Sometimes the shorter a story, the greater its punch. The mind runs wildly after absorbing the AP‘s six-sentence story on decision by the US Air Force to leave its little winged orbiter called the X-37B, already orbiting the Earth for nine months, for an unspecified longer time. Then it is to reenter and steer itself with its stubby wings to a runway at, one can only presume, either at Vandenberg Air Force Base, or at Edwards AFB in California’s Mojave Desert. “..the ultimate purpose has largely remained a mystery,” says this un-bylined squib. Its ride to space was atop an Atlas booster with launch from Cape Canaveral.

Wow. There’s gotta be an Area 51 angle to this somehow.

Looking around for other accounts, however, one finds that secrets there surely are but the basics of the craft and its abilities have been in the news for a long while. A few days ago at the specialty outlet SpaceDaily Morris Jones had a knowledgeable-feeling and in portions clearly speculative story about what this automated spacecraft does and why. And he comes up with a prosaic and reasonable guess what sort of workaday mission the little bird is on. And he hints to why much is already known about it – before the Air Force picked it up, NASA get the program started. (Down in Grist you’ll find the official Air Force fact sheet on it. )

Other X-37B stories:

• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: New Mission For Secret Spaceplane? ; It’s made by Boeing, and Boeing is sniffing around to satisfy a piece of NASA’s appetite for new vehicles able to get people or supplies to the Int’l Space Station. So maybe the spaceplane is running some corporate tests, she suggests. She cites a study published by the aerospace giant’s chief engineer on the X-37B program.
• Santa Maria Times – Janene Scully: VAFB will wait for spaceplane landing ; The story can’t say what the mission is. But this diligent reporter gets the goods on the fine work the Air Force and base contractors are doing to make sure the runway’s divots and bumps don’t burst this craft’s skinny tires. That’s more than puffery. It is  smart reporting – if her sources fill her in on this kind of thing and then see their names in the paper, maybe next time something better will slip out during the conversation. It could happen.
• LA Times: Air Force says it’s extending mission of mysterious X-37B ; This story, as do others, say this machine looks like a small version of the now-retired space shuttles. It has wheels, wings, and payload bay doors. But the shape is different. The comparison seems strained.
• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: Military space shuttle receives mission extension ;
• Space.com – Leonard David (Oct 7, 2011) Secretive US X-37B Space Plane Could Evolve to Carry Astronauts ;

Grist for the Mill: USAF X-37B fact sheet ;

- Charlie Petit

H5N1 virus (gold) in canine kidney cells Cynthia Goldsmith/CDC via NPR

A Dutch team’s efforts to get ready for any H5N1 bird flu pandemic – by making a potentially human-virulent strain via genetic engineering to study its behavior in lab animals – has gotten  intermittent examination in news reports. Among the first reports, and perhaps the very first, in the latest news crop was an NPR blog by Nell Greenfieldboyce on November 17. She reported efforts by the Dutch team to publish details in an open journal. You’d think they were preparing to provide the cookbook recipe for the end of civilization. Ah, maybe they are. A few outlets are portraying it that way and few articles are constructed to allay fears. Her report was followed fairly quickly by a longer, feature-style report at ScienceInsider Nov. 23 by Martin Enserink, who wrote of the now-emerging media storm that scientists fear to be on the way. He does nothing to fend off fear, declaring that if the Dutch virus got loose it could change world history. Taken literally, everything changes history. But one takes this passage to mean something epochal.

This is a second bounce. The tale has been public for awhile, as Enserink noted via links in his ScienceInsider account. In late September in New Scientist Deborah MacKenzie helped get the ball rolling. She related how the researchers first modificed the wild virus to be more lethal, then kept an infection going in laboratory ferrets while looking for spontaneous variants that were not only lethal but had spread on their own from one ferret to another. Soon enough, one arose. Some sources told MacKenzie the exercise is frightening, others told her that ferrets are not people and that if the virus could, given just five mutations, transform itself into a large scale threat to human health it would probably have done so without help. Also reporting that round of news, all  from a conference in Malta,  was Scientific American via its reporter Katherine Harmon, who used the then-new movie Contagion as a hook.  One of the researchers, she reports, himself told her the series of tests was “really, really stupid.” The primary theme one finds in Harmon’s story is not however that a man-made version is the prime threat. That comes from the implied ability of the wild virus to remake itself, eventually, with potentially large impact on public health.

The storm appears to be building. Other, Recent Stories:

• Huffington Post – Timothy Stenovec: Bird Flu: Scientists Develop New Strain of H5N1, Avian Influenza, That Could Kill Millions ; Nothing original, as it is a pastiche of (credited) reports from other outlets.
• Forbes – Rick Ungar: Scientists Create Lethal Human Strain of Avian Flu in Test Tube – Now Seek to Publish Formula For How It’s Done ; Another mashup, and it identifies one of its sources as “Scientist Magazine,” an apparent reference to Science and to its ScienceInsider specifically.
• Daily Mail (UK) ‘Anthrax isn’t scary at all compared to this’: Man-made flu virus with potential to wipe out many millions if it ever escaped is created in research lab ;
• RT (Russia) Man-made super-flu could kill half humanity ;
• Gizmodo: Engineered Avian Flu Could Kill Half the World’s Humans ;
• DutchNews: Expert unease over deadly flu virus ‘created’ in Dutch laboratory;
• The Blaze (ie Glenn Beck et al) Liz Klimas: Pandemic Possible? Scientist Genetically Modifies Bird Flu With Scary Results ;

On the other hand, there is this:

• The Atlantic – Adam Clark Estes: Reasons Not to Panic About the Latest Ultra-Deadly Flu ; There is less below the hed than implied. The story wanders from ordinary seasonal flu to H5N1′s potential, and into the comfort of knowing that CDC is staffed by very smart people. Not much of a thread.

It is not very clear in these reports exactly what the researchers want to publish. An actual recipe, with gene sequences of the mutations that they found sufficient to make the virus nerve-wracking? Or something more general on the general lessons in discovery that similar transformation may not be so difficult in nature?

- Charlie Petit

From top: Imperial, Ivory Billed, and Pileated woodpeckers

This site here went on a one-day NYTimes Sci Times strike yesterday. One glance at its lineup leader, a big profile of Steven Pinker, and this tracker thought bah! and enough on him, what’s new to say and hasn’t he had more than his quota of attention already?! Surely there are better things to do than read this. Peevish of me, overly resentful and suspicious of a guy who seems so suddenly blessed by wide if not quite universal media worship. So I spent some extra time trying to find a thread of meaning in coverage of the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

All better now. Anyway, the Pinker profile is from Carl Zimmer, another pretty much universally admired but outwardly modest writer (inside, nearly all of us are pathetically egomaniacal) of intellectual worth, so I read it. Yes, Pinker gets another buffing. But it has a lively anecdote on him as a teenager to start off, and it persuades further that the Harvard psychologist is on to something and not for the first time. Plus, I after all did go with some pals in a small group we preeningly (with a giggle) call a solon and listened to Pinker’s  book-tour talk in a dignified old club rent-a-hall in the Berkeley hills a month or so ago. Pinker, pale gray mane flashing, convinced me against expectation that our species has gotten more amiable with its own kind in the last millennium or more (while, one notes, we’re killing off other species about as fast as an asteroid). Students might read this to see how a not-so-old old pro, Zimmer, keeps a reader’s eyes moving through a profile, weaving personal anecdote about somebody’s full life with a thread on his or her long list of c.v. achievements. A fine example of craft, it is.

Other Science Times headlines to note:

• Andrew Pollack: New Hope Of a Cure For H.I.V.: No breakthroughs asserted – Berlin patient and promising work on gene therapy employing zinc finger proteases – but an encouraging progress report.
• Laura Beil: The Certainty Of Memory Has Its Day In Court ; This too is not news, but bears repeating again and again. Lawyers need to be able to challenge, and have some public skepticism already planted, by declaring that just because a witness is honest and certain that doesn’t make him or her reliable. One wonders if many trials already include expert witnesses who say pshaw to eyewitness testimony as worth much.  Although, one supposes, people who say they saw somebody they know really well already as in “It was my neighbor Bob, at it again and wearing that stupid shirt he likes so much,” and in clear light and fairly close, well, that ought to get some respect at the bar whether before it or sitting on a stool.
• Ritchie S. King: A Bacterial Platoon with Fungi Engineers ; A spritely brief, nifty picture, and it’s something other news outlets don’t seem to have had. Off a PNAS paper. Maybe there’s a press release? Couldn’t find one but if so, let us know. I looked for and found Mr. King’s site – this is a newbie with promise, not long out of NYU and Dartmouth. He has a little snark to him too – check his essay on what currently  – that’s word play -  is my passion to have an electric car and it is now on order. It grounded me a bit (another one). He’s not on the NYT SciTimes staff list. Maybe an intern.
• Cornelia Dean – A Venerable Birding Club, at an Epicenter of All Things Feathered ; Man, what a tony club that Nutter Ornithological outfit is. I read one paragraph and, being engrossed in a book about Teddy Roosevelt’s post-Bullmoose, ghastly-difficult adventure in S. America (The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard), I looked to see if America’s greatest birder president was a member. Yep. Cory doesn’t mention that, but the story is a brush with 19th century upper-crust naturalist fervor still going strong. And, one hopes, not so snooty anymore.
• Robert Garisto – How Do Eminent Physicists Tackle the Higgs Boson? With Chocolate ; Guest essay. The man is an editor (at a top science journal). He has style.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

S. Africa's Pres. Jacob Zuma addresses the meeting

Hmm. One suspects a UN policy meeting on climate change and its causes hasn’t much on offer if on its second day the hot news is where the delegates are going next time. Whether that’s a good barometer or not, it is of passing interest that the freshly-announced host-in-waiting is Qatar, smack dab in the middle of OPEC territory, world’s largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases, astride a decent-sized petroleum reserve of its own, and rolling in both dough and Arab Spring-fed angst. The ironic contrast of host nation and topic, not to mention abundance of luxury hotels and a big US military presence inspired in no small part by the strategic importance of Mideast oil, will make that a meeting to cover.

A few samplings of the next-host news, and then on to the goings-on at the current meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Kyoto Protocol, and all that jazz.

• Guardian (UK) Jessica Shankleman: Qatar wins bid to host 2012 climate talks ; Shorty, notable because Shankleman is not even there, and got word of the decision via Twitter – and she shares the tweet.
• AFP – UN climate talks move to oil-rich Qatar in 2012 ; Here one also learns the little, conference-seeking nation also recently bagged the 2022 World Cup of international football (soccer to us here in the USA).

Meanwhile, onward and sideward in Durban:

• Inst. for Policy Studies – Janet Redman: Durban Diary: UN Summit’s Stormy Backdrop ; Just a blog, but a fine example of the genre. It’s an international climate meeting, and the weather outside is stupendously bad. Our blogger writes it provided “a perfect illustration” why the meeting exists.
• Reuters – Agnieszka Flak, Jon Herskovitz: EU says climate pact not enough, wants deal by 2015 ;
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Durban for Dummies: Your guide to the UN climate talks ; At least a Brit paper runs this sort of guide. ‘Far as I can tell, it did not send Ms. Gray there. But she put together a decent rundown on issues and what to look for.
• Wall St. Journal – Devon Maylie : Climate talks open amid funding spat ;  A solid scene-setter. Don’t look for signs here of the Journal’s op-ed page’s slant. It is a straight-shooting report on drought, flood, climate, desperation, food reserves and debt. Maylie, who one suspects is based in Africa, is there, as seen in this additional shorty datelined Durban and on the World Meteorological Organizations pro forma announcement on 2011′s weather. It is lined up to be 10th warmest ever, helping to make the last ten years the hottest ten years on record. Also, however, La Nina notwithstanding, it does not refute declarations from some quarters that somehow temperatures’recent flattened trend is itself trend not fluctuation (fat chance of that, one thinks);
• Forbes – Eric Roston/Michael Liebreich: Stop the Annual Charade of UN Climate Talks ; in line with the above caution, don’t look for signs here of Steve Forbes’s dismissive snorting about climate change. This is a straight shooting plea from a suit, whose job is unclear from his title (boss at Bloomberg New Energy Finance), on the vital need for reducing carbon emissions and some suggestions how to move that ball forward without the present, cumbersome UN as its organizer.

Grist for the Mill: UN Framework Convention on Climate Change ;

Tracker P.S.: I bet there is a blog or blogsite where one can find info on how many reporters from what sorts of agencies are at the meeting. If somebody has such, please let us know via suggest stories or contact us function up top of ksjtracker.mit.edu. homepage.

- Charlie Petit

Old timers sometimes called them DBI stories – dull, but important. You want dull, try top soil and reservoir levels. Important enough to be readable news, and thank goodness for wire services that dutifully covered this. No other major news outlet arose on first search for others that bothered with it. The news is in announcement this week from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization that intensified farming around the world is extracting a price, in degraded land and strained water systems. Yet, by 2050, that land and those irrigation canals and such will have to be radically more effective as population rises from today’s 7 billion to more like 9 billion (absurd what we collectively are doing. When I was born it stood at under 2.5 billion). As it is already, a billion people are under-nourished.

Here’s a guess. I am sitting here at my desk on a hazy morning in California’s East Bay, and have seen some headlines but haven’t yet read the wire stories. The suspicion going in is that, as is often the case with DBI’s and the enervation that ensues when writing them, most writers will depend mostly or entirely on the press release. Some will likely have breezed through the larger report’s summary (both below in Grist). Maybe somebody will be seen to have called their state or national agricultural agency for a response, or a professor or two. Could be interesting. But this isn’t like, oh, the latest political sex and conflict of interest scandal that gets the blood racing and competitive instincts at a high pitch. It’s a DBI.

Plucking almost randomly, here’s an excerpt from the report summary:

Deeper structural problems have also become apparent in the natural
resource base. Water scarcity is growing. Salinization and pollution of
water courses and bodies, and degradation of water-related ecosystems
are rising. In many large rivers, only 5 percent of former water volumes
remain in-stream, and some rivers such as the Huang He no longer reach
the sea year-round. Large lakes and inland seas have shrunk, and half
the wetlands of Europe and North America no longer exist. Runoff from
eroding soils is filling reservoirs, reducing hydropower and water supply.
Groundwater is being pumped intensively and aquifers are becoming
increasingly polluted and salinized in some coastal areas. Large parts
of all continents are experiencing high rates of ecosystem impairment,
particularly reduced soil quality, biodiversity loss, and harm to amenity
and cultural heritage values.

That’s not jolly.

Stories:

• AP – Nicole Winfield: UN warns 25 pct of world and highly degraded ; She filed from Rome, with quotes from the press conference there. A straight summary with plenty of large, disturbing numbers – plus Winfield’s aside that the report comes out as the latest round of climate talks being in South Africa.
• AFP – Dario Thuburn: Quarter of world’s landmass ‘highly degraded’: UN ; Ditto, as per AP. From Rome, big numbers, a nod to the Durban meetings.
• Reuters – Svetlana Kovalyova: Land, water scarcity threaten food security ; Ditto except it’s from Milan, and no mention of Durban.

Dept. of Byline Degradation:

• Kozmedia News – Tom August: U.N.: Land and Water Scarcity Affects World Food Supply ; Eyes widened on thoughts perhaps this is from a bona fide news outlet, but no. Mr. August’s name is on it but it is (with an obscure credit at the end) a whack and paste job on the Reuters account. Speaking only as a thought balloon metaphor, one rather wishes the news so-called editors at such ripoff outlets as this were hogtied, doused in sticky syrup, and planted atop ant colonies. One doubts they paid Reuters a centime for its labor. If I learn otherwise, will happily share it.

Grist for the Mill: UN FAO Press Release ; FAO State of the World’s Land and Water Resources/ Summary:

- Charlie Petit

One supposes that media elsewhere may have already written a detailed, plain-English and disturbing account of the colossal challenge – one against which they had no immediate chance – nuclear workers at Japan’s Fukushima power station number one faced when the tsunami withdrew. And I have listened to one talk, with slides, that covers the essentials. The best I’ve seen however is in the current issue of the trade and professional magazine IEEE Spectrum. Eliza Strickland walks the reader through it, step by awful step. Well done. The emphatic but cool prose intensifies the inherent drama of this voyage into abrupt technological collapse and deep-rooted regulatory failure (if only some agency had ordered those backup generators to all be, with realistic worst-cases in mind, up a few flights of stairs).

Most important, the story dramatizes the instinctive mendacity of leaders of institutions when things have suddenly gone very wrong. Eventually the truth tends to come out. Read this story by Strickland and try to remember what the news was during the first days after the quake and tsunami. It certainly was not encouraging. But it was, as I recall, that Tokyo electric was struggling and vowing to get the reactors under control.  I’d have to check the timeline, but how long after supervisors at the plant knew they had multiple rectors with molten slag heaps under where the fuel assemblies had been, and eating through pressure vessels and thus leaving no prospect at all of reaching a safe shutdown within weeks or months, before management in Tokyo said as much?

For all that, one suspects that the health and fatality toll from radiation will fall far – very far – short of the human and perhaps the economic price inflicted elsewhere by the tsunami. Recently the Japanese government revealed that radioactive fallout, while not at dramatically dangerous levels anywhere except very near the plant, reached measurable rates in the entire nation. Some 8 percent of its land is affected enough to be considered contaminated. And this atomic power station is ruined, with others suffering significant damage. One account on the extent of radioactive contamination was on ABC Australia a week ago, reported by Mark Willacy.

By the way, the Fukushima meltdown just popped up on the tracker’s sensor system in another account. This from a j-school student at the University of Tennessee, where a nuclear engineering professor went through the basics. For Tennessee Journalist, reporter Jeremy Rumsey wrote it up. It has good context on the accident as compared to Chernobyl, but inevitably for a brief account nothing to match the power and thoroughness of the IEEE feature story. The report stumbles in trying to portray the quake’s oomph, going from energy to “force” which seems to mean power, and without seeming to recognize the difference and both gauged in terms of atom bombs. It also seems to conflate what happens to cooling water in a well-controlled reactor with the hydrogen-spewing calamity if water hits drastically overheated fuel rods. But it is useful, and it illustrates the wide diffusion of Fukushima’s lessons.

*UPDATE: Another precisely pertinent report:

• ScienceInsider – Dennis Normile: In Wake of Fukushima Disaster, Japan’s Scientists Ponder How to Regain Public Trust ;

One does wonder why there are no pictures, at least in public, taken from a high floor at the plant when the waters were highest. How awful must it have looked, the reactor buildings standing in a roiling sea 20 feet or more deep.

- Charlie Petit

Almost every year in November a train load of radioactive waste rolls through Germany. Each time it meets considerable public objection. UP to a few thousand protesters  turn out at the tracks to stop the convoy. Police, outnumbering them by far, try to keep the route clear.  Last year it took the shipment 92 hours to go the roughly 800 miles from the nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague, France, to the destination – the interim storage facility at Gorleben in northern Germany. This year the train, its high-level waste in eleven dry-cask storage cars, started last Wednesday and did not finish before Monday night. That’s a new record  for the protesters, 126 hours, even though their numbers were way smaller than last year’s crowd. Each side complains about the  brutality of the other. The police counted 100 injured officers; protesters said they have more than 350 hurt.

The protests are not aimed primarily at the traveling trash,mostly spent fuel rods from German nuclear power plants that are coming back from reprocessing plants in neighboring countries. The underlying objection is to nuclear power. Germany has decided to phase-out atomic energy by 2022 but that is not soon enough for many. And just over the borders with neighbors such as  France and the Czech Republic nuclear power prospers. Plus there is the still unsolved problem of finding an adequate final radioactive waste repository. Tobias  Muenchmeyer, a Greenpeace activist, criticized in the FAZ the hubris behind that idea that mankind could build a storage facility rigid enough to survive a million years. The news agency dpa describes the alternative (here reprinted in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung) the old salt mine in Morsleben, Saxony-Anhalt, and quotes sources estimating that it’ll take at least 25 years for authorities to conclude they found the best place.

Some newspapers wrote that this transport was the last since there is no German nuclear waste left in La Hague. But as Malte Kreutzfeldt wrote in the taz there is more trash in Scotland waiting for the journey back to Germany. In another piece Kreutzfeldt described how four farmers stopped the train by chaining themselves to the tracks.

Other News: 

50 years after the drug Contergan was taken off the market Philipp Osten in the Frankfurter Rundschau reminds of the thousands of victims of what today is known as the “Contergan scandal” in Germany. The active ingredient thalidomide was introduced as a sedative drug in 1957. Because it was advertised to have no unwanted side effects it was often prescribed to pregnant women. At this time it was not known that one optical isomer of  thalidomide constrains the growth of blood vessels in the limbs of unborn children. Babies whose mothers took the drug during pregnancy were borne limbless or with flipperlike arms and legs. Thalidomide caused birth defects in more than 10,000 cases till it was withdrawn in 1961. The case is a bitter example for the dangers of modern medicine and the limits of drug testing. Thalidomide wasn’t tested sufficiently for teratogenicity.

At least half the cases could have been prevented if only the manufacturer Gruenenthal had reacted faster, news agency dpa quotes a source. The company pays between 300 and 1100 Euro monthly annuity per case. A group of victims – all in their fifties today – is still fighting for more money – and an apology.

There were only a few cases in the US. Thanks to former FDA staff member Frances Oldham Kelsey thousands of newborns were saved from the perils of the drug thalidomide. She refused approval for an application from the Richardson-Merell company to market thalidomide, saying further studies were needed. Last year the New York times told her story. “The thalidomide disaster led Congress to pass legislation giving the FDA authority to demand that drug makers prove their products safe and effective. Moreover, Dr. Kelsey helped write the rules that now govern nearly every clinical trial in the industrialized world, and was the first official to oversee them.”

Hanno Charisius

N. America at Last Glacial Maximum

It looked like pretty good news, about as good as one study in the contentious arena of climate change can be. Sorting through what it might and might not mean is difficult, says I who just spent the entire morning trying to figure out what to make of it. Odd that it hit just as the latest round of IPCC climate talks gets going in Duban, So. Africa.

In Science last week a team of researchers from a solid and mostly top-tier set of universities – Oregon State and Oregon, Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, and Barcelona (that last I can’t peg, being a Euro-ignoramus) – reviewed their analysis of how cold it got during the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago. They also looked at the low level that the CO2 had and, while running lots of runs on a global circulation model from the Univ. of Victoria,  concluded the Earth is not quite as sensitive to CO2 changes as the IPCC says it might be. This all to refine projections how hot things might get in the century to come.

Most important is that it indicates none of the “long tail” toward global warming calamity of earlier studies. Those have left open a smallish but significant chance that doubling CO2 from pre-industrial levels (we’ve already gone 40 percent of the way) could trigger extreme warming of the planet – 6.3 K+  or over 10 degree F and maybe considerably  worse. That’d be catastrophic. Plus, this new paleoclimatological proxy for our fate puts a slightly lower mean, or best guess, on the warming: a range of 1.7 to 2.6 K rather than the more or less accepted range of 2-4.5 K in currently dominant studies.  If, the authors say, climate were as sensitive to CO2 change as the worst case scenarios suggest, the whole of Earth’s dry land should have iced-up in the lower CO2 and methane of 20,000 years ago. It did not. So a planet-wide heating to sure-fire mass killing level seems far-fetched if we keep on our mad pace to double it. This is fairly good. We’ll probably slow-bake and, decades hence, regret not having curbed CO2, but no dipping in boiling oil.  The report just as emphatically rejects a very low sensitivity, the sort that makes climate skeptics and contrarians feel confident that global warming is at worse a nuisance. The new report does not, by its nature, get into ocean acidification. That looming, humanity-blamed screw-up stands unchanged.

This oversimplified summary, based by an inexpert me on a quick read of the paper and press releases, barely hints at the difficulty the news presents to reporters trying to report it clearly, accurately, and quickly. The new Science paper is full of caveats. Outsiders are saying the performance of ocean and dry land do not seem to line up, the climate model it relied on is one of the world’s simpler ones, and it employs a temperature reconstruction for the last glacial maximum that is not as cold (ie, not as sensitive to a change in CO2) as many paleoclimatologists believe to be have been the reality of it. It is, therefore, a tentative finding.

Big outlets, those that covered it at all, treated the news as welcome. Relatively few covered it in the U.S., where the paper’s embargo lifted during the Thanksgiving four-day weekend. A news magazine and three newspapers – including two national papers – settled for blogs. At the Houston Chronicle Eric Berger summed it up with “To me, the real effect of this paper will be to really impair the credibility of the more extreme environmentalists who have been saying the planet faces certain doom from climate change.” Actually, one thinks, few environmentalists call doom certain – but that the odds of doom are as high or higher than chances of war or fire or flood or other things that have led nations and individuals to make very expensive decisions, such as buying insurance or arming themselves to the teeth, just in case. Plus, one thinks Berger, a solid reporter, overreacts to one paper when he declares that it alone will really impair anybody’s credibility. Even “slightly impair” may be overmuch.

At the NYTimes Rachel Nuwer on the Green blog greets this “new entry” in the climate sensitivity discussion as legit, but cites her sources to conclude it must be taken with caution.  Gavin Schmidt, a NASA climatologist best known to the public for his expert analyses at the blogsite Real Climate, tells her the study’s data represent too little of the planet to be convincing, and other sources tell her that because the average is for the whole planet, menaing mostly ocean, it does not preclude disastrous warming of continental interiors. The NYT’s Andrew C. Revkin aggregates at Dot Earth bits from initial news reports, and promises his own long analysis soon. Time Mag‘s Bryan Walsh does a fine job putting the study into context with many others. Some are terrifying, some not so much, and this one falls on hte not-so-much side in a large crowd. As he writes, predicting the future is really hard. USA Today‘s Dan Vergano gives it straightforward summary, but has no outside opinions from experts who might knock holes in the new study. (ACK!! Correction. Vergano’s penultimant graf does have an outside, and pertinent, comment. I owe him apology and here it is. I am deeply sorry for that reckless read).

Other Stories :

• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: CO2 may not warm the planet as much as thought ; But, the story says, the truth remains uncertain. Marshall talked with Gavin Schmidt, the RealClimate blog ace, who finds much to be unconvinced by in the new study.
• BBC – Jennifer Carpenter: CO2 climate sensitivity ‘overestimated‘; RAther dry report, but has outside, critical comment and makes a larger point well – that at best the Science report would mean there is a bit more time to get CO2 under control. That means failure to do so remains just that: failure.
• Register – Lewis Page : Global warming much less serious than thought – new science . We’re looking at just a couple of degrees with double CO2 ; Not a diligent job. No contrary opinions to be found here, and the hed is an exaggeration. Much less serious? No, a little bit less, and it remains serious. Page writes, without expert backup so far as can be told, that “Plainly there’s no great need to fear a rise above 450 ppm CO2, as people currently do” and that it will be a century or more before the 2 degree K increase in temperature taken as the border between merely warmer, and catastrophe.
• Australian – Amos Aikman: Climate forecasts ‘exaggerated’;
• Ars Technica – John Timmer: Last big  chill suggests lower climate impact of carbon ;

Blogstorm: Some of the prominent blog sites, from the side on the side of mainstream science, are upset with mainstream media for oversimplifying the study and not emphasizing its flaws. Perhaps, but more notable is that most media paid it any kind of attention at all.

• Climate Progress – Joe Romm: Media Misleads on Flawed Climate Sensitivity Study: Avoiding “Drastic Changes Over Land” Requires Emissions Cutss ASAP ; The post goes further, calling the study not just flawed but deeply flawed. He rounds up lots of contrary opinion to it. One suspects that Romm, despite his hot-headed habit of tongue-lashing anybody not in full-disaster-response mode, is correct in dismissing the study as anything – even if it holds up – to substantially change climate conversation.
• Real Climate – Ice age constraints on climate sensitivity ; A group post by the site’s cadre of researcher-authors, who calmly declare reasons that the new study may underestimate the sensitivity somewhat, and who point out that even so the projected climate change is comfortably within the error bars of IPCC-type consensuses. And, they point out, this is not the first study to look at the last ice age’s cooling as a clue to the next century-plus of warming. The post has little good to say about media response generally, but is most hostile to an inane response at a site called Investor’s Business Daily.

Grist for the Mill: Oregon State University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) In 2005 an ambitious biomedical research center was inaugurated in Valencia (Spain). Now, with the economic crisis in Spain and the short views of our politicians, half of the scientists in The Príncipe Felipe Research Center have been fired, and 14 of 26 labs closed. Some newspapers have been more critical than others with the extreme cuts. But all reflect the letter of support signed by 3000 scientists around the world.

In a totally different topic, Science published last week a study suggesting that (by adding more data from past events to current climate models) doubling CO2 atmospheric levels might cause less warming than IPCC predicts. One of the study’s coauthors is Spanish. We’ve read some stories about the paper, but none confronts the conclusions of the study with other climatologists that are not involved in the research.

Talking about environment, glaciers in Spain are disappearing fast and they will all be gone some time in the next 20-70 years. But reading the story about it, it doesn’t seem it would do any harm.

Also, it seems that with the recent elections and changes in the government, Spanish representatives are going to Durban without a clear position on climate change policy. 

Con el Thanksgiving estadounidense, un par de temas retrasados. Lo primero el escandaloso Expediente de Regulación de Empleo que tras continuos recortes presupuestarios ahora despide a 113 científicos y personal de apoyo de los 244 que trabajaban en el Centro Príncipe Felipe de Valencia. 14 de 26 laboratorios son cerrados. Podéis leer más info en el reportaje de Jaime Prats “ERE a la investigación biomédica” en El País. Merece la pena señalar que no es un centro anticuado lleno de científicos acomodados, que publique poco, lleve una mala trayectoria, y merezca cortar por lo sano para invertir en otros proyectos. El Príncipe Felipe fue construido en 2005, en pleno crecimiento económico. Ahora, con dificultades para mantener los grupos de trabajo, y por lo visto una nefasta gerencia, los gobernantes valencianos han decidido sacrificar la ciencia. El País se moja (otros medios menos) y amplia información con la nota “Réquiem por la ciencia” dos entrevistas sangrantes a una decepcionadísima técnico de laboratorio y un líder de proyecto que tenía financiación de otras fuentes. Un comunicado de apoyo ha sido expandido online y como informa Público por medio de Sergi Tarín “3000 científicos contra el ERE del Príncipe Felipe”, la respuesta ha sido considerable. (3000 científicos no es mucho; pero ya se sabe que los investigadores no tienen tiempo de estas cosas, porque tienen que ir al laboratorio a cambiar el medio de sus cultivos celulares… y a leer los papers de su submundo… luego se quejan cuando ya es tarde. Mejor dicho; cuando levantan la cara de su poyata y se enteran de lo que está pasando a su alrededor).

Cambiemos radicalmente de asunto: ¿Quiere algún organismo más y mejor información medioambiental en Latinoamérica? Fácil: patrocinad espacios en los medios. Poned algo de dinero del que os gastáis en viajes y dietas en facilitar que periodistas escriban sobre ciencia. Eso es lo que hace en España la Fundación Biodiversidad, con muy buenos resultados. Medios como El País, ABC, Público… ofrecen frecuente información medioambiental de calidad en sus secciones. Por ejemplo en Tierra – El País encontramos el buen artículo de Gustavo Hermoso “La agonía de los glaciares”, que sin embargo nos deja con cierta inquietud: ok, los glaciares españoles están desapareciendo y no quedará ninguno dentro de 20-70 años. ¿Y qué? ¿Cuál es el problema? El texto no lo aborda. Lo de la perdiz de plumaje blanco que queda expuesta a más depredadores es una historia de hace ya tiempo que ralla la anécdota. En el mismo texto se dice que la aportación de los glaciares a los ríos es mínima, y que lo más significativo del retroceso de glaciares es la clara prueba del calentamiento global. Bien; pero deja un poco frío.

En la prolífica sección Planeta Tierra – Público, el artículo de Manuel Asende “España llega a Durban sin guión” explica la incertidumbre sobre la posición que defenderá España sobre el cambio climático en la reunión de Durban, tras el resultado electoral y cambio de gobierno. Según Manuel el PSOE respaldaba la propuesta de reducción de emisiones de la UE, y el PP lo rechaza con la excusa de la crisis. Eso deja maniatados a los negociadores españoles, que se intuye irán allí más como espectadores que otra cosa.

En Natura-ABC vemos principalmente noticias de agencias, pero destacamos un par de piezas muy bien trabajadas tras el anuncio de penurias económicas de la empresa creadora de las pulseritas-estafa power balance. Inma Zamora aprovecha para ampliar la lista de “productos fraudulentos que prometen milagros”, como collares cuánticos, pinzas lasvi, diet rings, empresas que dicen luchar contra el sida con magnetismo… desde hace un par de años vemos a la prensa española siendo crítica con las pseudociencias y este tipo de estafas. Antes estos temas simplemente no entraban en las secciones de ciencias. Quizás algún reportero de América Latina puede ganar personalidad abordando estos asuntos en su país. Es una buena oportunidad. ABC incluso graba una entrevista en video a la portavoz de la organización de consumidores. (qué gracia que al lado del artículo en la tienda ABC vendan una cama de acupuntura por 39 euros;) ).

Pero volviendo al clima, y justo ahora previo a Durban que un informe de la OCDE dice que las temperaturas podrían subir 6 grados de aquí al 2100, la agencia SINC presenta un muy interesante artículo: “El clima podría ser menos sensible al CO2 de lo que calculan las estimaciones más catastrofistas” (SINC). La pieza no viene de una fuente poco importante, sino de un artículo publicado en Science con colaboración española. El mensaje es que utilizando un modelo que integra datos paleoclimáticos de épocas muy anteriores a las que recogen los modelos del IPCC, la correlación entre subida de CO2 y calentamiento no sería tan estricta. Podría haber cierta atenuación por fenómenos naturales, o otros factores que parece sí influyeron en el pasado y no son contemplados en modelos actuales. Importante texto, que merece la visibilidad que le da SINC (extraño que otros medios no lo reflejen). Quizás lo que le pediríamos al artículo sería una valoración del estudio por algún climatólogo no relacionado con la investigación, y un pelín más de claridad en la exposición. Por ejemplo, El Periódico de Catalunya sí habla del paper de science, y Antonio Madridejos “Un estudio calcula que la Tierra no se calentará tan rápidamente” empieza con una muy clara primera frase: “La situación sigue siendo muy pesimista”,  para avanzar dando datos concretos diciendo que según el nuevo estudio, en caso de duplicarse el CO2 “el aumento de la temperatura mundial será como mucho de 2,6 grados, y no de 4,5, como recoge el último informe del IPCC”. Tampoco hay un análisis externo que refuerce la idea de que el IPCC ha exagerado o encuentre matices al estudio. Qué extraño es el concepto “noticia” aplicado al medioambiente.

- Pere Estupinyà

With tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Holiday meaning a four-day weekend for most of us here in the USA, we’ll be pretty inert here at tracker central until Monday.

To set the mood, here are a few stories out finding a connection between Turkey Day, and research.

• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson : Mars Rover Finds a Turkey Haven for the Holiday ; Scroll down in the story for an arresting accident scene photo.
• The Atlantic – Nicolette Hahn Niman: Is That Really a Heritage Turkey? ; And yes, the author is in the family that sells the Niman Ranch brand of beef and other meats that hard core, but carnivorous, foodies love.
• ThinkProgress Green – Brad Johnson: Global Warming’s War on Thanksgiving ; Looks like a parody, judging by the cover. But it’s not.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Giving thanks helps your psychological outlook ; Several did this topical news, including yesterday in NYTimes by John Tierney.
• ISNS – Chris Gorski: The Globe-Trotting Turkey / Genetic research promises to improve upon a multi-continent breeding effort. I’d heard that a lot of domestic turkeys are descendants of Mexican breeds. Never quite understood that. Now do. The Aztecs were ranching turkeys long before they mistook an invader for a prophesied god. A question – is the subspecies running wild in the US the basis for any of our domestic fowl at all?

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker must be the last to have stumbled on a buzzstorm of speculation over the last three weeks, largely on the blog side of web news but with mainstream outlets jumping in too, over bizarre graphic designs and shapes dotted across China’s Gobi Desert. Google Earth, among other non-spy surveillance systems, has been picking them up. Favorite speculation among the loonie rune-readers is that the markings are for calibration of Chinese surveillance, or spy, satellites. If so, that’s odd. You’d think plain old, existing stuff would work fine – like the Great Wall, or a solar farm, or airport runways, a freeway cloverleaf, etc. Maybe crop circles, too.

For those in a hurry a one-story summary is at the New York Times where  J. David Goodman about five days ago ran a rundown on it all.

I ran into it first at LiveScience, where Natalie Wolchover listed them in her Life’s Little Mysteries running compilation. But the first outlet that gave them a good push, it appears, is one I’ve never heard of. That is Viewzone, where Haishing Liu ran some with interpretations and caption material supplied to the service by a reader in China itself.

Other places to see some of the pictures:

• Gizmodo: What the hell, China?
• Wired/ Danger Room – Noah Shachtman: More Mammoth (and Mysterious) Structures Found in China’s Desert ;
• LiveScience – Natalie Wolchover: Mysterious Symbols in China Desert Are Spy Satellite Targets, Expert Says ;

- Charlie Petit

Bon voyage Curiosity, daughter of Mars Science Laboratory, the big wheeled bruiser of a rover that NASA hopes to get off the ground Saturday. The aim is to land next August in ancient, gnarly Gale Crater not far south of the planet’s equator. It is about 100 miles (154 km) across. Its midsection sports a pile of debris about as high as the Andes. The pic shows just part of the crater’s complex terrain, gathered from orbit by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter and its THEMIS imaging system.  Grist has a link to the whole eye boggling gallery. The jumbled edifice, it appears, is a bit of a geologic mystery other than that an impact made it early in Mars’s history, sediments buried it, and erosion has slowly re-exposed it. Maybe it happened repeatedly. Water was involved. Perhaps the $2.5 billion rover will find stratigraphic and mineralogical evidence that makes legible whatever sagas have unfolded there, maybe including signs of extended wet times suitable for life to evolve and thrive.

With Russia’s Mars-Phobos sampling mission stuck ignominiously in low-Earth orbit, due for spectacular burn-up in a month or two, one hopes the cosmic ghoul of bad luck will let Curiosity go.

  News outlets are giving the mission plenty of advance coverage. Angles include 1) the mission’s scientific potential, 2) the endless budget wars and tribulations, particularly intense these days, that leave uncertain whether this will be the last NASA big-ticket planetary probe for years to come, and 3) to a smaller extent the once-hotly-controversial radioisotope thermal generator that is to free Curiosity of dependence on solar power.

Starting with the last first, it is notable that the press release from Rocketdyne, a space power and rocket engine manufacturer with hq in Sacramento, California (link in Grist below), boasts of its RTG on board but says nothing about the nearly 11 pounds of plutonium oxide (not the isotope used in fission chain reaction atom bombs) whose decay heat drives the device. Maybe the company is spooked by past, public protests over putting radioactive materials on space probes that are launched from our home planet and as Phobos-Grunt illustrates might come right back down. But some reporters are not shy about writing the full facts of it. Some say the interesting thing is that, this time, it has attracted little public outcry. The Tracker finds that satisfying. Maybe the world has gotten so scary for statistically sound reasons that the  remote chance a launch accident can sprinkle some plutonium from the sky (despite being  packed in an almost completely crash-resistant casing) no longer rises high on worry lists.

Stories on the atomic battery, Pu included:

• Florida Today – Don Walker: Plutonium protests can’t draw a crowd ; One reason offered here – launch comes during the Black Friday etc. post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy. The piece quotes, unchallenged, a few of the remaining worry worts.
• Wired Science – Adam Mann: Nuclear Battery Will Warm Giant Rover on Frigid Mars Treks ; Overall, a reassuring piece.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Mars Mission May Be Curtain Call for Plutonium-Powered Spacecraft ; Remarkable story. I’d forgotten all about this. The isotope has to be made in reactors and purified with equipment built for the nuclear weapons industry. All are shut down. Here‘s a two-yr-old AP story by Seth Borenstein with more.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Mars rover gets ‘engine’ upgrade: Curiosity fueled by nuclear power ; Good general background, gets around to the disappearance of fresh Pu-238 from the larder.
• NYTimes (Green blog) Matthew L. Wald: The Competition Between Solar and Nuclear Energy Moves to Mars ; Features an aside on one aspect of the Pu-238 shortage that catches interest. If a more efficient, if complicated, reciprocating motor called a Stirling engine harnesses the heat’s energy, it would take a lot less radioisotope from the same power.

Other recent Mars Rover advance stories:

• Space.com – Clara Moscowitz: After 7 years of development, Mars rover ready to launch; See also Mike Wall: NASA to Launch Mars Rover ‘Dream Machine’ This Week ;
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: On Mars Rover, Tools to Plumb a Methane Mystery ; Interesting – Chang spends almost as much attention on instruments that are not aboard the craft, such as ones designed expressly to detect microbial activity or even to sequence alien DNA from red planet dirt, as on ones that mission workers did install.
• Forbes – Alex Knapp: Next Mars Rover Is Prepared For Launch ;
• Virginian-Pilot – Diane Tennant: Mars landing will cap work of NASA Langley researchers ; Nice to see an old-fashioned,modest-sized local paper with a local angle space story, done cleanly by an old-fashioned savvy newspaper science beat writer (not that she is old-fashioned, but such jobs are getting to be triggers for nostalgia).
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Bigger, better rover could launch to Mars this week ;
• Florida Today via Clarksville TN online – Steven Siceloff : NASA’s Mars Rober Well-Equpped for Studies ;
• Universe Today – Ken  Kremer: Science-rich Gale Crater and NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover in Glorious 3-D / Touchdown in a Habitable Zone ; You’ll need your handy red and blue stereoptical translating spectacles, ie 3-D glasses, old school style, to see the pic with this. It’s worth digging them out.
• … lots more. After the US Thanksgiving day break,one hopes we’ll have some stories on a successful launch for updating this post.

Grist for the Mill:

Arizona State U. Mars Odyssey/Themis Gale Crater’s History Book ; Hamilton Sundstrand Rocketdyne Press Release on Curiosity’s power ; JPL NASA Mars Rover Press Release, JPL NASA Mars Science Lab project page ; Mars Science Lab Newsroom ;

 

Barely Pertinent Phobos-GRUNT news:

• AP – Vladimir Isachenkov, Melissa Eddy: Signal received from Russia’s Mars moon probe ; The European Space Agency’s engineers get clever, pretend the probe worked, and sent a signal of the sort it’d receive while part way there. It perked up. No word if this alters the final outcome, but hope flickers.

- Charlie Petit