glass cases can be deeply offensive both to the relatives of the people in the graves as well as to most right-minded people generally. But how does one identify which modern groups can make valid claims? From many scientists comes outrage that invaluable clues to the peopling of North America are being lost – buried or even cremated – in undue deference to superstition and myth.

One suspects most US readers of ksjtracker have already a rough handle on these things. Today’s Science in print and on line, freely readable to all (with registration), turns several writers loose on the issue -  contributing correspondent Andrew Lawler, free lancer Keith Kloor, and Science‘s European editor John Travis.  Ramrod to the effort was editor Elizabeth Culotta. Part of its intent is to elicit conversation among readers about their thoughts.

The overall package is here. A pdf is also available to reporters with access to the magazine’s SciPak at the EurekAlert press packaging service AAAS provides.

I’ve read rapidly through the lot and am impressed. The prime new issue is recent revision of the act, making it possible for today’s U.S. Indian nations to lay claim to remains and grave goods that are extremely old, or otherwise ambiguous. This is so even if researchers insist no affinity can be established. In some cases, they are certain there can be no direct link at all to any surviving people or culture. The word preposterous comes up.  Bones up to and even beyond 10,000 years of age, such as those of famed Kennewick Man found along the Columbia River, surely predate the migrations that led to the communities in the area today, they argue. Yet remains that old are becoming exceedingly difficult to study as tribes assert control of them.

It is a conundrum. Most Americans think there is little sacrilege in studying ancient remains of peoples of all sorts. Furthermore, separation of church and state, I suggest, gives a sense of sacrilege little legal standing. Yet oral histories and clearly religious beliefs including stories of special creation embraced by many Native Americans are being accorded standing equal or even superior to evidence-based argument. Seems simple enough that that’s not quite Constitutional, as one might infer from how public school science classes and mandatory airing of creationism are treated in court – except for the degree of autonomy and sovereignty also accorded native Americans by treaty. Gad, it is complicated. To give it a fair, broad airing is a journalistic challenge.

This package, a long time in the making, lets readers confront many points of view. There are not sides so much as a huge gradient of opinion among both Native Americans and others. There is a great deal of cooperation too. But just for one example of the issue’s intractability, try to read the Q & A by Keith Kloor with an archeologist who assisted in the reburial of remains of a Pueblo community’s ancestors and not be moved to deep sympathy with the act’s general aim, science or no science. This package is provocative. The conversation that ensues will, doubtless, have some very provoked people taking part. One hopes there are a few cooler heads, too.

By the way, Kloor at his Collide-a-Scape blog is providing more info from his reporting for the series, and says he expects to post within the next week further on the issues the package raises.

Related News:

The package includes an account of a hank of Lakota medicine man and chief Sitting Bull’s hair, efforts at DNA extraction, and hopes by descendants to settle some arguments. Thank you John Travis not only for being sure I noticed this package, but for pointing out that while it moves the ball forward,  it has no scoop on the essence of the Sitting Bull story. A writer who until recently worked at arch rival Nature got there first.

• Science News (Aug. 17) Alexandra Witze: Genome of a chief / Ancient DNA experts say they are analyzing a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair ;

- Charlie Petit

Nature has a poser of a paper in this week’s issue. It’s like discovering that when one’s strips the ice from the Arctic, the polar bears actually LOVE it. The gist is that when three researchers at Imperial College London and one at the University of Colorado, each an esteemed place in the climate change game, went to document the cooling effect on Earth’s surface rendered by the recent low in solar output (and in sunspots and storms), their presumptions hit a brick wall. Data said the result was the opposite. The London team leader told the UK Guardian‘s Damian Carrington, “When I first saw the results I thought we had done the calculations wrong.” At least, I think she told Carrington that directly – I do know that I don’t notice that quote anywhere else. It is  not in the ICL press release (see Grist). Many other articles in the British daily press use only the somewhat stiff quotes provided in the release.

One must note that the study covers just three recent years. Confounding as the results are, the study’s authors fall all over themselves, via the press release statements, declaring two important caveats. First, three years is not enough to nail down the effect of solar activity on Earth temperature. One thinks of, for instance but they don’t mention, the documented cool weather that transpired centuries ago during a period, known as the Maunder Minimum, when sunspots were near-absent and implicitly solar activity was low. That would agreeably say, as intuition suggests, that a dimmer sun makes a cooler Earth. Second, they say that no matter which way the effect goes, their data imply the envelope of solar variability is too small to have more than about ten percent the impact on temperature forcings than that caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Unless reporters get other sources to back up a different conclusion, then one might expect stories to regard this development as curious, but not of much impact on the overall science of climate change. Check the headlines in the roundup – this news is getting interpreted on the big stage in more than one, politically-charged direction. Today, in another post, I link to a Guardian story suggesting that contemporary daily science journalism tends to induce the collective production of essentially identical stories. This bunch is a counter-example. Some samples suggest scientists have thus underestimated the severity of greenhouse forcing, others prefer the idea that this just shows scientists collectively don’t know what they’re talking about, and other variations.

One must say this news is not  easy to explain even without this conundrum implying that maybe a  hotter sun = cooler Earth surface. It has do do, at heart, with the varying partition of power delivery to different layers of the atmosphere as things change. As it is, I can follow the logic each time I read it, but then promptly forget why it is that the greenhouse effect may warm Earth’s surface but it chills the stratosphere. Now along comes this new switcheroo.

Stories:

• Register – Lewis Page: Much of recent global warming actually caused by Sun ; Amidst his bofffins and boffinry refs, usually a mask at the Register for some fairly sharp reporting, Page fails to back up the sensational hed and lede. In fact, as one goes along, the story accurately notes the authors’ feeling their work is interesting, maybe important,  but not yet conclusive of anything. It’s impossible to find in his story backing for his assertion on top that the work “downplays the influence of human-driven carbon emission” to a degree worth enunciating with emphatic tone.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Ozone study dims Sun’s global warming role ; Not bad at all. Connor bravely dives into the complex atmospheric chemical, dynamic, and radiative reactions to solar input and spectral shifts. At least, a reader might get the sense that such things occur, but there’s not enough here to leave a  feeling of understanding them. More important is his upshot remark: “..the findings do not undermine theidea that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the main cause of global warming…”
• Vancouver Sun – Richard Alleyne : Stronger Sun makes Earth cool, not hot: Experts ; Alleyne actually works at the UK’s Telegraph, but it’s more fun to link to the version in a paper called The Sun. Other than the excess confidence implied by the hed that this case is made, it’s a decent, short job. It says climate science is complicated but, overall, this study provides more comfort to the scientific mainstream worriers than to the skeptics who say mankind is not moving the thermostat enough to mean squat. (direct Telegraph link here).
• Financial Times – Fiona Harvey: Sun throws new light on global warming ;
• CBC (Canada): Sun’s role in global warming questioned ;
• Nature.com – Quirin Schiermeier: Declining solar activity linked to recent warming / The Sun may have caused as much warming as carbon dioxide over three years ; Solid job, which is exactly what one hopes and expects to get from the journal’s own in-house journalists.
• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: Satellite data sheds new light on solar cycle ; Really, sheds light? It should say shed, plural form, but that’s not the point and neither is the cliche of shedding light. This is kind of like the F.Times hed three bullets up – no hint of meaning. The story’s solid, marching through the main points with a couple of asides to note specific weather lately.
• Carrentals.co – Hannah Westfield: Solar Activity Linked to Recent Rising Temperatures ; I’ve been noticing this Carrentals outlet popping up on news search routines recently. Usually ignore it. It’s in the UK. I’ve no idea how it works or whether Ms. Westfield is a paid or unpaid blogger or what. But it is a car hire rating agency, and does run science items regularly. This particular one is written a bit cheekily, not badly but apparently entirely off press release. Still, it’s an odd outlet to find carrying science reporting, and while not outstanding in this instance, it is science journalism. Times are changing.
• Discovery News – John Cox: WHEN THE SUN HEATS UP, EARTH…COOLS? ; My question exactly. A skilled weather writer, Cox (who was, for several years, a back up vacation replacement tracker at this site) tackles this just right. We have a puzzle, it’s answer is not yet in, the data should spark no grandiose pronouncements on general climate change theory or policy, but it might be very important and at the least is a puzzle of the first water. Then he stops. Short piece, right on. I filched the picture he used, too, up top right.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Sun’s Surprise: Even As It Relaxes, It May Heat Earth’s Climate ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Solar Surprise for Climate Issue ; Longer than most, ergo more complete, and sporting considerable outside opinion.
• National Geographic – Ker Than: Sun’s Impact on Climate Change Overestimated ;

Grist for the Mill: Imperial College London Press Release ; Nature abstract;

- Charlie Petit