It does seem, after it’s way over as an acute emergency, the gulf oil spill keeps coming back from the dead in the form of postmortem reports and lists of lessons learned. But reporters on the beat roused themselves from their burnt-out torpor for one last week and another this week. The latest is a preliminary working paper (a heavier tome is due next year) from the staff of a White House-appointed  National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. It closely follows a report last week by the National Academy of Engineering – an arm of the congressionally-chartered National Academies that includes the Inst. of Medicine, grand daddy Nat’l Acad. of Sciences, and Nat’l Research Council.

A few examples of coverage of the NAE report were in a ksjtracker post Nov. 17.

Among the more enterprising jobs of transforming this week’s report from yet-another compendium of industrial errors – a compendium more authoritative then most to be sure – is from the Associated Press. Its Seth Borenstein dug out a powerful vignette, and in illustration of the urgency and near-panic of the BP and federal response to the accident when it was unsure whether or when the gusher was going to get corked. I won’t give it away – it’s an engrossing tale of  perspiration and inspiration.

A catch-up on a few other stories missed last week through yesterday:

• Washington Post – Steven Mufson: Reports on spill cite lack of research, investment ;
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou: BP Gulf-Leak Estimates Slowed Efforts to Kill Well ;
• LATimes – Neela Banerjee: BP, government praised for inventive response to oil spill / But a presidential panel also sharply criticizes the company, industry, and federal agencies for being unprepared…” I just read through the national commissions draft staff report (see Grist below). This headline has the info exactly right. The news may be that, as the main hed says, there is praise in there for anybody involved (and such praise is merited for how quickly top management and grunt workers alike poured money and ingenuity into fixing the thing. But the main story lesson remains the utter failure by industry and BP in not preparing and running practice drills for such an emergency, and by the feds in not demanding it be done.
• Forbes – Michael Economides: BP Culture Made Gulf Spill Inevitable ; An aggregation, with links, to other accounts and reports.
• Wall St. Journal: Stephen Power, Ben Casselman, Russell Gold ; Gulf Spill Linked to BP’s Lack of “Discipline” ;

Grist for the Mill: NAE Press Release (Nov. 17) ; Nat’l Commision Staff Working Paper No. 6 (Nov. 22) ;

- Charlie Petit

Among the more pleasant aspect of being a journalism critic, which I was told I am before I realized it myself, is that it’s okay to make things up. As long as it is done transparently. I look at news stories and can hypothesize away about how they got to be the way they are without the need for, uh, journalism. That is, to contact the writer and ask a question or two.

I am smitten at the moment by Carl Zimmer‘s piece on viruses, below the fold p. 1 of the NYTimes’s science section. It is about a Columbia University man who personifies the incredibly fast development of tools and of trains of logic for identifying viruses lurking in living (or recently living) tissue. It is a grand stroll through a busy research complex on campus, building narratively an appreciation for how cleverness and hard work have paid off in almost magical ways for ferreting out from a soup of human or animal cells the tiny admixture in them of viral genes and, with them as clues, for deducing the viruses’ identities. It’s a lot like finding novel bacterial or archaean microbes in the ocean when one cannot culture them, which is pretty amazing in itself  but this virus parallel looks way harder.

It’s a lovely story by this almost frighteningly productive reporter,  Mr. Zimmer (I wonder – does Carl EVER get the yips, writer’s block, middle of night paralyzing anxiety attacks, mad hours or days of frantic procrastination doing anything but write…????  ). About two thirds of the way through is an arresting passage, on autism and a program to see if it can be at least partly viral in origin. So here’s what I made up. I elect to suspect that Zimmer started with that autism aspect as an intended news story, but while reporting discovered a chance to portray a bigger scene. A lot of reporters such as I might stick with the spot news while regretting inability to give the  back story its due. Have we here the alternative, a deliberately buried news story, and lede, for the greater cause of explaining one deep for- instance on how science gets done?

Yes indeed, I am procrastinating when I ought to be looking at the rest of this section….

Other notable headlines:

• Benedict Carey : Virtual Healing for the Real World ; I’m convinced. Virtual reality glasses and digital avatars provide shrinks with powerful new tools for treating social and behavioral disorders, phobias, obsessions, and more. But a question: While the video game industry asserts that violent combat and crime enactment doesn’t warp personality by much if at all, some psychiatrists say here that rather mild social simulations can significantly change behavior – how can it be both?
• Natalie Angier: Reptile’s Pet-Store Looks Belie Its Triassic Appeal ; If you put ‘tuatara’ in this site’s search engine, you will find that I once called it a lizard. That generated fast come-uppance from a reader in New York who commented on this New Zealand reptile’s phylogenetic charms. Angier really gets into it. She blessedly doesn’t call it a living fossil but does, deftly, call it a ‘so-called living fossil.’ Result: nice sketch its natural history, its protected status,  and some of the fast evolution underway inside a creature little changed outwardly from its early Mesozoic ancestors.
• Dennis Overbye : He Was Mr. Universe, but He Was Really n Love With the Stars ; A reminiscence of astronomer and cosmologist Allan Sandage, passed away last week. Overbye wrote the book on Sandage. He tells here  a warm, writerly tale of how things went between them.
• Erik Olsen: Florida Keys Declare Open Season on the Invasive Lionfish ;
• Nicholas Wade: An Exhibition That Gets to the (Square) Root of Sumerian Math ; One suspects Mr. Olsen put on scuba gear himself to get this story. And maybe even vegetarians would deign to eat this creature’s flesh – and thus spare a lot of other Atlantic reef residents from trips down their eager alien gullets. Watch for it on restaurant menus?
• Karen Barrow: Behind the Facade, Post-Traumatic Stress ; It’s not just for soldiers. Victims of violence and rape, too.

As always, lots more. Whole section (and the link inlcudes plenty of stuff not in the science section itself).

- Charlie Petit

I’ll back up that hed in a moment. First, but relevant, it is a bit distressing to skim through a new report released three weeks ago by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that dissects at length (135 pages) the press turnout and performance at the Copenhagen meeting a year ago. It’s not so much that less than ten percent of coverage by the vast media contingent dealt explicitly with science. It was a meeting on what to do about climate, given the already-reported scientific research. Ergo, the action and thus the dramatic news was political. Ten percent on background science seems about right for news media interested in news.

What bothers one, on reading through it, is that at least as much of the overt science reporting there was driven by opinions from NGOs at the conference as by academic scientists. And that may be because the likes of Greenpeace had small armies of press officers on hand. Academic scientists practically none. The IPCC itself has but one full time media outreach person – ie, press agent. I’ve nothing against NGOs. They are loaded with sterling and devoted people. But disinterested they ain’t, agenda-driven they are.

What also bothers is the rather poor performance, which appears reflected accurately in the report’s opening passages, of media generally in handling news that goes under the pejorative tag “climategate.” Thanks again to freelancer and climate-change-specialist Stephen Leahy. In a comment on a post here (next one down) on Friday, he drew attention to this Reuters analysis. I’d seen allusions to it and even responded to blogger talk on it, but until the fast foray this morning, hadn’t read a word of it.

It provides, one ventures after a quick look, essential reading for people interested in science and environmental journalism as a trade. The report has some eye-openers including stats on the stunning turnout by reporters from some nations rapidly moving from the developing world to the ranks of major powers, India and Brazil. Plus China – it send a lot of reporters there.

The report is particularly pertinent as the smaller,  next edition of these UN meetings, formally called the Conference of the Parties 16 (or COP 16), gets set to start in Cancun on Mexico’s Yucutan coast.

Dunno what the press turnout will be, or its demographics, but stories easily available to me from the English-speaking world (which means mainly US, UK, Canada, and Australia) are already giving advance looks at the meeting, including actual news on pledges signed by mayors of cities around the world who got together in Mexico City in hope of setting a tone for Cancun.

Cancun Curtain Raisers, a sampling:

• AP – Charles J. Hanley: As world warms, negotiators give talks another try ; See also AP’s report from Arthur Max in Chersky, Russia, in which Cancun gains mention: Leaking Siberian Ice raises a tricky climate issue ; It’s not leaking leeks, y’know. It’s leaking methane. And the flat terrain is transforming itself into a gullied badlands. One more – Seth Borenstein: Weak world economy cuts carbon pollution last year ;
• CNN – Matthew Knight: Mayors sign global pact to tackle urban emissions ; Far as I know this story is true – people said what it says they said. But I challenge anybody to find anything in this story suggesting that this pledge comes with any muscle. One would think a shred of realpolitik could get into a story such as this.
• Malaysia Star – Paul Gabriel: Braced to weather climate talks ; This is serious, resourceful reporting. Gabriel sits down with the chair of the meeting, Mexico’s Foreign Minister, and gets a view of things one doesn’t see much in US press. On the down side, one must mention, this fine lady seems among the many unsure how careful one ought be to distinguish weather from climate.
• Reuters - Pete Harrison: EU says may unveil CO2 credit curb plan in Cancun ; Also, Chris Buckley: China feels heat of climate change rifts ;
• Indian Express – Shilini Nair: “We need to find a common ground with developing countries on climate change mitigation. This could be possible in Cancun” ; Another serious attempt to address issue, and more nuance too on climate v. weather.
• E&E ClimateWire via NYTimes – Lisa Friedman: Venezuelan Climate Envoy Recalls ‘Bloody Palm’ Incident, Has High Hopes for Cancun ;

Also, another lookback at Stockholm, and look forward….

• Washington Post (Capital Weather Gang blog) Andrew Freedman: A year after climategate, applying lessons learned ; After a solid but unsurprising review of how media, and the US and UK publics have reacted, to IPCC’s flubs and to those stolen emails, Freedman reports on recent repairs to how scientific agencies are handling the delivery of  research results to the press and public.

Grist for the Mill: UN COP 16

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A group of Dutch researchers says that wifi radiation alter leaves growth. The study has not been published in any peer review journal, the methodology used is derisory, and it has been hardly criticized by different sources. But following information from wires, some Spanish online media is assuring that wifi waves damage trees. Interestingly, some influential Spanish blogs complained, and the story has been removed from newspapers like Publico, that even twitted an apology to its readers.

En información científica la blogosfera suele mofarse de los medios, y muchas veces con razón. Ante la vorágine de informaciones absurdas en Internet, el portal que no sea capaz de seleccionar bien qué noticias incluye, dejará de ser una referencia válida para los lectores que busquen algo más que titulares impactantes.

Un supuesto estudio científico holandés dice concluir que las radiaciones wi-fi dañan a los árboles. ¿por qué supuesto? Porque todavía no ha sido publicado en ninguna revista científica. Primera advertencia. ¿Por qué el rintintín del “dice concluir”? porque los propios autores advierten que son resultados muy preliminares, la supuesta caída de hojas más prematura ha sido observada en una muestra de sólo 20 árboles, sin ningún grupo control, y las fuentes oficiales ya lo han criticado. Este estudio no merece el calificativo de científico, y mucho menos airearse por Internet. A pesar de ello, algunos medios recogieron la nota de Europa Press y publicaron que “Las radiaciones de las redes wi-fi causan anomalías en los árboles” (ABC). Incluso se añade un equivocado “demuestran” en la nota. El texto de ABC toma como fuente (¿no debería ser a la inversa?) la horrible nota de PC World: “Wi-fi enferma a los árboles”. PC World se puede permitir el error; ABC no. Y no es el único. Da que pensar acerca del frenetismo de las noticias, que una excelente sección de ciencia como la de Público llegara a publicar la nota, por muy que tras las quejas de sus lectores anunciara por twitter que la retiraba pidiendo disculpas. Buena reacción.

Reconociendo el gancho que tiene la “noticia”, y poniéndonos en la piel de los editores, podemos entender que sea difícil resistirse a citarla, explicando bien que es poco concluyente. Muy Interesante añade interrogantes a “¿Las redes wi-fi dañan a los árboles?”, no utiliza el “demuestra” sino el “sugiere”, y resalta en negrita a la frase: “la investigación aún no ha sido publicada en ninguna revista científica”. El País en “¿Las ondas wifi dañan a los árboles?” trabaja muy bien la información. Subtitula: “Un experimento holandés pretende demostrarlo sin llegar a conclusiones definitivas”, y añade la réplica de la agencia de radiocomunicaciones, desacreditando el estudio. El Universal “Estudian repercusiones de wifi en árboles”, elije un titular más acertado. Redacta su nota con información de El País, pero decide prescindir del matiz crítico.

La noticia va expandiéndose por las diferentes plataformas digitales. Unas le dan cancha, mientras que otras se burlan de la credulidad de las primeras. Dentro de poco tiempo, “fuente válida” será quien se lo merezca.

- Pere Estupinyà

Reuters today has an inscrutable story as runup to the UN climate talks, such as they may be, to get underway in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of this month. Gerard Wynn writes it under the hed, U.N. climate talks must solve forest carbon riddle. It tackles a serious issue. How does one, if and when the world resumes serious efforts to change carbon emissions, factor in the carbon sucked up in plantation forests and then released in part when the trees become paper, lumber, or other products?

This is important, don’t we all know, because in any given year the tonnage of CO2 inhaled and exhaled by plants far, far exceeds the annual increment added by people, mainly from fossil fuel burning. All you need to is glance at the famous Keeling curve of recent CO2 concentration and see those jagged sawtooth wriggles. The up and down jags reflect seasonal growth (and leaf-drop and decay) of shrubbery in the Northern Hemisphere with its larger high-latitude land masses. If one could somehow skew the downstrokes to exceed the upstroke, the biosphere would compensate for that slowly rising baseline in a jiffy. A big if. But tempting to think about. Plants matter.

The Reuters piece, and others on the topic making the rounds, don’t take such a big-picture approach. It is hard to tell exactly how forestry practices contribute of atmospheric CO2 in the long haul from these stories, or why they are so instrumental to any eventual agreement that would return emissions of carbon to a level the world can tolerate.

(Note – confession interjection. I was about to post on another space science story, on an extrasolar planet apparently born outside the Milky Way, in a galaxy now ripped asunder and consumed by that same Milky Way we call home. But that would’ve been all space for the tracker, and that’s a rich diet even for somebody who one imaged a career in astronomy. So I found this nugget on climate change).

Other forestry and carbon stories:

• Asahi Shimbun (Japan) Eiko Yano, Daisuke Sudo, Tomohisa Yamaguchi :Japan jumps into battle for forest carbon credits ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Teguh Surya: Carbon credits have a social price for Indonesia ;
• Philippines Business Insight: Why are forests central to the climate fight?
• Jakarta Globe: The Fine Print on Forest Protection ;

See any pattern? One sampling does not a case for a trend make, but none of these stories found in a quick search are from the US and only one, from globe-girdling Reuters, is from the UK. One is tempted to suspect, but I’ll only raise it for conversation’s sake, is that US and Brit press are exhausted by denialism and chary of  most anything vaguely green and lefty. Too much so, thus far, to give much attention to Cancun.

Looking harder, I do find one close to the topic of carbon, trees, and climate meetings, plus one pertinent to my surmise over patterns:

• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin: Cool rainforests store more carbon, book finds ;
• Bloomberg – Kim Chipman: Climate skepticism in U.S. Bewilders Other Nations, Negotiator Stern Says ;

- Charlie Petit

Only two weeks ago NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft, nee Deep Impact, zipped past comet Hartley 2 and radioed some fine photos of the peanut-drumstick-bowling pin-shaped nucleus spurting condensates and other haze. It does seem that such instant reporting on space feats dampens news appetite for the details that usually follow, but in a short turnaround, NASA released a lot more yesterday and got good mileage from them.

The news is that subliming CO2 seems to be jettisoning fluffy chunks of water ice from the ends, while clouds of water mist seep from its waist. That’s a bimodal behavior that has experts transfixed. It also gives reporters and editors another chance to show off the finely focussed images of this visitor from the solar system’s outskirts.

Stories:

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: NASA probe flew by ‘snow globe’ comet;
• AP – NASA craft braved comet ice storm during flyby ;
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Surprise at a Comet Visited by NASA: A Snowstorm;
• Nat’l Geo News – Victoria Jaggard: Comet is Cosmic Snow Globe, NASA Flyby Shows ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Comet fly spacecraft flew through blizzard ; A brief, but get out your red and blue 3D glasses. Dan includes a binocular image.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Scientists look at ‘snowstorm’ in comet flyby ;
• Los Angeles Times – Amina Khan: Comet Hartley 2 emits ice balls, NASA finds ;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: A cometary blizzard ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(Note – This is posted a day later than planned after mid-composition delay to replace a modem.)

Boosted by hot press releases from institutions taking part in the int’l effort and publication in the esteemed journal Nature, some news outlets are attaching tremendous excitement to word from an international consortium that it not only generated some supercold hydrogen analogs made of antiparticles, but held them prisoner. Briefly. That came in a specially crafted octupolar magnetic field that nudges them into a crowd by taking advantage of the slight polarity in atoms that, overall, have no electric charge.

To read some of the stories you’d think they were shaking the very foundations of physics – rewriting the laws of the universe – opening a new window into creation – glimpsing the infinite – or (you plug in your own hyper-cliche).

It is diverting enough. An anti-proton with a positron in its thrall? That’s neat. But, while coolly levitating in a photonic grail of inward-nudging EM gradients, until it does something  that defies or extends known physics it’s not, one may suspect, quite the breathless new venture into mystery that some accounts suggest. But it is an impressive technical feat and likely prelude to new science. It is a story simply because antimatter has an otherworldly, semi-mythical sci-fi aura to it no matter what the specific news. Ergo, a sure fire lure to the imaginations and eyeballs of many readers.

• AP – Frank Jordans: In breakthrough, scientists trap antimatter atoms ; This story is careful. Notable is an earlier and frothier writeup, here in the Sydney Morning Herald under Physics riddle: scientists claim Big Bang breakthrough,  attributed to AP. Unclear is whether the latter sparked a rewrite, or was by a different reporter, or both.
• Antimatter – Alexandra Witze: Antimatter, here to stay ; Several outlets bring up novelist Dan Brown and his Angels & Demons fiction on how to blow up the Vatican and a lot else. So does Alex – as an opening  joke. Next graf says, in effect, not really. She also provides welcome detail on a competing group’s more ambitious plans – while it lost the race to bottle the first batch, to make bigger antihydrogen blobs for study and right in the next door stall at CERN.
• Discovery News – Larry O’Hanlon: Trapped Antimatter Could Help Spill Universe’s Secrets ;
• Times of  India: Sci-fi a reality: In a first, antimatter captured ; The hed is fine, but the lede shows what happens when rewrite gets hold of copy from “agencies”: Scientists claimed a breakthrough on Thursday in solving one of the biggest riddles of physics….. Not even close. Now, they will see if antihydrogen has any riddles to ask them.
• National Geographic – Ker Than: Antimatter Atoms Trapped for First Time – “A Big Deal” :
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter Spotts: Antimatter breakthrough could help scientists unravel Big Bang mystery ; a calm explanation why this could lead to something big.
• Economist: Gotcha! Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time ;
• NatureNews – Eugenie Samuel Reich: Antimatter held for questioning ; That’s what I call a perfect hed for the savvy readers of a journal such as Nature.
• Financial Times – Andrew Jack: ‘Anti-matter’ trapped in physics breakthrough ; Good enough job. One is unsure why anti-matter is put in quotes that weaken its impact – as though there is another good opinion what it may be.
• Register – Lewis Page: Has CERN made the VATICAN ANTIMATTER BOMB for real? ; No, he says. But read it, if only for the analogy about global thermonuclear war. And the boffins, always the boffins.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: UC Berkeley physicists trap antimatter atoms ; Good good except, oh ’tis hard to twit a pal and mentor, but as Planck, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and others figured out early in the last century, a positron does not jitter around an antiproton in a manner in any way, except vaguely metaphorically, resembling the orbit of a planet of a star. Don’t tell Dave I said that.
• Calgary Herald – Jamie Komarnicki: Calgary researchers make sci-fi antimatter a reality :

And finally, straight to Star Trek…

• PC Magazine – Peter Pachal: Antimatter Breakthrough Could Lead to Starships, Says Scientist ; Yes, scientist. Singular. A well-known one.

Grist for the Mill:

CERN Press Release ; UCBerkeley Press Release ; Lawrence Berkeley Nat’l Lab Press Release ; U. of Liverpool Press Release ; University of Calgary Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

‘sorry bout this, but the cable company’s modem pooped out this morning. A new one is now swapped in, and working (except for the router, which will presumably sign on eventually), but it took hours to fix.

Tomorrow or perhaps this afternoon I’ll get things going. The strange little cloud of antimatter that has the physics news spotlight, and on which I was working when the wider world went dark to my equipment, will be first up.

- Charlie Petit

Last week a post here noted the kerfuffle raised by the Chicago Tribune and LA Times when their publishing house had to pull in its horns over an article that  lumped  a climate answer line for the press at the American Geophysical Union with another, overt campaign to counter skeptics of anthropogenic climate change.

A week later, it is hard to find out exactly the detailed truth and nature of the AGU’s effort – which on the face of it seems to be a legit, not particularly partisan service to reporters.

Thoughts along this line were spurred this morning on reading a pointed and distinctly political, partisan essay at the Washington Post site:

• W. Post Capital Weather Gang (blog) Andrew Freedman: WSJ editorial board spins climate science, again ;

The gist of Freedman’s post is that an editorial page writer at the Journal is accusing the AGU of selectively excluding three prominent scientists from the answer panel. They are the University of Alabama’s atmospheric scientist John Christy, MIT’s physicist Richard Lindzen, and retired physicist and climatologist Fred Singer, formerly at U. Virginia. All three are prominent for doubting that global warming is or can be severe enough to merit drastic interference in the economic system, particularly in what fuels industries and people in general choose to use.

The problem with Freedman’s piece, and he is a reporter not merely a blogger like me, is that he defends the AGU but gets no specific information on the Journal’s implications that the AGU screened the panel for some kind of policy correctness. Did the AGU include these gentlemen in its invitation to volunteers for taking press inquiries or not?  Did the AGU do anything else to exclude them? (It would seem unlikely AGU would bar them, but one can’t rule it out. My opinion: any reporter who calls for answers and gets one of these fellows on the line, and does not know or does not stir himself or herself to find out is a pretty crummy reporter.)

Maybe somebody has reported this more deeply. If so, let me know and I’ll share. I did, in a rare venture beyond reading and reacting to what’s in the press, send a note to the AGU press operation asking what they can tell me. If there’s a reply, I’ll share that too.

*UPDATE

Peter Weiss, AGU Public Information Manager, replies to my query:

AGU invited members to participate in our Climate Q&A Service by means of broadcast emails, sent more than a year ago, to listservs of subgroups of the organization (for instance: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeosciences, Oceanography, etc.) that have members in climate-related fields. Because all of the three scientists mentioned by the Wall Street Journal are members of such subgroups, all would have been on the listservs that were sent the invitations.

Why don’t those individuals remember receiving those notices? I don’t know, but perhaps because those invitations were issued so long ago and because of the large numbers of emails received by so many people these days, the scientists interviewed by the Wall Street Journal didn’t notice the invitations or forgot about them.

BY THE WAY, an oldie but goodie on the climate politics-science front:

Reading through some of the news, including the above WaPost blog, I finally read a terrific piece that Beth Daley did at the Boston Globe earlier this year. Wish I’d not missed it when it was new. She profiled Lindzen and his close friendship with another climate scientist of like-minded politics, Kerry Emanuel, and how it has foundered. Most revealing, and most carefully reported.

Another Perceptive Article:

• E&E Greenwire via NYTimes – Amanda Peterka: Scientists Scramble to Bridge the Uncertainty Gap in Climate Science ; First piece I’ve seen that is at all clear about why Judith Curry is taking so many potshots at the IPCC. Also here are useful insights into the vast gulf between the public appreciation of science (it likes science) and the public understanding of science (it thinks scientists are the ones to go to for answers that aren’t riddled with maybes, uncertainties, error bars, and calls for more research).

- Charlie Petit

With the Gulf Oil catastrophe dropped far off the front pages, and in most papers all pages, I trooped over to the New Orleans Times-Picayune to see if it’s still following things. Yes indeed. An account by David Hammer seems to carry a certain weary air to it, but he covers a new report from the National Academy of Sciences on what went wrong.

While the explicit conclusions, he writes, offer ” little new information” and repeat “well-worn findings,” he does find it startlingly clear in its take on the assertion from BP and its partners that they live and breathe in a culture of safety. Rather, he reports, the panel concluded that daily operations prior to the spill were so undisciplined as to suggest “they never really recognized the risk they were facing.”

Hmmm. American were promised a new, higher degree of federal oversight and regulation of offshore oil work after this disaster. A few reporters, maybe in NOLA, ought to make a note to check back in five years to see how much things have changed.

A Few Other Stories:

• NYTimes (Dot Earth blog) Andrew C. Revkin: Academy Tallies Missteps by Gulf Drillers ;
• NYTimes – John M. Broder: Spill Report Faults BP and Contractors ;
• USA Today (blog) Jessica Durando: BP ignored warning signs on Gulf oil well;
• Washington Post (blog)  Joel Achenbach: What BP should have done ;

Grist for the Mill: NAS report,

- Charlie Petit

One must always consider the source when reporting on environmental threats. For instance, a group in business to warn about them may not be entirely disinterested when judging whether a natural gas operation or a line of whupping windmills is an ecohazard.

The issue came up while reading in the Philadelphia Inquirer an account by Sandy Bauers. Her primary source is the Nature Conservancy. That’s a solid outfit, not known for histrionics. It generally adopts a politically neutral stance on touchy environmental policy issues. Interesting it is to see that, according to this, a shale gas industry representative seemed to react to the report in almost friendly fashion. And as far as one can tell from Bauers’s account, the report’s authors went about their job conscientiously.

Still – would a call to a local professor knowledgeable about woodlands ecosystems have been so hard to make?

Grist for the MIll: Nature Conservancy Pa. Chapter The Energy Equation ; Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Here’s the curiosity of the day. Or of the yesterday, which is the date on a posting at the Post‘s site by Pamela A. D’Angelo on the recent discovery by a Chesapeake Bay waterman of an oyster nine inches long. That’s more than twice the usual. If  things scale normally for oysters, that’s eight times the volume of the average.

D’Angelo, one surmises, is a freelancer. One gathers as much by noting that she also posted, earlier this month, on a local oyster festival but did so for an NBC affiliate, WSLS, in Roanoke Va. One further imagines – sheer fabulation, perhaps – that the festival is where she got wind of this giant oyster and then wrote it for the Post’s site.

What captures interest is that this one, big oyster may be the largest and oldest one taken from the Bay in many years. It may herald a lucky fluke, or perhaps a trend in waters where oysters have become rare and short-lived. She does talk with and quote a couple of authorities. She also took that picture of the oysterman and his big bivalve.

This deserves some followup, one thinks. For one thing, and not that I’d thought about it, but I didn’t even know there still are watermen working the bay for oysters.

- Charlie Petit