A tip of the hat to Andrew C. Revkin, at the NYTimes blg Dot Earth, for calling attention to a remarkable piece, an appreciation that I’d like to second.

At the BBC its environmental reporter Richard Black has posted up a sterling example how to report, with punch, a big sack of probably and maybe. He has his hands on the draft of an upcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It tackles the slippery topic of weather extremes, and the evidence that storms and droughts and such things as that have gotten worse due to the slow rise in global temperatures and the accompanying changed dynamics of storm tracks, humidity, and atmospheric turbulence.

One must read it right through to get its full meaning. Black starts off by sampling all the hedging the IPCC authors are sharing with one another over the certainty that humankind along with the rest of the biosphere is getting socked harder with deadly weather than it used to. His focus is on so-called climate vulnerable countries – places that sea level rise or other such changes will hit first and hardest. But the piece also reads a bit like ammo for the contrarians, including those who see nothing but lefty anti-business one worldism, hiding behind a smokesceen of bad science, in policies that would forcibly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One can sensibly believe, one infers from this story, but also not for sure know that anthropogenic climate change is responsible for today’s  droughts and killer cyclones.

But that’s just a set-up for the more dire opinion among IPCC’s expert corps. Which is, it says here, that however scrawled and hard to make out the signature of climate change is on today’s weather, chances are disturbingly high that another few degrees in warming should make the connection inescapably clear. Writing on ambiguity is not easy, but Black wades into anyway, and usesit to sketch a growing move to separate the need for adaptation – one that is undeniable – from the smart corollary of greenhouse gas mediation. Investment in readiness for bad weather makes sense no matter what, with the vulnerability of growing population a prime reason. But crediting humanity’s collective behavior for it, and assigning liability and responsibility to change that behavior, is harder to do. For now.

- Charlie Petit

First off, I was just a wee bit disappointed by James Gorman‘s front sci-times page story.  The reason is not the story, but the byline. It is a deeply affecting and informative account. It has a somber topic:  the vivisection and other invasive experimentation upon our fellow hominid and closest living relative, the chimpanzee. It is a practice that may end in the US  soon, he reports, and is already banned across most of the globe.  The story is a reader, thoughtful and well assembled. It includes a sidebar profiling a few lab chimps with a hint of their personalities and cross-species empathy (like John, a former rodeo chimp-clown who still likes pictures of horses and cowboys). Thing is, Jim Gorman has a reputation for humor and the occasional gag in his stories. Jokes would not suit this topic.

   Never fear, this occasional contributor to Science Times has today a two-fer. Gorman  is also on p. 2 of the print version, and boy am I going to put an app for the Times on the tablet I buy and cancel delivery of the paper, so pretty soon I won’t know where the layout editing puts the stories. Anyway, to get back on track, this one is funny. It does have interesting news but with giggles. It gets sillier as it moves on. It’s an essay, allowing lapse into first person. Its topic is the transgender complexities of being a species of hawk, the Western marsh harrier. They include, as he explains in a technical aside on scientific nomenclature having to do with garter snake mating balls, she-males and he-males, plus of course females.

Coincidentally, transgender complexity comes up elsewhere in the section, and is worth mention: Pauline W. Chen, a physician writing for the Well on line site that Tara Parker-Pope set up, describes the need for stronger medical school curricula on gay and gender issues in clinical care. She starts off with a whopper of a vignette.

Other Headlines to Note:

• Dennis Overbye : Oh, the places we could go ; This is an old staple for metropolitan newspapers, a piece on some local cultural institution’s new exhibit. Overbye plows through it in good style and shares his delight in one of the exhibit’s hands-on facets. Which is, The American Museum of Natural History’s new display on the past and future of space travel. It gives Overbye a chance to offer a biting critique of the state that has befallen NASA: “…the American space program seems ready for its own diorama as the space shuttle shuts down, the Moon landings recede into ancient history, and space science is slowly dismantled by a prairie fire of budget cutting and wild cost overruns in the few programs that are left”. Overbye lets show his suspicion that if anybody carries space exploration to a new and higher energy level, best bet is on China.
• Denise Grady: Political Science: Medical Nuances Drove ‘No’ Vote in Mississippi ; Or, why a lot of people who may be pretty staunchly anti-abortion, among other socially-conservative things, drew the line at the recent proposition to declare full personhood, legal rights and everything, to human eggs at the moment of fertilization. The story also moves the ball forward, hinting how proponents of such personhood plan to make some adjustments and get the gist of it adopted in some or all the US anyway.
• Matthew Wald (Green blog) Carbon Trading Initiative a Success, Study Says ; While under fire, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative among ten eastern US states seems to have suceeded in saving consumers and industry money, while reducing somewhat the rate of growth in emissions. (Grist for the Mill: Analysis Group Report). Tracker will do a separate roundup on the fairly limited coverage the report has received thus far.

As usual, much more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Late last month the NYTimes ran a huge special section on energy, mostly about fossil fuels and their supply resurgence in North America. It said nothing about the climate impacts if all those offshore, oil sands, fracked natural gas, and other reserves get used to exhaustion. I gave it a pass – after all the NYTimes has written about the climate peril due to fossil carbon almost ad nauseum. (See earlier post.)

And in writing that last post, I slammed hardnosed blogger Joe Romm for urging people to cancel their subscription to the Times for omitting the climate angle (and apologized later to Romm for overdoing my reaction to his stance). I still would not even entertain such a thing as to cancel, but do have growing qualms about NYTimes’s news judgment.

Now, over the weekend one of that earlier package’s main writers, Clifford Krauss, along with Eric Lipton ran another piece in the Times, this one on federal subsidies to solar energy farms. It is a level of taxpayer support so high, they write, that it “largely eliminated the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteed them large profits for years to come.”

This, one presumes, is presented as an example of badly executed gov’t policy. The story does not say so directly, but it implies that a subsidy program that does not leave the subsidizee exposed to risk is a bad thing. Well, one does expect that some risk ought to remain. However, the explicit link to bad things is in the next paragraph, where the Solyndra fiasco is presented as an exemplar of gov’t guarantees run amok.

The parallel to Solyndra seems to these eyes rather weak. First, Solyndra’s private investors, while first in line to get a piece of whatever value is extracted from the company’s corpse as its parts are sold off, still took a bath as far as I know. And second, even if the organizers of these solar power plants – vast expanses of solar panels – are almost sure to survive and prosper, is that not the whole, express point of a government subsidy when it pays off?  To say that’s what is happening, but in the context of an expozay of gov’t ham-handedness, is a disservice. If, as the story says, the example from the wide open spaces of sunny California raises questions whether “the Obama administration and state governments went too far” in supporting such projects, it ought to explain exactly why an apparent win-win situation is an error. After all, it says here the market for the projects’ electricity is assured, and the owners will make money. Sounds like the government will not have to pay off any bankruptcies. What’s the problem?

For all that, the NYTimes story is far more responsible than a piece at the Washington Post by Steven Mufson that ran over the weekend under the apt hed, Before Solyndra, a long history of failed government energy projects. His facts are almost surely correct. A DOE report does say that US subsidies for advanced energy projects since 1961 adds up to more than $172 billion (through about 2007). And a lot of that went down the drain, such as for a breeder reactor, synthetic fuels, a flywheel energy storage idea, and hydrogen-powered cars. But this story’s question is explicit:  “What does Washington have to show for these investments? And should the government even be in the business of promoting particular energy technologies?”

How does a list of the duds help answer that question? Are there not successes? And who would ever expect the gov’t to guess right every time? To be able to list screw-ups as evidence of failure is to imply that somebody in gov’t promised they’d hit nothing but bullseyes, and I bet no such assurances were made. If anybody says they can do that, two word clue to proper response: Bernie Madoff. If we are to have a discussion about aggressive gov’t subsidy programs and deliberate efforts to steer private enterprise toward better longterm outcomes than an unfettered market might produce, let’s read a more complete accounting of failures and successes. Private enterprise is vital to America’s economic vitality but it’s not sufficient.  Jet airplanes, railroads, hydroelectric dams, big city airports, the internet,  highways, efficient fridges and other appliances, higher gas mileage cars, and all sorts of stuff happened faster and differently due to government initiative and participation than industry by itself could have managed – and with more overall societal benefit. One more: The Erie Canal, a great precedent. After years of planning and Congress’s agreement to pay for it, President Monroe vetoed it as unconstitutional. New York’s state gov’t stepped into the breach. It transformed commerce. Monroe should’ve signed off in the first place to share credit for the nation’s first big transportation system.

For all the blather from right wing talk shows and the like about the liberal media, and usually those voices would list the NYTimes and WaPost high on their list, both of these newspapers often take big swipes at waste and corruption without much regard for the political stripe of whoever is responsible. So it does not run counter to form for them to look skeptically at government energy subsidies. But these two examples fall short.

- Charlie Petit

Last week’s Science, via its ScienceExpress service,  had a fascinating bit of esoteric news. Mostly specialty astronomy and science outlets picked it up, plus a few of the bigs.

News stories on this however don’t all agree on what happened. That’s good in principle – different voices in a competitive media landscape and all that. But some of the variants are misleading or ambiguous..  It seems simple enough: Using one of the giant Keck telescopes in Hawaii, two astronomers from Univ. California – Santa Cruz and a colleague from Vermont’s Saint Michael’s College diced the light from quasars formed very early in the universe. They discovered that two of them are shining through thin pockets of gas that look like almost pure hydrogen. That means it is about what one would expect, if one is a cosmologist, of material nearly unchanged chemically since the Big Bang (other than by effects such as de-ionization wrought by falling temperature). Pristine primordial gas, that’s neat – sort of like the ylem that Carl Sagan mentioned (I think) to the  public on TV, and that George Gamow and his assistant Ralph Alpher had coined in the 1940s via mythological origin for the stuff from which all matter descends. Alas, none of the accounts I see mention ylem.

The quasars are among the earliest that formed in the universe, and have long since gone out. The pristine gas is, or was when the quasar light went through it, about 12 billion light years away, so we’re seeing it when it was a little less than 2 billion years old (the Big Bang being pegged at ~13.7 billion years ago). By now it’s farther away and who knows how pristine still.

Metals? Press releases quote the astronomers as saying they see no metals. The releases also say that, due to arcane historic reasons, ‘metal’ to an astrophysicist is anything that is not hydrogen, helium, or lithium, which are the elements spawned directly by the Big Bang. Most accounts say that astronomers’ metals are not our metals but things heavier than these initial three (and I think that if lithium is enhanced above its Big Bang nucleosynthesis level, that’s a metal too but not I’m getting fuzzy on long-ago astronomy courses). Anyway, in this critic’s humble opinion, there is no reason in a breaking news story to use the metals term at all. A feature where one is taking readers into the culture of astronomy, sure.

Second, and pickier, did they use one or two of Keck’s giant 10-meter telescopes? A few outlets said they used both, some said ambigously and thus safely that they used the observatory, some said they used one, and one account just said they used “the Keck telescope.” The UCSC press release down there in Grist says explicitly they used Keck I. That also is spelled out in the fairly short research paper for those reporters who rely on more than press releases before sending emails or making phone calls to authors and outside experts. Yet the Keck observatory’s own release says they used the telescopes, plural,  which is a good example why to look beyond handouts for the story. Thing is, experienced astronomy writers should never say both were used unless they discover by some oddity, such as an interferometry observation, both were at work. Typically astronomers take advantage of the somewhat different equipment on each ‘scope, in this case the high resolution spectrometer on Keck I.

At the AP space writer Marcia Dunn – whose usual beat is satellites and planets and projects involving rockets or with NASA written on them – gave the story its biggest ride. The lede mentions metals without adornment, although she provides an aside later to the the term’s expansive meaning at your neighborhood observatory. She mentions helium, too, and tells readers that the astronomers’ equipment just was not sensitive to it, though it’s surely there. No mention of lithium but that’s a minor thing. Best, Dunn refers to a second paper, in Science, that changes somewhat theories about what kind of stars would have formed from such primitive gases, one not enriched in the heavier elements that the first stars themselves manufactured and, via stellar winds and supernova explosions, ‘polluted’ the gas from which the stars we see today formed. And she gets an outside source’s comment, who salutes both papers and explains how the two piece of research complement one another.

Other stories:

• LA Times – Amina Khan:  Scientists find primordial gas 12 billion light-years away ; Clearly explained, no so-called metals but plenty on heavier elements. Nothing either on the second paper in the journal, about the first generation of stars that formed from gases such as this, earlier.
• San Jose Mercury News – Lisa Krieger: UC-Santa Cruz astronomers discover pristine gas – cloudy relics of The Big Bang ; Krieger writes this nicely, assuming readers know nothing about the Big Bang, and explaining things succinctly as she goes. However, she calls it “the Keck telescope” and also refers to the gas’s signature as being found in absorption lines of the light from “a quasar.” They discovered two quasars, each with a pristine cloud betwixt us and it. She did compose a gracerful line: “More profoundly, the UCSC discovery is a reminder of the illuminating power of human reason, and how scientists can overcome seemingy insuoluble problems useing technology” and follows that immediately with a quote to give it muscle.
• ScienceNOW – Yudhijit Bhattacharjee: Astronomers Spot the Universe’s First Gas ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: Fresh Start: Scientists Glimpse Unsullied Traces of the Infant Universe ; Isn’t that a good and writerly hed? Matson figures out how to handle the confusingly double-telescoped Keck Observatory. He just does not mention it.
• Universe Today – Tammy Plotner: Keck Observatory Locates Two Clouds Of Pristine Gas From The Beginning of Time ; Seems to be solely  a press release rewrite.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Primordial Gas Clouds Reveal Glilmpse of Big Bang’s Aftermath: She says it explicitly. The telescope was the Keck I.
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Astronomers find pristine gas from the big bang; Short, precise, and looks entirely accurate right down to its Keck I and its HIRES spectrometer.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Pristine Big Bang Gas Found ; Shorty, even has the assumed lithium in these clouds even thought the hardware was not up to confirming it. Nothing on the telescopes that caught the light.

Grist for the Mill: UC Santa Cruz Press Release ; W. M. Keck Observatory Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This site noted earlier this week, scroll down a few posts to see, in an update that Russia’s hopeful return to the big time in interplanetary investigation got off the ground but only barely. Its mission to a Mars moon, designed to bring some back, reached low orbit but its next stage failed to fire. It’s full of fuel and looking to reenter within days. Russian controllers are working hard to get it to move up, not down.

We’ll catch up with the full story Monday (Friday the tracker is off, for the Veterans Day US holiday). But just to hold the fort as the Great Martian Galactic Ghoul licks his chops just above our very own air, here are a few on the state of emergency at Roscosmos Mission Control.

•  NYTimes -Henry Fountain: Russians Fight to Save Mars Probe After Mishap ;
• AP – Vladimir Isachenkov: Russia struggles to save Mars moon probe ; with later update by Seth Borensein, Vladimir Isachenkov:
• RT (Russia)  : Martian curse: Russian probe may crash in populated area ;

- Charlie Petit

In Nature this week are reports from two teams that have two ways to answer a mystery as old as, well, not so old. In the early 70s Apollo astronauts brought back rocks that bore a magnetic imprint. Some of their minerals lined up with a magnetic field that had been left there when the stone carrying them cooled down from a molten state, as from volcanism or inside a new crater. Today the moon has no such field. Simple theory implies it is too small to have ever generated one on its own. The two explanations, from teams at UC Santa Cruz in the US and in Europe led by a researcher at the University of Marseilles, France, are different but do not contradict. Each provides a way that differential rotation in the younger moon, between its stiffer exterior and a molten core,  could have been caused, in part, by Earth’s gravitational field and the variable torque it could put on its neighbor back when the Moon was hotter in the middle, closer to Earth, and its core’s spin axis in greater conflict with its mantle and that of Earth. The result, for reasons beyond your correspondent’s ken, were a dynamo-like set of conductive lunar currents able to generate a magnetic field. That’s the Santa Cruz version. From Europe comes another way to have given the moon a dynamic stir: joltings to  its axis, plus general interior turbulence, as large planetesimals crashed in. The latter reason, some accounts note, could explain as well why some asteroids and dwarf planets might have magnetic fields.

It’s an arcane topic. Several outlets tackled it. Among the better ones is at Space.com from Clara Moskowitz (a physics and astronomy major in college, and UC Santa Cruz sci-comm certificatee). She invites readers to sift through “an abiding mystery,” which is elegantly put. Oh, an abiding mystery, please do go on. The story is a parade of sure, emphatic declarative sentences,  lucid and economical as news writing always ought to be.

Other stories:

• Wired Science – Adam Mann: Mysterious Moon Magnetism Could Be Result of Earth’s Gravity ;
• Science News – Nadia Drake: How the moon got its magnetism ; Good job, and synchronicity time: another sci journalist (see space.com above) out of UC Santa Cruz. Ms. Drake studied genetics, not astronomy. BUT her father is Frank Drake, the famous astronomer whose eponymous equation is the standard one for summing odds of finding alien life that talks to us.
• Cosmos (Australia) Laura Greenhalgh:  Lunar magnetism arose from mechanical stirring ; Has the asteroid-magnetism angle up high.
• Sky and Telescope – Camille Carlisle: The Oddly Magnetic Moon ; OK, so I looked up the backgrounds of all the young American women writing astronomy in this instance. I like that program, and the odds of women coming from UC Santa Cruz are much higher than those for men, reasons unknown. That ratio led me to see how many of the femmes covering this news studied at UC Santa Cruz. And one learns Ms. Carlisle is another former astro-major. Took her science writing at MIT but, while not doing so at UCSC, her bio says she does hail from the redwood country of Northern California. That makes three who know their banana slugs.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Earth May Have Swirled Moon’s Core ;
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Mystery of MAGNETIC ROCKS FOUND ON MOON Cracked  ; He calls it a boffinry conundrum. Good ol’Register. Never met a science story it could not boffinate. Page has other diverting turns of phrase – such as calling this poser a “selenean puzzle.” Selene, one hustles to learn, is a deity of Greek myth, akin to Roman Luna.
• Santa Cruz Sentinel – Marissa Fessenden: UCSC researchers propose a new way the moon could have generated a magnetic field ; Holy Rob and Uncle John, ANOTHER writer from UC Santa Cruz herself – a current member of the class and presumably interning at the Sentinel. But, story is brief, which may be why the local angle trumped all – no mention of the European, complementary hypothesis.
• New Scientist – Melissae Fellet: How the cold, dead moon stayed magnetic ; Yikes. This is getting lunatic. Ms. Fellet, too, not only has MF as initials and that is two in a row and I did not reorder things to make it so, but she is also a UCSC matriculatee.
• Universe Today – Jason Major: How the Moon Became Magnetized ;

More on the UCSC Outburst – I haven’t checked everybody, and did not list all the stories that ran. But it looks like Mr. Mann at Wired Science in the first bullet up there is another one.

*UPDATE: One more, and with ANOTHER UCSC writer too, as learned from comments appended to this post. But that’s not the main reason to update. Read this for a sparkling example of how to assemble a back story. It ties the science to part of the career arc of the grad student lead author of the paper that inspired  the news. It’s from an in-house p.r. pub. Good job.

• Caltech Features – Marcus Woo: The Magnetic Moon ;

Grist for the Mill: UC Santa Cruz Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Yes, Russian armor. But at Ft. Stewart, Georgia

Two for readers who like to learn something new about wildlife and forest management, at non-profit outlet YALE environment360 that should be on the rss list or other alert system of anybody who appreciates nature writing with a news edge:

• Bruce Dorminey – Military Bases Provide Unlikely Refuge for South’s Longleaf Pine ; A visit to an ecosystem that most outside the south don’t know much about. However, I’d strike the “unlikely” from the head. Might be a surprise to some, but seems perfectly reasonable that, despite sometimes hostile-sounding names, such places as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the DMZ in Korea,  Kennedy Space Center, White Sands Missile Range, and military training bases in general are dandy places for nature to thrive. Anybody who’s ever spent time on a big army base knows that most of the acreage just sits, unmolested. Even bombing ranges. But not so sure about desert tortoises and tank maneuvering expanses. Aside from that, an original and engrossing way into the larger issue of longleaf pine restoration.
• Ed Struzik: Killing Wolves: A Product of Alberta’s Big Oil and Gas Boom ; Another reader that fills in, for those who only object to the tar sands fuel industry for generalized CO2 reason, what else goes on up there. One does have another objection to a hed. This one implies it’s all about wolves. Another wolf-weeper, however, it is not. Wolves in Canada are of course  magnificent alpha predators worthy of preservation, but for now there is no shortage of them there. The topic is one of their (endangered) prey species, and failure to think fully-through a strategy to save it.

Or, just browse around the site for whatever catches your eye. There is always a good menu at Yale e360. Hmmm. Yale’s School of Forestry should charter a string of cafes called e360. Catchy name. Nothin’ but fully sustainable food. Including meat. None of that vegetarian-only stuff with its tinge of cultishness. Maybe freshly road killed white tailed deer? No, scratch that, but I’d tuck into some pestilent, not-quite-wild-anymore, deliciously baked Canada goose just herded yesterday off the town pond or public park. Such cafes could make the school a non-profit fortune. Give me a cut of that action.

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

Duck, for here comes a long post on something that isn’t news, but is about news and its impact. And I start by evading the main point.

I just learned a new word – or, more exactly, a new hat for an old word. In the International Journal of Press/Politics I was plowing through a  media study, Climate on Cable,  by researchers at American University, George Mason U, and Yale. Along came this: “..in such instances when the message of one political candidate or partisan group is ‘louder’ than the other, when the valence of coverage of a candidate or issue shifts over the course of time…” Now just hold it right there. Valence? Coverage of a candidate can involve an electron looking for a hookup? Huh?

The word comes up again – in a passage saying “the overall tone or valence of the transcript….”. Gad, must be a sociology cliche I never heard of before. Well, I looked it up and a tertiary meaning is attractiveness or something like that. This study has some other fancy and effective language but only for people who know a whole lot of words and their metaphoric potentials, such as where it talks about persuasive effects being “more fugitive than minimal.” That has literary punch but, um, took me a second to figure out – not the best ploy when writing an academic paper on a topic murky enough without resort to preciously clever usages.

Oh, the paper’s topic. It is interesting but a wee bit subtle.  To first order, the conclusion is laughably easy to reach without doing any pointy-headed study. It’s an ode to the power of the press, or perhaps one should say the valence of slanted news coverage. It is, as the hed on this post says, that cable news audiences in the United States tend to agree with the points of view of their favored shows. Such as (filling in my own examples):  Sean Hannity’s viewers on Fox are more likely to scoff at the idea that contemporary climate change is so bad or humanity’s fault and to agree that the technical literature on the topic smells of scoundrel researchers cooking data to get grant money. Those tuning in Rachel Maddow tend more to think that if the world’s highly-credentialed scientific bodies overwhelmingly agree we’re probably stewing the planet toward perdition in emissions that won’t clear up for many centuries, it’s something worth correction. The paper has a bunch of plots showing how starkly different is coverage of climate at Fox than at the other two largest cable news outlets.

More interesting is the impact of the networks on their viewers who go counter to stereotype – Dems who dial up Fox, and GOP-types who regularly check out MSNBC or CNN. You gotta read it slowly, which I confess I did not do. Here’s the punchline: Democrats, no matter which network they watch, tend to think global warming is the real deal. Republicans, by contrast, and even those who measure up as staunchly conservative, are far more likely to sidle over to the global warming worrying camp if they rely significantly on CNN or MSNBC for their TV news.

This is weird. What to make of it? The Republicans are in fact more intellectually flexible and curious than Democrats?  Or that Democrats see through hooey even when they watch it all the time? Or something else? The study puts one conclusion this way:

In any case, the good news for climate change advocates is that at least some Republicans, who as a group tend to be predisposed toward global warming skepticism, are less skeptical when exposed to information on the reality and urgency of climate change.

That doesn’t make the study a cheerful thing. It also declares:

…to the extent that the cable news networks continue to provide partisan content in the quest for a lucrative
niche audience, the opportunity for consensus-building and cooperation on global warming—as well as on other critical issues of the day—diminishes.

 

Further reading:

Big Think – Matthew C. Nisbet: Study Maps the Relationship Between Cable News and Climate Change Perceptions ; Nisbet and his post led me to the study, thank you very much, and gets right to the point (unlike me, a supposed news writer). He is a professor at American University in Washington and a colleague there of one of the study’s authors.

- Charlie Petit

Katherine Eban is one of those people who delights in spoiling your breakfast, as she did mine this morning. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, I was enjoying my coffee–and then Eban struck.

Her weapon? A scorcher in this month’s Self magazine, a place where science writers might not often look for enlightenment and inspiration. The hed and deck of Eban’s piece sum it up nicely:

The Hidden Dangers of Outsourcing Radiology

That scan of your brain, bones, or breasts you got last Tuesday? It might have been read by someone who isn’t a doctor and lives 12 time zones away. If, that is, anyone has bothered to read it at all.

The story begins with a terrifying anecdote. A woman is admitted to the emergency room with the worst headache of her life. The doctor, suspecting a cerebral hemorrhage, orders a CT scan of her brain. The hospital sends the scan to a radiology firm hours away, which sends it to a subcontractor in Minnesota, on its way to a radiologist, Edward Wong, in Hong Kong, who notes a mass in her brain, and a disturbing ring around it, and routes the report back to the hospital emergency room where the scan was done.

Seamless, right? Except, as Eban writes, “The emergency room doctor who read Dr. Wong’s report never spoke with him; he later admitted that he did not know the significance of the ring yet didn’t ask.” The ring, it turns out, was evidence of a situation that almost proved fatal.

Troubling? That’s only the beginning. The benign image of the doctor and the radiologist gazing up at a negative clipped to a white light box, tapping a pencil on the abnormality and discussing possible treatment is “as outdated as Marcus Welby,” Eban writes.

She tells another story of a woman whose scan alone did not necessarily raise alarms, but combined with her surgical history–it should have. The problem, of course, is that the radiologist knew nothing about the patient’s history.

In another story, a woman was offered a free mammogram by a hospital that said it wanted to test new equipment, according to the woman. A story broke in the local media that some 1,300 mammograms had never been read at the hospital. The free screening had been a ploy to get her in for a repeat scan without telling her what had happened to the original scan, court documents alleged.

Eban also has a piece in the Nov. 9 issue of Fortune, an in-depth examination of the notoriously secretive and privately owned Purdue Pharma, maker of the notoriously problematic drug OxyContin. The story starts a little slowly for my tastes; the review at the top of the story of America’s dependence on pills and the dangers of OxyContin and other opioids was overly familiar, I thought. But you should persist, because a third of the way through the story, she reveals that she was able to score an interview with the company, which, if not unprecedented, is highly unusual. She details the history of the company, which took an old drug, altered it enough to gain FDA approval, and unleashed a marketing blitz. OxyContin, Eban makes clear, is a triumph of marketing–not a triumph of medical research or pain control. I didn’t find this one quite as unsettling as the Self story, but it told me more about Purdue Pharma than anything else I’ve read, and the company is eminently deserving of such journalistic investigation.

Check out Eban’s website for other examples of her work. Just don’t do it over breakfast.

- Paul Raeburn

A storm is in the news and for once, and with good reason, it doesn’t get handled as a global warming debating point. At least not much. Alaska in November doesn’t evoke thoughts of rising temperatures. But still, a storm this huge could inspire the weather service maybe to put names on few storms that are not hurricanes (or cyclones or typhoons) or their slightly smaller cousins, tropical storms.

There are many stories on this thing. One wonders if the TV crews who produce the Deadliest Catch have stayed safely tucked in Dutch Harbor. Hope so.

The storm’s development and path toward the west coast of Alaska, south of the Bering Strait but mostly north of the Aleutians, with the town of Nome in its cross hairs, elicited frantic warnings from the National Weather Service. Huge waves, massive erosion, big storm run-up, further peril to numerous small towns populated largely by Inupiat and other Eskimo communities, and heavy snow have seemed likely to take a heavy toll on property and on people who don’t get to high ground.

One of the few outlets that seems to have tried to explain it in meteorological terms is the Christian Science Monitor, where global warming DID come up, with a question mark after it. Old time staffer Pete Spott‘s  angle is that recent warming has limited the sea ice that might otherwise have damped out the storm’s large waves, loosing them to crash directly on shore. The Monitor also picked up, from the news service Our Amazing Planet, Brett Israel‘s explainer of the confluence of immediate factors to brew this potential killer. Not only did warm air from the south tangle up just right (or wrong) with a jet stream and cold Siberian air masses, but the mashup formed an unusually long, straight river of surface wind, or fetch, across the sea. That, Israel writes, lets the wind build waves to enormous height.

The latest news update, mid-afternoon eastern time:

• AP – Dan Joling: Alaska Storm Damages Roofs, Sends Residents Inland ; Good breaking news reporting but who wrote that hed? Really, ‘damages roofs’? How about writing “Blows roofs off,” or “Residents flee” or “Sea Enters Nome”   etc. “Damages roofs” is what happens in a hail storm. Removing a roof is not mere damage.

Just curious Dept: Among remote Alaskan coastal towns in the storm’s track is Point Hope. Three days ago New York Times reporters William Yardley and Erik Olsen, accompanied by a NYT photographer, saw their feature story run on the basketball-mad town’s youngsters knocking off teams from much larger communities. One figures that a three-person team was not sent to Point Hope to write about amateur basketball players, however enthused they may be. Just guessing here, but one smells a larger investigative story in the works, and the basketball feature was simply opportunistic telling of a story too good to let pass. So here we have the Times with hundreds of thousands of readers, maybe millions, learning about the Tikgaq gymnasium and its hoops wizards. Then bam, three days later, the town’s people are in the same gym trying to keep safe from a historic storm. Does that weathered plank wall still hold that bent rim, today? Is the Times’s team still there, or back home? One doubts they’re there still, of course. But I’m sending Yardley an email to ask what he makes of this irony.

- Charlie Petit

For many years wonky economic language has helped to hobble, one surmises from the perspective of this resident of the US, efforts to make industries pay for damage their activities cause even if they are diffuse and don’t have any built-in impact on their bills for production or delivery of whatever it is they sell. For example, the oil industry and coal industry that do not internalize the longterm costs to future economic growth imposed by the climatic side effects of their products.

In Australia today, amid a flood of reporting on a vote by slim margin to tax carbon at the rate of $23 (Australian, very close to $US) per ton of emission – higher than Europe’s carbon markets are running at now – along comes the more pointed and perhaps palatable “Social license to operate” concept. OK, it’s an Op-Ed in the Sydney Morning Herald by one Katherine Teh-White, id’d as managing director of a management consulting firm devoted to, um, social licenses to operate. The idea, far as I can tell, is the same as that behind effort to internalize, within the balance sheets of companies, the costs to society as a whole that are traceable to things such as pollution. One has no belief that mere relabeling will change the business and philosophical and political dynamic stalling meaningful government acceleration of a sustainable new industrial age. But it might make some difference. I’ve thought calling such economic incentive an aerial sewage tax is an honest way to put it. But maybe this social license idea is more felicitious on the ear. And,, one must concede, putting the word “social” on anything the government tells people to do, for their own good, will make even more smoke pour out of the ears of America’s rising right wing school of dogmatic purity. Too bad we can’t put a tax on that kind of smoke. It might balance the budget. Plus, it’s anybody’s guess whether Australian will wind up rescinding this tax as smoke comes flying out the ears of some of its own citizenry.

Other news on Australia’s new carbon tax:

• Telegraph (UK) Jonathan Pearlman: Australian carbon tax passed in Senate ; Filed from Sydney.
• AP – Australian Senate passes carbon tax on 500 largest polluters, breaking PM’s election-year vow.
• Independent (UK) Kathy Marks: Australia comes clean after deal on carbon emissions cap ;
• BBC – Australia Senate backs carbon tax;

- Charlie Petit

Hot Rod Art y'don'wanna see in a tie-up

Wouldn’t that be an irony?  Sitting in a car on a jammed freeway, nothing but exhaust pipes rumbling for miles ahead and behind, seems a stupid way as it is for society’s infrastructure makers to arrange transport right when we need to be somewhere, at rush hour. But what if, on top of being a wee bit mindless, it made us stupider then we were going in – what if the CO, aerosol sooty stuff,  and unburnt HC and I dunno what else actually sapped our precious cranial neurons?

That troubling hypothesis, and he makes it clear it’s nothing more than that but it’s easy to see a few warning flags, got the Wall Street Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz a prominent space in the paper this week.  He also writes a shout-out to his story in a WSJ blogpost. Lee Hotz is nothing if not a sane and sensible reporter. The  Journal’s news pages are famed for their sane, sensible, carefully reported and meticulously edited stories, even allowing for Murdoch’s Morlocks. But still. Really? We evolved sitting round smoky campfires coughing our brains out sometimes, yet our IQ’s retreat a little bit if we regularly breathe a little petro-smoke that’s been run through a catalytic converter to boot? Maybe. The story is an indicator that some heavy research is in order. The peril, if that it be, is not limited to commuters and truck drivers, but to people merely  living in congested cities and especially near busy roadways, it says here.

Hotz distills suggestive clues that where there’s smoky exhaust, there’s brain cells in a hurt. Such as evidence he cites that when EZ-pass technology kept more of the traffic whizzing past toll booths in New Jersey, premature births (which also imperil congition) dropped by about 10 percent in adjoining neighborhoods. Hmmm. Not rreally sure how that connects to the theme, actually. But  the brains of lab rodents in Los Angeles, breathing air routed to them from a freeway, got noticeably inflamed. And several others.

Right about now one would  like to think a member of Congress or somebody at NIH is ordering up a review, a blue ribbon National Research Council panel or something equally packed with elite thinkers, to come up with a protocol that will tell us how much to worry when all the brake lights go on. One would think work-based epidemiology of heavily exposed people, bus drivers or NASCAR mechanics or such, would help clarify things.  California practically invented smog and highway traffic jams. Me, I’m glad we’re  getting an electric car sort of soon  (have I mentioned that? Ok ok, too much I have) and NO, we don’t get much of our electricity from coal around here. Maybe a few more of these very quiet vehicles with no exhaust will throttle the smudge down by a smidge.

- Charlie Petit