A Southwest Research Institute scientist says he has figured out a scenario for the birth of Saturn’s rings. The planet, abetted by a disk of hydrogen gas, consumed a large moon billions of years ago, stripping it of its outer ice layers as its spiraled toward doom in the planet’s immense atmosphere.

That’s pretty dramatic in itself, but how about a crime angle too? The AP‘s Seth Borenstein spins the tale darkly as a “case of cosmic murder.”

I dunno that “murder!” is the first thing that crosses my mind when a shooting start flares in the night sky, but Borenstein keeps the CSI-mood going by declaring that Saturn stole its victim’s ice in the course of this murder most foul. He settles down fast after that, explaining the rudiments of the hypothesis, published on line Sunday by Nature, and comparing it to other scenarios proposed for the rings’ formation. He includes a note that what was originally a scattering of ice somehow released from the moon not only formed rings, but some of it reagglomerated into little moons.

How exactly a moon might be selectively stripped of its icy mantle, but not have its rocky innards spread wide too, is not explained very well  in most news accounts, including the AP’s, but it presumably has to do with the Roche limit, cohesion…. I dunno, really. Stories below take a hack at it.

Other stories:

• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Saturn’s Rings: Robbed From a Moon? ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Saturn’s Rings May By Remains of Ripped-Apart Moon ;
• ScienceNews – Alexandra Witze: Saturn’s rings explained ; She does the best at the explanation – first the moon gets heated and mooshed and segregated until water and ice are nearly all on the outside, and then tidal forces start dismanatling if from the outside in.
• AstronomyNow – Emily Baldwin : Saturn stripped icy moons to create rings ; Writer for this UK mag is an astronomer – and explains this well, too.

Grist for the Mill: SWRI Press Release ;

ps – We also have news circulating on the weird ridge of the Saturnian moon Iapetus. That’s really obscure, but really interesting too.  Tomorrow, perhaps.

- Charlie Petit

On Friday time ran out before I could get to this post, a pleasant excursion through some purely entertaining news from a smaller journal and about strange monsters and a vanished people.

The news is that a researcher based jointly at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Mus. of Nat. History in the Netherlands, along with a colleague in Indonesia, have diagnosed some very large bird bones from the island of Flores as from six-foot-tall, now extinct relatives of today’s Marabou stork. They were in the same cave where researchers found the diminutive bones of so-called Homo floresiensis, the famed and still disputed hobbit-people that may have been among the most recent surviving members of the Homo genus aside from us and maybe Neandertals. A report on it is in the Zoological Society of the Linnean Society.

Among the first, perhaps the very first, with the news was BBC in a report from its Earth News reporter Emma Brennand last Tuesday. It seems to have cast the near-universal template of how this news was to be handled everywhere – a big bird lived among little people thousands of years ago and may well have eaten them or, at least the babies among them. That last speculation, put rather gently in the third graf, arises from the observation that modern storks are indiscriminate carnivores, eating pretty much anything that they can get their beaks on. If there were little people, toddlers say, in range: ergo muncho. Oh c’mon, surely a hobbit mom would know enough to keep a close eye on little Bilbo in stork country. But that’s all it took for the headline writers to let fly. The storks, by the way, may themselves have been too big to go airborne.

Other Stories:

• AP - Robin McDowell: Remains of a giant stork found on Indonesia island that was home to many extreme-sized creatures; Note I wrote “near-universal template” about the BBC’s account and the eating of hobbits. McDowell’s story, huzzah, says nothing about that – only that this was one hell of a stork and that among other of its contemporaries were komodo dragons and some very large rats. But note the different commonalities among the following headlines.
• Telegraph (UK) : Giant stork ‘preyed on Flores hobbits’ ; Notice the quote marks. Nobody in the story, which also has no byline, is quoted to have said that. So what’s the point of the quotes? That even the editors don’t really believe it, or made it up, but want some cover?
• Toronto Star – Lesley Ciarula Taylor: Were ‘hobbit’ humans killed off by giant storks? ; The hed is a question. Nothing in the story remotely suggests that the answer is yes – and Ms. Taylor indicates she interviewed the paper’s lead author so she could have asked the question directly and share the answer. But she, or perhaps more likely the copy desk, just asks it of the hapless reader.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Stork that ate babies, rather than delivering them ; What a dreadful hed – to follow that initial verb with a gerund shows no respect for parallel phrasing in sentence construction. It should be rather than delivered them. And his second graf says explicitly there is no evidence it ate’em, anyway.
• LiveScience – Charles Q. Choi: Giant Storks May Have Fed On Real Hobbits ;
• TMCnew – Erin Monda: An Article in Which Frodo Gets Eaten by Stork ; I love that hed. The story is wiser than the hed may suggest. I dunno much about TMCnews, but Ms. Monda does a graceful job here laughing at the news business, with tongue in cheek.

A passel of smaller outlets ran with the news, too. I could not find, although I suspect there is one, any press release that may have boosted this story. But before we turn the page, here’s one more very different piece of info from the even stranger corners of strange news. In fact, that is what this is filed under. I came upon it while looking for the original of Mr. Choi’s offering, bulleted above.

• LiveScience/Strange News – Clara Moskowitz: Phallic-Shaped Rock Discovered in Maryland: First quote: “Holy crap, what’s that?” And it goes up from there. To increase the value of this journalistic triumph, Moskowitz links to a blog where one may also learn of a Stone Age Dildo Found in Sweden.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Some stories from México and Costa Rica show euphoria with the results of the UN climate change talk in Cancún. Other countries –specially Spain- are more skeptical. Bolivian press tries to explain why Bolivia was the only country that didn’t support the deal, although admitting that it was totally ignored by international community. In general, good coverage of the meeting.

La cumbre del clima en Cancún ha servido para pulir asperezas, recuperar la confianza en las negociaciones multilaterales, acordar un insuficiente pero nada despreciable fondo verde de 100 mil millones, y acordar un pacto incluyendo a EEUU y China que –si se cumple (no es vinculante)- nos pondrá en una dirección muy positiva. ¿Satisfechos? Eso siempre depende de las expectativas previas con que partíamos. Y por lo que reportábamos antes y durante la cita, en términos relativos podemos sentirnos contentos. No todavía en términos absolutos. Otorguemos un grado de confianza al pacto, pero sin bajar en ningún momento la guardia. Veamos qué opina le prensa latinoamericana empezando, cómo no, por Bolivia. En La Razón, el embajador ante la ONU Pablo Solón explica porqué Bolivia no apoyé el pacto acordado por el resto del mundo: falta de ambición. Bolivia quería limitar la subida de temperaturas a un grado centígrado en lugar de dos (el embajador dice –no sabemos bajo qué evidencias científicas- que la Tª del planeta subirá 4 grados) , acordar una reducción de emisiones del 50%, y crear un tribunal de justicia climática. Nada de esto se consiguió, y “por principios”, la delegación boliviana fue la única que se opuso al pacto. Resultado: la ignoraron. Según una Editorial “Bolivia en Cancún” de la Razón, “Bolivia murió con las botas puestas”, aunque “la Pachamama no ha llevado muy lejos al presidente Morales”. El editorial rechaza la palabra éxito, y cita el titular de El periódico de Cataluña de Antonio Madridejos y Toni Cano: “La cita de Cancún celebra como un éxito un acuerdo de mínimos”. Continuando con Bolivia, La Prensa se muestra más crítica en “Solón explica por qué Bolivia quedó sola y no firmó en Cancún”. La expresión “se quedó sola” se repite al inicio de una completa nota con palabras todavía más extremas del embajador Solón, alerta por futura escasez de agua según Evo Morales, descontento de ONG’s, y unas líneas finales en que califica de fundamental el papel de Brasil y México. Opinión transmite que ”El Fondo Verde de Cancún es sólo maquillaje”, y La Jornada habla de fracaso de Evo Morales en Cancún. Los Tiempos tacha de radical y aislacionista la posición que asumió el país, y recoge las palabras de Evo Morales quejándose de que las potencias no entendieron la posición boliviana, y que seguirían solos en la lucha. Buen resumen este ñultimo enlace.

En algunos países la cobertura es muy diferente. En La Nación (Costa Rica), Pablo Fonseca se muestra casi eufórico en “Cancún devuelve la fe en la lucha contra el cambio climático”, y en “El multilateralismo también ganó en Cancún”. Habla de “nueva era”, de “dejando cortos todos los pronósticos”, y de “fiesta en Cancún”. La costarricense Christina Figueres tuvo un papel destacado, pero nos suena un pelín exagerado el optimismo de Pablo.  En México, amplia cobertura de El Universal con notas de Silvia Otero, Thelma Gómez y Jorge Ramos como “Acuerdan crear Fondo Verde por 100 mil mdd”, “Nace era de la tecnología verde”, “Bolivia se quedó solo en la cumbre”, y “Greenpeace reconoce avances en la COP16”. Leyendo sus textos, se percibe optimismo, pero también cierta cautela. En el primer párrafo del primero de los enlaces se lee “pero el acuerdo no define de dónde provendrán los recursos (del fondo verde) ni fija metas de reducción de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y los compromisos de las naciones en vías desarrollo para medidas de mitigación, siguen siendo voluntarios”. Milenio refleja las alabanzas a la gestión de México por medio de Lorena López en “En Cancún se pudo, presume el presidente”; un buen pero quizá demasiado complaciente texto. México gestionó fabulosamente la cumbre, pero quedan grandes retos, y no lo debemos olvidar.

En posiciones intermedias, que son las más interesantes, podemos encontrar títulos agraciados como el de Manuel Asende “Cancún resucita la negociación, no el clima” en Público (España). Destaca el fondo de 100 mil millones de dólares, pero también que “todo queda sin atar hasta dentro de un año en Sudáfrica”. En El País encontramos una muy completa nota del enviado especial Rafael Méndez “Cancún da otra oportunidad al clima”; con contexto, seguimiento de los momentos claves, clasificación de ganadores y perdedores, y buen resumen de los acuerdos alcanzados. Muy objetivo; se entrevé un “mejor de lo que pensábamos”. Con información de agencias, El Mundo titula “La Cumbre de Cancún logra sortear la amenaza del fracaso” y “Se avecina nueva batalla por el clima en Sudáfrica 2011”, calificando de “ligero avance” el pacto de Cancún.  Realmente, si Cancún ha sido un paso adelante significativo o una limpieza de cara tras Copenhague, lo veremos en los próximos meses.

El tracker quizá se equivoca; pero tiene una ligera sensación que a los medios del cono sur lo ocurrido en Cancún les importa un poquito menos. Sólo es una percepción. Algunas notas destacadas son el buen titular (discreto contenido) de La Nación (Argentina) “No es un final, sino un nuevo comienzo“, y el texto más amplio de Laura García Oviedo “Logran un sorpresivo acuerdo para frenar el cambio climático” (ehem por lo de “frenar”), que se centra en el deshielo de los glaciares. Más pesimista, el enviado especial de Clarín Gustavo Sierra en “Con incertidumbre, cierra la Cumbre de Cancún”, que también redacta un extenso texto –casi crónica- sobre la rápida velocidad a que se derriten los glaciares argentinos.

Curioso que El Universal (Venezuela) utilice la palabra “éxito” en “Cumbre del clima de Cancún se coronó con éxito”. Al final, la percepción se reduce casi al grado de confianza que depositemos en los que deban gestionar el acuerdo. Lo resume muy bien un editorial de El Comercio (Ecuador): “Cancún: un giro positivo” en que se valora positivamente el cambio de inercia y pacto que incluye a China y EEUU, pero recuerda que “ahora el reto es volver vinculante el acuerdo y encaminar el compromiso de China y EE.UU. para acercarse al Protocolo de Kioto que han sido reticentes a firmares volver vinculante el acuerdo y encaminar el compromiso de China y EE.UU. para acercarse al Protocolo de Kioto que han sido reticentes a firmar”. Les seguiremos de cerca.

- Pere Estupinyà

Has it only been two weeks since NASA’s press conference, originally planned as a celebration of cool science and then found its first job was to clear the air over stupid rumors that scientists had discovered alien life – and then saw the actual results published in Science  and NASA’s original p.r. plan go through its own ringer and  storm of criticism?

That’s a long sentence because a lot has happened and boy, that was fast. Some these days are saying the press was slow to catch on to the doubts in the academy. And yes, the first day or two of reporting were pretty faithful to the press conference’s assertions. But still – two weeks and a full ruckus has unfolded in public complete with blogging scientists providing a layer of net-propelled peer review.

It is reminiscent, but on a smaller and far faster scale, of the fuss sprung in August, 1996 when another paper in Science, by NASA researchers at the Johnson Space Center and a colleague at Stanford (head of the National Research Council) said meteorite ALH84001, found in Antarctica where it had fallen 13,000 years earlier to complete a journey from Mars, appeared to contain fossils left by microbes on the red planet. .

The Mars meteorite however took many months to gather the full press rebuke from colleagues. A similar if less-sensational process has taken mere days for the arsenic-tolerating microbes of Mono Lake. The difference, one might argue, is that modern digital media and the rise of blogging scientists and science writers alike vastly spread both the original news and the grumblings and brickbats from other researchers.Of course there was email and other electronic gossip 15 years ago, but nothin’ like this. One must hasten to add that it is impossible to say for sure how the current episode will play out. Full analysis may reveal that, in fact, arsenic has been swapped atom for atom into the DNA and maybe even RNA of Mono Lake’s strange microbes. Then will come vindication for the Arizona State U. researchers. The final chapters may well take weeks or months, and may well unfold largely in refereed journals just like the old days. But the full joining of the battle has been very public and exceedingly fast.

Such speed up has been underway for a very long time. For further perspective, it took many years, decades even, for such mistakes as Percival  Lowell’s canals on Mars, and for the fraud of Piltdown Man, to get history’s judgment. If one goes even way farther back, the come-uppances (justified or not) of Galileo was glacial, and the titanic struggle for priority on calculus between Leibniz and Newton built so slowly it took years for the two to even know they were at odds. This thing is going at light speed by comparison. Its early evolution, in velocity if not ultimate resolution, more closely resembles the affair of perhaps the two most feared and toxic words in modern science and still a prime example of near instantaneous research combat: cold fusion. Physicists were all over the claims by those electrochemists in Utah within days, pretty much like with arsenic bacteria. And just a year ago the fossil known as Ida, the one that was to change everything, has a proclaimed important that underwent similar almost instantaneous demolition at the hand of colleagues, bloggers, and press.

Again, we’re only part way through.  Maybe this will turn out like the the prion story. That hypothesis of a non-viral, non-microbial infection had to survive withering blizzards of criticism and doubt before its vindication and a trip to Stockholm for the vindicatee.

This is all by way of introducing a few recent roundups and thoughtful summaries of how things are going on the  Monolakian front.

Among the best chroniclers of things so far, despite his own self-flagellation for supposedly moving too slowly in the first day or so, has been the UK’s prolific Ed Yong. On Friday at his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science he has a superb timeline of the story’s evolution in press and in culture generally.

Other arsenic bacteria reviews and thumbsuckers:

• Guardian/Science Weekly – Hosted by Alok Jha: The great arsenic bacteria backlash : A superb (but one-sided) podcast this morning, with participants including Vermont science writer David Dobbs, tapes of Carl Zimmer‘s comments to New Hampshire Public Radio, and a UK-based astrobiologist, all the them pretty much rubbishing Science for publishing the research and NASA for promoting the story so extensively. Dobbs is particularly incisive in declaring  the web response from scientists and general bloggers a new form of instant peer review that is overriding NASA’s and Science’s efforts, along with the paper’s primary, author to now restrict the follow-up conversation to traditional, formal peer review. Also on is a sharp UK-based astrobiologist with comments on lack of controls (such as inflicting similar arsenic conditions on a range of other microbes?) and the oddity of an arsenic-backboned DNA that doesn’t quickly dissolve in water.
• Chemical & Engineering News – Carmen Drahl: Arsenic Bacteria Breed Backlash ; Reader Lila Guterman (thank you very much)  brought our attention to this last week in a comment on earlier posts. Drahl’s piece is worth highlighting again as an explanation of technical matters in plain English and providing depth to the general objections one is hearing to the paper’s conclusions.

- Charlie Petit

Happily for those of us at the Tracker, the supply of stories with powerful conclusions–yet based on no evidence–continues to grow.

We might forgive a writer or a news organization for over-reaching a little beyond what the evidence shows. If we catch wind of it here, we give ‘em a ruler on the knuckles and move on. But when writers or broadcasters serve up stories based on nothing–that deserves more powerful condemnation.

Tom Paulson at Humanosphere–one of the new blogs in the National Public Radio Argo Network–has found some lovely examples of conclusions based on nothing.

The subject is the cholera epidemic in Haiti, and who’s responsible for it. A variety of stories have blamed UN peacekeepers from Nepal for bringing the epidemic into Haiti. (Why the peacekeepers came from Nepal, rather than, say, Florida or the Dominican Republic, is a question we’ll leave for another day.)

The Washington Post ran  a short story with the hed, “UN Peacekeepers Called Likely Source of Cholera Outbreak.” But as Paulson points out, the story is a mess:

This [the conclusion in the headline] is based on the assessment of a French scientist, Renaud Piarroux, who didn’t actually identify the source as the UN but said “no other hypothesis could be found.” At the very bottom of the story, it says:

Piarroux could not prove that there was cholera inside the base or among the soldiers. But he also hinted strongly at a coverup.

So Piarroux had no evidence, but no other guesses.

His conclusion: UN peacekeepers brought the bug! Sheesh.

The BBC committed the same crime, Paulson notes, with a story saying “Haiti cholera: UN peacekeepers to blame.” This story, too, is based on the dubious reasoning of Piarroux.

Paulson’s blog is worth watching. You can find it at Humanosphere.kplu.org (a nod to the local NPR station in Seattle, where Paulson is based). Today he calls our attention to a story in the Guardian on a Wikileaks-leaked cable saying that Pfizer put pressure on the Nigerian attorney general to persuade him to drop legal action against a Pfizer trial of a meningitis drug in Nigerian children. I doubt I would have seen that if I hadn’t been watching Paulson. And I’m glad I saw it.

Paulson is doing a nice job of uncovering suspicious stories and suspicious science. That seems to be his emerging specialty at Humanosphere. And it’s a good way to go.

Paulson and I are friends. If you think that’s tainting my judgment, take a look at his blog and judge for yourself. What I don’t yet see in the posts is the dry wit that Paulson is famous for in person, but I suspect as this newspaper reporter becomes more comfortable blogging, we’ll see more of that. In the meantime, put Humanosphere in your feed reader.

- Paul Raeburn

Earlier this week fellow tracker Paul Raeburn rightly took apart (previous post) a published argument in Slate that because more US scientists are Democrats than are Republican, and because climate change would favor Democratic-type big government policies to solve it, that climate scientists are therefore consciously or not tilting their data and analyses to favor the Democratic Party’s agenda. Further, the author suggested, it may not quite be fraud but the consensus that greenhouse forcing is one monster of a problem is an instance of politically and ideologically blinkered error. Paul asked, correctly, big talk and where’re the data to show that Democrats do science differently than do Republicans?

Fine. But the general idea of scientific evidence as human construct is getting a lot of play in other forums. No better example, and one much harder to dismiss, is in the Dec. 13 issue of the New Yorker in an article by science writer Jonah Lehrer, a freelancer and contributing editor at Wired. It’s behind a subscription and pay-to-play wall, but get your hands on it if you can. This article is a mind-bender.

The thesis is that most published results in journals are never replicated, or if they are, the original dramatic results that got a conclusion into a big journal tend to fade with time. Most of this examples are drawn from the behavioral, biological, and general health literature. He has so many instances to exhibit that one thinks there is clearly something to this.

Reliable blogger Keith Kloor is also bringing attention to the piece this week, and notes that it resonates strongly with an article in the Atlantic by David H. Freedman on the flimsy statistics used to support many conclusions published in medical journals.

Both these stories are must-read by science writers.

The New Yorker story is full of anecdotes, anguished quotes from scientists worrying about why their initial results are not standing up, and such terms as publication bias, the decline effect, significance chasing, and verbal overshadowing.

I must say I don’t much like the hed. It’ll attract readers but is not backed up by the story: THE TRUTH WEARS OFF / Is there something wrong with the scientific method? ; I don’t believe Lehrer thinks truth itself is pulling fast ones on us, but that people have a hard time seeing it. As for scientific method – you know, keen observation, stout attention to statistical significance,  replication of results, a reliance on doubt as a stronger guide to reality than faith, and so on – the story does not suggest there is any better road toward truth. Paraphrasing the NYorker story, what’s wrong is that, given human frailty, the scientific method’s standards are easier to recite than to follow.

As a physical sciences snob, it went down pretty easy with me to read that in the behavior and medical sciences the reliability of published findings is erratic at best. But then I read this from Lehrer, after he had already discussed the diminishing evidence (ie failure of replication) for some data on antipsychotic meds:

“The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real world phenomena (in one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.”

Well! Really? By contrast to the extensive detail he provided from the softer sciences, this is all he has on physics and such. One is left wondering what the ten standard deviations in the fine coupling constant mean in absolute numbers, and what physicists say about changes in understanding of neutron decay physics and whether they are distressing. Ditto with boreholes and measurement of gravity. Without more, I can easily assume that that if the data have waggled around it’s just because the measurements are pretty hard to make. Further, gravity and its underlying physics are among the perennial hot items among theorists and experimenters alike. Physicists love to see data change and to refute what’s already in textbooks. So if the numbers in the manuals are changing, that seems like a good thing. Obeisance to an  unchanging “law of gravity” doesn’t reflect modern physics, either, as many sorts of alternates are continually blinking in and out, like virtual particles along an event horizon. (for more see update below)

Neither the Atlantic nor New Yorker articles address one likely, obvious cultural impact of such stone-casting at the glass houses of science. Climate change contrarians and skeptics may celebrate them as vindication of the idea that, conscious or not, global warming is a concoction of liberal thinking. That’s sort of possible, sort of. I’d mark a boundary between the overt bias one might find at Greenpeace or the Natural Resources Defense Council – not that it’s inappropriate in such groups – and the subtle-at-most bias found among university-level PhD researchers. Even if, as held in the Slate article that Paul Raeburn took apart in his post, about half of scientists are Democrats any subconscious bias among them surely cannot explain why way more than half of peer reviewed climate change articles accept the consensus that the planet has warmed, is warming, we probably done it, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

In a related topic: A bit of ‘Democratic’ climate news?

I am betting that, while I don’t know, the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has more liberals asssociated with it than conservatives. Just guessing. And I’d apply that to its director Tom Yulsman. Just guessing, again. But here’s a post to ponder at its website:

• CEJournal – Tom Yulsman: The heat goes on… ; Yulsman digs up data hinting strongly the globe is about to finish the warmest year in the modern, recorded era, and warmest in millenniums if one goes by proxy data like tree rings and ice cores used to make hockey sticks. Dunno if liberal bias is at work here in skewing the numbers. My guess: no.

*UPDATE: Not sure what “weak coupling ratio for neutron decay ” means, I sent by email to a theoretical physicist prominent in public discussion and who has his eye on large issues, Arizona State U’s Lawrence Krauss, the graf in the New Yorker on that and gravity measurements.

Here is a slightly amended rendition of his reply:

“The physics references are (deposit scatological bovine expletive here) … the neutron data have fallen, reflecting under-estimation of errors, but the lower lifetime doesn’t change anything having to do with the model of the neutron, which is well understood and robust … And as for discrepancies with gravity, the deep borehole stuff is interesting but highly suspect.  Moreover, all theories conflict with some experiments, because not all experiments are right.”   /  LMK

- Charlie Petit

source Climate Change, http://tinyurl.com/23oe6ga

At Yale’s thoughtful, sometimes path breaking if not always real newsy, Environment 360 news operation freelance energy writer Dave Levitan gives biochar a slow cook of his own. Biochar, you know about that, right? The idea, and such big shots as James Hansen and James Lovelock see it as intriguing and probably worth a shot, is that plant waste from agriculture and other existing activities can measurably slow the rate of CO2 buildup if a big part of its carbon gets buried as, essentially, charcoal.

The analysis in e360 is balanced, but generally sympathetic to the idea that turning a fraction of plant waste into biochar, in a process that also produces some synfuels for sale, wouldn’t cost much, might even make money, would increase soil arability, would not necessarily compete with food or other crop production, and should make a significant dent into greenhouse gas buildup. He includes lots of pros and cons and links to other writings on the topic. His piece, one must add, does not quite say it’s time to employ this tactic.

See what you think. For what it’s worth, I believe I there is a brief instance of unclear thinking in the story. Here’s what Levitan writes about one scientist’s calculation:

“…(his) analysis of biochar’s potential … found it to be enormous. He contends that burning and burying 10 percent of the world’s biomass waste would sequester nearly five gigatons of carbon annually – more than the net 4.1 gigatons that human activity adds to the atmosphere each year. Humans emit roughly 28 gigatons into the atmosphere each year, but much of that is taken up by vegetation and oceans.”

That needs, seems to me, clarification.

Readers presumably might take it to mean our whole, atmospheric,  net carbon insult would be countered by little biochar reactors – low O2 ovens – all over the world. However, it looks, as written, to lure readers into a partitioning error. While humans may be responsible for just 4.1 gigatons that stay in the air per year, we’re still pumping the whole 28 gigatons into the atmosphere up front. Much of it then makes its way into the oceans and into forests and other carbon sinks (although how long can the latter stay there? Standing timber does not seem like a reliable sequestration to me, but that’s another matter).

Thus the 5 gt of carbon we might biochar and bury in the soil would counter the 28 gt we pump into the air, reducing it to maybe 23. And the partitioning of that extra C presumably would follow about the same rules as applied to the original 28 gt. Thus the amount that’d stay in the air, in proportion (4.1 is about 15 percent of 28) would be 3.45 gt, for a net reduction yearly of about 0.6 gt, not the whole 4.1. Maybe that’s not clear, too many numbers, but I’m just saying that when one compensates for a share of the flow into the air, there’s no reason to expect the reduction to apply to only one of the several fates that await the whole thing.

If I made some logical error, I expect to hear about it quick from the smart readers we have here at the tracker.

*UPDATE: I sent to Dave Levitan my analysis of the sequestration numbers. He was kind enough, within an hour or so, to send this reply:

Hi Charles,

Thanks a lot for the post on my biochar story. And it’s interesting you found that passage to be a bit of a problem — my editor and I changed that bit about four times trying to make it as correct, relevant and instructive as possible. I suppose we didn’t quite get there.

You make a good point about the partitioning error, and it wasn’t one I had really thought of (and I should have). I do have one quibble with it though, although this does come from a perspective of incomplete knowledge on the topic: I’m not sure why the percentage that stays in the atmosphere (4.1 out of 28, as it stands) would have to stay the same, rather than just the amount being sequestered staying the same (or meeting somewhere in the middle). In other words,

is 15% somehow a fixed amount that can be absorbed? Obviously, with less CO2 in the air then yes, some things would absorb less of it –like oceans and the whole acidification problem — but I’m only suggesting that the change in absorption might not be as proportional as you suggest. (All that, of course, with the giant caveat that, as I

wrote in the piece, actually conducting such large scale biocharring seems very, very difficult to do and do well.)

Hope that makes sense (and again, if I just don’t understand the

science well enough here, my apologies and I’ll do my best to figureit out). But I do agree with you on the general principle — it could probably have been said a lot more clearly than how it ended up in there. For the record, here’s what Dr. Matovic’s paper said on hiscalculations:

“If 10% of the world biomass NPP is converted into charcoal… it would sequester 4.8 GtC/yr, approx. 20% more than the current annual increase of atmospheric carbon, at 4.1 GtC/yr.”

Thanks again for the post.

Best, Dave.

- Charlie Petit

At Wired Science, where snappy breaking news and medium length insights are common, but long and deeply reported features are not the norm, Brandom Keim has a substantial reader on a problem we’ve all heard about but may not know very well. This could change that. He reviews in engaging, distressing detail the spread of white nose syndrom among several species of American bats. One learns how hard it is to understand, how difficult it is to imagine an easy fix, and the variety of work underway to tackle it.

It is so long that Keim has room to share the sort of detail that’d never make it into a standard sized news story. Well into it, one stumbles across an extended vignette that makes one realize why pork – congressional earmarks – can be good things. Local pols could put some money into something vitally important to their farmer constitutuents, such as to establish a bat research unit. Not now, not in today’s political climate.

- Charlie Petit

AP‘s Seth Borenstein, amid the grind of daily stories, had time to stitch up recent news from space and right here on Earth – that big saline lake alongside Lee Vining, California – into a brief meditation on the Drake Equation. He doesn’t say it that way, but he does discuss for readers the rising odds that alien life forms of some kind exist on other worlds and, one hopes, some of it may be detectable from here.

(YIKES, as several commented, while jamming this together, in a moment of vague cultural allusion and confusion I called the prolific AP science man Seth Borenfeld instead of Borenstein. I don’t even know if Borenfeld is ANYbody’s last name. Sorry about that.)

It’s a sensible job, without excess zeal but with several sources – usual suspects all – consulted for their thoughts.

Illus source NASA Planetquest ;

- Charlie Petit

Reuters, via Wash.Post

So where’s the drama, Mr. Elon Musk, epitome of brash entrepreneurship, so cocky you rub a few people the wrong way? Falcon9, your bigger rocket, the one designed to make serious money, takes off yesterday morning, stages itself to orbit bingity bang, leaves the Dragon cargo capsule there to zip around Earth two times, and then the precious thing that could soon be delivering payloads for NASA sways under its ‘chutes into the Pacific almost exactly on time. I missed the ascent live but watched the video of it shortly afterward yesterday morning. Boring. Nominal this and nominal that. Mission accomplished, not a scratch. Nothing, not one single thing, so  they said at the press conference later, went wrong or made Musk and the rest of the ground crew tense or hunch suddenly over the readout screens. SpaceX has had its screwups and experiences with bad luck in some earlier launches of its smaller Falcon rocket. But this latest went swimmingly, as did an earlier flight of the Falcon9 in June. The nine is for the nonet of kerosene burning motors in the tail. On the drawing board is a still larger one, Falcon9 Heavy, its first stage a set of three regular Falcon9 primaries roped together. So far so good.

Anyway the company formally known as Space Exploration Technologies really earned its registered nickname SpaceX, as in not for kids. It now looks like a fully grown-up, adult company, trusted with the car keys and to drink wine with dinner. Maybe the next launch squirts sideways, or several ways at once,  in the stratosphere and rains its remains into the Atlantic. But for now things look smooth, cool, collected, and competitive. Now if the Tesla car company, Musk’s other wild venture into another tough business, can deliver its four-door electric S sedan to market maybe I’ll dream of having the guts and money to buy one.

SpaceX photo

The NYTimes‘s Kenneth Chang set the stage in yesterday’s paper with a keenly-reported explainer of the stakes, with a concise summary of the market SpaceX may serve if its new rocket worked this and a few more times.  And this morning he describes the launch, capturing quite well both the impressive near-perfection (the splash-down was 52 seconds later than scheduled!) of the test and the flabbergasted near-loss of cool by Musk, usually it says here a “man whose outsize confidence can verge on arrogance.” Exactly right, although I prefer the adjectival form “outsized” for its greater verbish vigor. Anyway, lookit that thing. If you built such a machine almost entirely on your own gumption (and a lot of hired talent) you’d strut too.

Several articles are openly enthused and congragulatory, just like me. The Atlantic‘s noted national correspondent, James Fallows, briefly wrote up the test’s results under the hed Well Done SpaceX, Elon Musk, et al. The bulk of the post is a partial repeat of a previous Q&A Fallows had the foresight to conduct with Musk recently. At MSNBC‘s Cosmic Log, Jay Barbree, NBC’s Cape Canaveral reporter who has covered every manned launch in history from the place, filed it under the hed Something wonderful happened here. ;

And AP‘s Marcia Dunn captured the mission’s promise succinctly in her lede. She started it off “NASA took a giant leap away from the spaceflight business Wednesday as a private company launched….” etc.

I dunno his party affiliation. While Musk has donated some money to Republicans over the years, it’s been mainly to Democrats (data). This  success certainly provides a small boost for The White House. Obama is determined to scotch the NASA in-house rocket contracting program that was supposed to provide a new human-hauling capsule and boosters able to get them to the moon and Mars. He intends to award the business of taking people to space to cab and livery services that build and design their own vehicles and do so largely on their own dimes. In between government jobs, they can cater to super-rich tourists. Dunn put her finger precisely on that with her opening angle.

A few other stories:

• Washington Post – Marc Kauffman: SpaceX rocket launch heralded as successful test of commercial spaceflight ;
• Wired – Jason Paur: SpaceX Dragon Flight Earns Praise, Opens Doors ;
• BBC News: Dragon private spacecraft’s successful test flight
• CNET – William Harwood:  SpaceX test flight of cargo craft a success; “mind blowingly awesome” is in the lede, a quote from you-know-who. Good selection of photos too.
• MSNBC Alan Boyle: Dragon could visit space station next ; This is a more or less standard news story, well put together.  Boyle also covered this story live largely via twitter, with a few longer extracts from his and others’ tweets. This is a media mode that is very popular. I must confess to find it fragmented and unsatisfying. Maybe if I tried being an up-to-date twitterzen I’d think differently.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch: First step of new space era? Hmm. Right theme, but the hed? One thinks Orbital Sciences with its Pegasus launcher might well claim to have taken the first significant step into a private space age. But this surely could be a larger step. Spotts fills us in quick on what cargo gave the capsule some ballast: thousands of commemorative mission patches. Many, one suspects if Musk is as smart as he appears, to members of Congress by SpaceX’s lobbyists and other friends.
• NPR /All Things Considered- Joe Palca: We Have Liftoff: SpaceX Launches Test Spacecraft ; Usual wise, funny Palca – and he makes good use of all the “nominals” from mission control.
• Time Magazine – Jeffrey Kluger : Could Private Space Flight Make NASA Irrelevant? ; Pretty silly story, filed just before the launch. It is a pastiche of thoughts that don’t all cohere. The hed is not off-base from the story – Luger really does think NASA just took a “giant leap toward effective irrelevance…”. Two things wrong with that. First, NASA and its foreign, governmental partners are still to be the paying customers. Second, this fellow appears to thoughtlessly think NASA’s only job is to put people in space even though, if one asked him, he’d probably remember hearing about Cassini at Saturn, the rovers on Mars, and various space telescopes that NASA operates. Note that in her story the AP’s Dunn referred to NASA’s sidle away from the  “spaceflight business.” In NASA-ese, spaceflight means with people. She didn’t forecast a demise for the agency altogether.
• … could do more

Grist for the Mill:

SpaceX Falcon9 news ;

Dept. of irrelevant, except for context:

AP man Seth Borenstein – and thank you very much (and yes I know Seth’s last name, see added remark in another post today, on life in space, a few items up) – recently sent a note urging our attention to NPR and a blogpost by the formidably talented Robert Krulwich. This one discusses a new mapping application that shows the sizes of unfamiliar things by superimposing them over familiar things. His first example is the footprint of Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s moon wanderings in 1969 set upon a soccer field or, alternately, a baseball field. It’s worth reading for its basic info but mostly because the very-private Armstrong liked it so much that, unbidden, he sent Krulwich an expansive note on it, to which the updated story links.

Third, Krulwich’s account serves as a reminder how long mankind has been doing spectacular things off-planet, and how far SpaceX must go to fully stand-in for regulation government work. I heartily wish it luck.

- Charlie Petit

Last year, The Pew Research Center for People and the Press reported that 55% of scientists say they are Democrats, 32% say they are independents, and a scant 6% say they are Republicans.

Who knew? It’s an interesting finding, and you might find yourself wondering, as I do, why that’s the case, and what might explain it.

In an article in Slate, Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, concludes that the Democrats’ scientist-majority is advancing findings that support a Democratic agenda:

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?

Sarewitz reasons by insinuation, not with evidence or data. If he thinks it’s causation, he should make his case–and cite some evidence to support it. He doesn’t bother. He tries to taint scientists merely by asking a loaded question. Sarewitz might also ask the males among them when they stopped beating their wives.

Can Sarewitz show that scientists’ political beliefs affect their findings, which is what he is alleging? No. Again, he insinuates, but does not even try to back up the claim. Instead, he writes, “…Could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride?” Well, it could be, I suppose. But is it? Sarewitz doesn’t bother to say.

Another instance: Sarewitz says “survey data show that the scientific community enjoys the trust of 90 percent of Americans—more than for any other institution, including the Supreme Court and the military. Yet this exceptional status could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics.” Could it be? I suppose so. But where’s the evidence? Mr. Sarewitz? Hello? Hello?

Maybe it’s unfair to hold Sarewitz, a political commentator, to standards of evidence we might demand from scientists. But wait a minute; according to the the Arizona State University website, Sarewitz is a scientist, with a Ph.D. in geological sciences from Cornell. On that basis, I’d say we have every right to demand a little more scientific rigor in his arguments. And what is Sarewitz’s political affiliation, I wonder? Wouldn’t it be fair to disclose that if he is alleging that others are reaching conclusions based on their political leanings?

Sarewitz ends his Slate piece with this grand, impressive conclusion: “A democratic society needs Republican scientists.” Really? Based on what?

Here’s my conclusion: A democratic society needs good scientists. And if the public’s overwhelming trust in scientists signifies anything, it might just signify that we have them.

- Paul Raeburn

(Thanks to literary agent Ted Weinstein for the heads-up on this.)

One has to salute any US journalist who gets to go to meetings, and especially to a meeting in Germany. That would be Science News‘s Ron Cowen, in Heidelberg for the meeting of the biannual Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.

He has a couple of good ones:

• Dec 7: Crab nebula outbursts shock astronomers ; The crab, a supernova remnant, has long been thought pretty darned near somnambulent – pumping out X-rays, but otherwise steady as stone. New data mean it’s time to rethink its nature.
• Dec 7: Beast at galaxy core sits, lacking spin ; I have to admit personal interest in this report on the Milky Ways supermassive black hole. It apparently is not spinning, Cowen reports. ?That’s a pretty arcane discovery. But it is encouraging information for those, including some of the sources in Ron’s story, who want to build a telescope to inspect the black hole’s darkly gloaming silhouette. These data came from tests with the technique they hope to use. This is something I know about because  I wrote on the ‘scope project earlier this year, also for Science News.  Thus, I am partial to Cowen for giving this fresh news some attention.

- Charlie Petit