Peter Gleick (rhymes with click) is a water and resource specialist at an outfit in California called the Pacific Institute where for many years he’s been a solid source for reporters wanting new detail about how mankind is messing things up – particularly via a changed climate’s impact on natural hydrology. (He is also, by the by, younger brother to well known science writer James G). This  week NPR, via an interview with Renee Montagne on Morning Edition, gave Gleick a chance to say something optimistic and somewhat admiring about our collective behavior. Led by reforms in industry and agriculture, US water consumption per person, if not in absolute numbers, has dropped considerably in recent decades.And this despite the move by so many people to the Southwest to buy big sunny houses and to plant large lawns with big sprinkler systems.

Did you know, for instance, that 70 years ago smelters and mills went through 200 tons of water for every ton of steel they produced, but now it’s more like three or four tons of water? It’s not a long interview butit serves to remind listeners that at last once in a while market pressures, gov’t regulations, and private innovation work well as a team.

(A nod to reader Karl Bernard for the story tip)

Grist for the Mill: Pacific Institute ;

Pic, drip irrigation, via  Business Week

- Charlie Petit

Gad. The big TV we bought about five years ago for the family room would soon be illegal were it still for sale in the stores. I just went and looked at the user manual. That 42-inch Sony LCD sucks 210 watts of power when on (and 2 when on standby) and that doesn’t even count the cable box and the gizmo that sends signals to my headset so my dumb half-deaf ears can tell my dumb brain what people are saying. That’s about 30 more than new regulations adopted by the California Energy Commission will permit.

Any time bureaucrats decide to regulate popular consumer products out of the molds into which free enterprise has put them (as in gas mileage, incandenscent bulbs, freon in AC and fridges, paint on toys, seatbelts, finials on cribs, machine guns at the hunting gear emporium, against foam cups that really are sort of dumb laws, etc.) it’s news. Somebody celebrates, somebody gnashes teeth. Same this time around.

One news angle in California’s case ought to be the pretty good track record by the energy commission. Its mandated efficiency standards on other appliances, manufacturing practices, building codes (as in insulation and double-paned windows), etc. have flat-lined per capita electrical consumption for the state for 30 years while usage has gone up and up for the nation as a whole. We got richer, on average, too. Anyway, it says here that TVs like the one in Mr. and Mrs. Trackers’ family room will need to draw 183 watts or fewer (less? My usage instinct just went blank) in 2011 and 115 watts four years later. Really giant TVs are exempt for awhile from new regs – they’re rare and are usually used in theater-type or sportsbar settings where, I suppose,  the usage per set of eyeballs merits some slack.

It’s front page on some California news papers, but it made national news, too. Fool around with people’s TV sets? That’s a story. But chances are that private enterprise (a slightly different thing than free enterprise) will meet the guv’mint’s challenge – after a requisite spell of complaint. That’s the thing about the way CA regulates electricity and consumer products – our power rates are higher than average but we use so little, our bills are lower than average. So far so good. Needless to say I’m a big, smug, ain’t-we-smart fan of the Energy Commission. The EPA and DOE should have had such courage.

Let’s see how many stories provide a good taste of the back story, the one about how well these chamber-of-commerce ruffling moves have worked out before.

California Stories:

• LA Times – Marc Lifsher, Andrea Chang: California approves new standards on energy-hungry TVs ; It calls the reduction a “slash” in TV power. The term “nanny government” arises. So also do word that this alone will save residents $8 billion from utility bills, and generalities on the merits of efficiency.  And at the end, a bit on how well such strategies have already paid off. A Times blogger, Jon Healy,  also provides Regulating TVs – who wins, who loses? The paper, it says there, editorialized against the regs. One downside – it may take longer to get 3-D TVs that satisfy the new rules.
• San Jose Mercury News – Dana Hull: California adopts first-in-nation rules to cut energy use by new TVs ; After spending time with sources proud of the move, it picks an angry quote from the Consumer Electronics Assoc: “..dangerous for the California economy, dangerous for technological innovation, and dangerous for consumer freedom.” (Freedom on the line? Fox TV’s Glenn Back – excoriated in the current New Yorker – and tea parties are sure to muster to that.) Sums up at the end with a roundup of past payoffs for such moves, and notes other states that are mulling adoption of similar standards.
• Sacramento Bee – Jim Downing: Televisions must use less energy, California regulators tell makers ; This one puts industry’s skepticism first, but says chances of reversal are slim. The governor is firmly on board and most TVs now on sale, it says here, meet the 2011 specs. The story does not, however, have much on the payoff from such practices previously (and a topic, one must add, that the Bee has covered extensively over the years).
• Meanwhile, from a redder portion of a blue-tinged state, this op-ed: Imperial Valley Press: Our Opinion: Forget TVs, work on the budget ;

National Press:

• NY Times – Clifford Krauss : California Imposes Rule for Efficiency on Some TVs ; Mentions California’s regulatory energy history prominently, and calls new regulation perhaps the “most challenging to consumers’ tastes.” One might counter with the state’s lead in demanding, back in the 70s, smog-squelching catalytic converters. Until auto engineers got smarter, that rule turned once-mighty car models into acceleration dweebs and consumers howled.
• Wall St. Journal – Rebecca Smith: New California Rules to Make TVs Greener ; Not long, with nothing on CA’s history of such market interventions and how it’s gone so far.
• AP – Samantha Young – Calif. requires TVs to be more energy-efficient ; Very brief mention of regulatory history, results.
• Reuters – Timothy B. Hurst : California Bans Sale of Energy-Guzzling Plasma TVs ; Plasma TVs are the least efficient, but one is unsure that it’s necessary to single them out in the hed. The piece, by the way, is circulated by Reauters on is wire, but also credited to Ecopolitology.com.*
• USA Today – David Lieberman : California requires TVs to be more energy-efficient in 2011 ;
• PC World – Jacqueline Emigh: California Bans Power-Hungry TVs: Critics Blast Regulation ; Piece is balanced, despite the hed, in its treatment of the pros and cons. However, nothing on past efficienty regs’ impacts.

Grist for the Mill:

Consumer Electronics Association Press Release ;

CA Energy Commission Press Release ;

* Ecopolitology.com – I was unsure what that is. Seems at quick glance to be an activist but well-done enviro news service. It also led me by random walk to a persuasive take-down of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to the windfarm proposed for Nantucket Sound:

• Cape Cod Today – Carl Freeman: Local Public Radio station becomes a forum for RFK Jr. distortion ;

Well, yet another another challenge for industries that make and rely heavily on plastics. Just a week ago this site posted on a study of factory workers in China linking male reproductive problems to exposure to bisphenol-A. This week its twin poster child for plasticizer worries, the molecular family called phthalates, is a suspect for making little boys a little less likely to do stereotypical little boy things – like play fight, wave toy guns, or glomm onto toy trucks and trains.The news, based on a report in the International Journal of Andrology,  has been spreading for several days now, and has been covered by many outlets.

The study, reported the LA Times’s Thomas H. Maugh II three days ago on line, is from team led by a University of Rochester group that has previously reported an association between exposure to these plastic softener agents and subtle changes in the size and anatomy of boys’ genitals. The new study, he reports, is small (it was funded in part by the EPA and NIH). Women were tested for phthalates in their tissues (via urine assay) during pregancy, followed a few years later by questions about their children’s play habits. There was no association between exposure levels and girls’ play, but boys – it says here – tended to be less interested in rough and tumble play and other male-associated patterns at higher exposures.

The study involved 145 preschool children. However, the Times and other news outlets tend not to provide any numbers on how big a shift occurred or how many boys displayed it. Such number are not to be seen in the press release either.

Other stories:

• Science News – Janet Raloff: Plastics Ingredients Could Make A Boy’s Play Less Masculine ; No specific numbers to back up the trend, either. But she has an important bit of news: a much larger study is in the works.
• HealthDay News – Randy Dotinga: Could Plastics Chemicals ‘Feminize’ Boys’ Play / Small study suggests a link, but others question a connection ; Ah, a number. It says the masculinity metric in the questionnaire’s structure was 8 percent lower in mothers with the highest level of phthalates than in those with the lowest. But how many women were in those categories is not revealed here.
• US News & World Report – Ford Vox: In his On Men column with the hed Pthalates Threat: Less Boy, More Girl, , the doctor-medical writer draws perspective from both last week’s BPA news and this week’s study. And this latest, he writes, is so small a study it “isn’t as worrisome as the headlines suggest.” But if it convinces more mothers to avoid processed food while pregnant, he writes, that’s good for other reasons. This account is quite detailed, and provides a bit more on that 8 percent difference. It’s evidence, yes, he writes, but nothing has yet proven that phthalates cause permanent effects in people at exposure levels common in the environment.
• WebMD – Kathleen Doheny : Phthalates Affect Way Young Boys Play ;
• TIME Magazine – Tiffany Sharples O’Callaghan: Can plastic chemicals cause effeminate behavior in boys? ;
• NY Daily News – Rosemary Black: Study: Chemicals in plastic can make boys act more like girls ;
• Kansas City Star – Matthew Schofield : Are the chemicals in plastics making our boys less boy-ish?;
• Toronto Star – Cathal Kelly: Does exposure to plastics make boys less masculine? ;
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Chemicals used in plastic feminise the brains of little boys ’so that they avoid rough and tumble games’ ; Sheesh. Overkill hed. Less rough and tumble doesn’t mean none, not to speak of the inherent uncertainty in a small study. Story’s text is similarly eager to look on the “disturbing” side of the report.
• for the record department – Plastics and Rubber Weekly (UK) Barry Copping: BPF skeptical on US phthalate study ; BPF is the British Plastics Federation.

Grist for the Mill: University of Rochester Med. Ctr. Press Release ;

Pic source on Flickr.

- Charlie Petit

Dueling headlines? AP’s Seth Borenstein reports a rise in CO2 under the hed, Led by China, Carbon Pollution up Despite Economy ; Over at Reuters, David Fogarty writes a different tale, Global CO2 emissions to drop 2.8 pct in ‘o9: report. Borenstein’s angle is that even as the global recession began to bite last year, China’s new fleets of wind turbines were blowing in breezes of rising CO2 due mainly to China’s fleets of new coal fired power plants. Fogarty’s is that nope, CO2 is falling due to that same global recession.

Confusion may be one result of such seeming inconsistency. Yet it’s not, it appears, a contradiction. The stories agree on a larger and more important underlying truth: whatever blip the recession causes, CO2’s trend is relentlessly up. It is accelerating into territory that, as seen in other stories below, has a few reporters horrified. Developing nations, led by China with India nearly as important, are the main drivers of that increase.

Both stem largely from a report in Nature Geoscience from dozens of authors, led by researchers at the UK’s Univ. of East Anglia, US’s Oak Ridge Nat’l Laboratory, and other institutions working under the aegis of The Global Carbon Project. At the same time, the Global Carbon Project issued a separate briefing paper aimed largely at delegations heading for next month’s Copenhagen meeting. Reporters got briefings in London, Australia, and New Zealand. Its overall message was on the long term rise in CO2, but included data showing that in 2008 the increase over the level in 2007 could largely be attributed to emissions in China. But the researchers also say that this year, with the recession more intense, emissions will drop a bit. The Tracker would go with the forecast drop this year – it’s newsier, sounds like a welcome turn of events in a bad time, would pull readers in, and then let’s them have it with the bigger, bad news that our atmospheric blanket is getting toastier all the time, alas.

That data block upper right, distributed by AP, does show that despite China’s continued growth last year many nations, led by the US, were already throttling their factories and power plants back as economic activity ebbed.

Other stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Pollution increases as world loses its ability to absorb carbon dioxide ; This may be a better angle than either Reuters or AP took – the carbon sinks are getting clogged. Plus in a second story stemming from the same report, she has Climate Change: temperature to increase 6C by end of century.  Gad.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor, Michael McCarthy: World on course for catastrophic 6°Rise ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor (comment): Climate change is like a disaster in slow motion ; The paper’s science writer does an op-ed. He is dismayed and perhaps disgusted by political hob-nobbing while the world turns on the roasting spit.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Marian Wilkinson: Jump in coal use pushes emissions to all-time high ;
• Times (UK) Ben Webster: Greenhouse gas emissions study highlights need for tighter national targets ;
• Canwest News Service (Canada) Margaret Munro: Emissions per capita at ‘all-time high’: Report.

Grist for the Mill:

University of East Anglia Press Release ; Univ. of Bristol Press Release (on real contradictions in recent news) ;  Global Climate Project Brief for Policy Makers.

Sort of related, contrapuntal green energy news that may momentarily take one’s mind off the atmosphere’s catastrophe:

• NYTimes – Kate Galbreath: After Outcry, 2 companies shift their turbine plans ; A report on the fine-grained, business-motivate ties between Chinese and American wind power moguls, and what politics and public opinion can do to their plans.
• USA Today – Julie Schmit: Controversial wind farm to build turbine plant in USA. Ditto.

- Charlie Petit

Out in the side halls of the debate, such as it is, over global warming is the issue of CO2 fertilization. That is, aside from warming things up and turning oceans more acid, CO2 can stimulate plant growth (unless their growth is squelched by some other nutrient or water shortage). Ergo, CO2 good, IPCC bad.

Now along comes news that one iconic species, the Bristlecone pine tree of which some individuals are thousands of years old, appears to be putting on growth rings now that are fatter than any they’ve ever been before. Soon’s I saw the headlines I thought CO2 Fertilization by golly!!

Or, maybe not. The lead hypothesis, it appears, is that it’s simply gotten warmer, and hence more hospitable for the trees, high in the White Mountains along the California-Nevada border and in other Great Basin peaks where they grow.

Anyway, a few outlets jumped on the news given extra prominence by press releases including one from the National Science Foundation (in Grist below).The formal publication, by researchers at the universities of Arizona, or Western Washington, and Minnesota, is in the Proceedings of the Nat’l Acad. of Sciences. Which I just looked at as I write. The news stories below don’t say very much about CO2 fertilization but the paper does. It calls it an unlikely cause. The growth spurt is restricted to the uppermost part of the trees’ range. Temp changes are distinct there, not so for CO2.

In fact, the paper has far more ifs and maybes and other qualifiers than does the press release. But its authors are emphatic: at and near treeline the late 20th century has seen bristlecone pine growth rings of unprecedented width. And they looked at more than 20,000 rings.

Stories:

• Arizona Daily Star- Tom Beal: Tree Growth Faster At Higher Elevations / Rapid Warming Cited ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Bristlecone growth may reflect global warming ; Perlman cites another phenomenon in his lede – coral growth – which as it happens is topic of another post a few items down. Story is written by a man who has looked at bristlecones himself, back when they were younger, and who called the PNAS paper’s editor, a Stanford man, for more detail.
• Redding Record Searchlight – Doug Craig: Meanwhile, Some Trees are Thriving ;  This tiny paper gives the story a nice ride, but mainly by rewriting (with citation) the version in New Scientist.
• New Scientist – Shanta Barley : Climate change gives ancient trees growth spurt ; Barley gets a distinct angle – by growing faster the old trees may be flirting with a quicker demise. But there’s a big maybe on that.

Grist for the Mill:

NSF Press Release ; Univ. of Arizona Press Release ; PNAS paper ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker recently got access to the newsletters that Energy and Environment Publishing sends out to subscribers in return for a hefty price. Most of them contain serious journalism, heavily reported, and within a business model that will never work for true mass media (see “hefty price”). But they offer  encouraging evidence that the internet is not always fatal to old line publishers who cannot survive without profit. (And one of its writers, Lisa Friedman, is winner of the on line category among this year’s AAAS Kavli science journalism awards)

Today one of those newsletters, ClimateWire, has an intriguing write up by staffer Annie Jia. She went to a meeting underway in Washington DC: the 3rd Annual Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference. Her hed: People are irrational about climate, but teachable.  I can’t link to the whole thing, but will update this post if I can get an open link sprung for me by the publisher. (*UPDATE, we got it, the previous headline link should take you to Jia’s story. ) It’s a well done report with insights useful for understanding why the hell so many people are too dumb to see that anthropogenic climate change is real and a crisis, and others are too dumb to see it’s either a fraud or too far down the priority list to matter.

However, it led me to look for any other coverage of the meeting. I found just one, a blog, well-crafted, with its own twist on the meeting’s news. It’s at theenergycollective website, by Marc Gunther: What’s for lunch? Behavioral economics meets climate change. He refers to one narrow aspect of the meeting, and will, so to speak, presumably be reporting in further posts on the meat of the meeting. But this one is about meat, the kind one eats, and the irrational but predictable ways that diners’ choices of meaty or vegetarian lunches can be manipulated. It’s all about choice, and about the perverse ways we make them.

And what a wandering trail led to this post!

Grist for the Mill: American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy Behavior, Energy & Climate Change Conference.

- Charlie Petit

Its difficult for many people to look at, without dismay, photos of those giant wholesale fish markets in Japan, Spain, and elsewhere and their carcasses of bluefin tuna, often as big as prize-winning hogs and some the size of horses without legs, lined up for inspection. One needn’t be a vegetarian to worry about such a beautiful – plus tasty – species whose numbers are clearly plummeting world wide. Several news outlets have been following deliberations, in Brazil, by the Int’l Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, as it debated the quota that fishing boat operators ought to have for the upcoming season.

It made up its mind over the weekend and cut the quota substantially, but not enough, say critics. Those critics includes, as seen in the press release from NOAA down in Grist, the U.S. government.Media reports tend to include the numbers and a lineup of environmental and other critics who wanted either a total ban, for now, on catching the giants, or a number about half the size agreed to by the delegates from 45 countries. Critics tend to note that the agreed on catch is only half the problem – the other half being the fraudulent record keeping and other cheating that makes the actual catch much larger.

Stories:

• Reuters – Douglas Engle, Stuard Grudgins in Recife, Br: Fishing body agrees to cut in Atlantic tuna quota ; The cut is about 30 percent from what it’s been. Straightforward, but quotes nobody outside the regulating body as welcoming the new limit.  Greenpeace and the Pew environmental group get in their licks however.
• AFP - Bluefin tuna quota cut not enough: environmentalists ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Tuna body shies from fishing ban ;

Non-power of the Press; A few editorials’.,columnists’ calls went unheeded:

• LA Times (Nov 13): Saving the bluefin tuna ;
• New  Scientist: Tuna in peril as catches reach triple the limit ;
• NY Times: Last Act for the Bluefin ;
• Times On Line (UK) – Charles Clover: Tuna vanish as their protectors samba on . Sometimes it is a mistake to write, for publication, when one is seething mad. Lawyers may react, retractions may follow. Sometimes it works out fine. This seems to be in the latter category. How often does one get to read  which agency is “arguably the most dysfunctional environmental organization on earth”?

See also:

• Politics of the Plate (blog) Barry Estabrook: Tuna Diplomacy ; Filed before the final decision, and including some bloggy but actual reporting. Best part is its alternate translation of the fishery managing organizations acronym. Such a thing illustrates one way in which blogging – or columnists -  can more easily cover some aspect of news than can mainstream media news writers.

Grist for the Mill:

Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin Press Release ; Booooo, it says.

European Union Press Release; Ya-a-a-a-y, it says.

- Charlie Petit

Two very different snippets of jellyfish news hit the last few days.

The larger one seems particularly sound.  AP’s Michael Casey filed it from Japan after a visit with a fishing crew. His enterprising story aptly applies the appliance measuring stick. Its lede: “A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venemous tentacles…” and so, creepily, on. One is uncertain that blood-orange is a color, and orange is itself a metaphor, but there are blood oranges. A terminological tangle, that is.

Back on topic:  The story gains heft as it moves past its vignette lede, introducing readers to a scientist who has devoted much of his career to trying to understand the recent proliferation of these huge jellies, their impact on the fishery, and blips of data from around the world that suggest a global surge in jellyfish populations with warming one overarching common factor. The piece does not however proclaim a single cause for the case in Japan, but cites temperature’s rise, overfishing, and pollution that triggers plankton growth as possible co-factors. Nice balanced job – despite the usual and exasperatingly, often ignorant, carping and wisecracks one finds in, as one example, The Arizona Star’s  list of readers’ comments. One continues to think newspapers and other outlets ought toss out any comment that does not include the commenter’s full real name (exceptions for those in totalitarian nations voicing dissent that could put them in jail, or worse.)  This paper appears to require partial names and initials. That’s a start.

On the weird news about jellyfish front, one finds diversion at BBC. There Jody Bourton reports, with the video evidence, discovery that some coral polyps are able to eat jellyfish. None of the gelatinous victims appear to be of refrigerator size but that, too, is a start. Maybe Gaea will somehow bail us out of a jellyfish-dominated oceanic future.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) An NGO from Peru has just won from the World Bank an award to – in theory – paint in white 3000 square km of  Peruvian glacier terrain. The glaciers account for 60% of the country’s water reserves. Their area has decreased a 22% in the last 30 years due to global warming. As the ice recedes, the dark rocks absorb more light and accelerate the process. The idea is that painting the rocks in white will slow its melting. Local people, with paint that doesn’t contaminate, will do the painting.

This is an example of adaptation measures now that mitigation agreements seem further. El País publishes a very critical story entitled “US and China make Copenhagen fail”, in which it denounces the passivity of the two more contaminant-spewing  countries of the world. It says that nobody else is going to reduce emissions if the big actors don’t start first.

La ONG “Glaciares de Perú” acaba de ganar un concurso del Banco Mundial y se le han concedido 200 mil dólares para pintar 3000 km2 de los glaciares de los Andes peruanos, en fuerte recesión debido al cambio climático.

El Comercio (Perú) informa de esta noticia y explica que cuando un glaciar empieza a derretirse, la parte oscura de la roca absorbe más calor y acelera el deshielo. El monte Razuhuillca de 5.200 metros será el primero en pintarse, a mano, y con una pintura que no daña el medio ambiente ni contamina las aguas del glaciar.

En El Mundo (Esp) encontramos una nota más completa desde Lima de Beatriz Jiménez, quien empieza poniendo números a la problemática: la superficie de los glaciares peruanos ha disminuido un 22% en lo últimos 30 años, y esto tiene consecuencias directas en el ciudadano, pues el 60% de las reservas de agua de Perú vienes de sus glaciares. Entrevistando al director de la ONG, no logra profundizar en la que define como “receta secreta” de la pintura. Seguro que el Banco Mundial ya lo habrá analizado antes de aprobar el proyecto, pero esperamos leer opiniones externas sobre su impacto ambiental. Otro dato interesante del artículo es que sitúa a Perú como tercer país más afectado por el cambio climático después de Bangladesh y Honduras, a pesar de ser responsable sólo del 0.4% de las emisiones.

Mientras tanto,  los grandes contaminadores no parecen muy decididos a afrontar el problema. En El País (Esp) encontramos un artículo muy crítico de Antonio Caño, enviado especial a Singapur, que titula su nota “EEUU y China hacen fracasar Copenhague”. Según el texto los líderes de ambos países ya han comunicado al Gobierno de Dinamarca que en los 22 días que faltan para la cumbre no será posible conseguir un acuerdo vinculante que permita la reducción de emisiones de dióxido de carbono.

Este fracaso de los esfuerzos en mitigación (intentar reducir el calentamiento global) podría significar mayor atención a las medidas de adaptación (corregir sus efectos negativos). Aquí deben estar muy alerta los países más afectados por el cambio climático, entre los que hay muchos Latinoamericanos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Lake Titicaca in Bolivia is near a record low level for the last 70 years. A drought gets the main, proximate blame. Most attention to this situation this week internationally  is due to the AP. Its  Carlos Valdez on Friday reported the fact and launches his piece with “Evaporation blamed on global warming…” etc. Nobody specific is credited with pinning the blame on global warming, although one must say it is the sensible default suspect in such cases.

Now, please meet a news outlet of which The Tracker for one had never heard before this morning. It is New Tang Dynasty Television, or NTDTV. It is eight years old, is based in New York and, it declares at its site, is a publicly supported non-profit that delivers news while promoting China’s traditional arts and culture . The audience appears primarily to be people of Chinese ancestry living outside China. Its chairman of the board is a US physicist. Other members of the board tend to be similarly tech and science savvy. Must be a story there. On the Titicaca question, Its story has no byline but, to these eyes, puts a safer and better composed explanation on the same facts. It gets intro, in the video that accompanies the transcript, from an anchor woman (without much evident Chinese ancestry) speaking with a distinct British accent and a possible sign that this network takes itself seriously as a general, international news outlet.  The expert sources in the report itself, interviewed on scene,  list the evident reasons the lake is low in order:  drought in #1, which appears  due to El Niño’s current phase is #2, and #3 is the declaration at the end that #2  “is believed to be aggravated by global warming.” That’s a logical progression from certainty to hypothesis.

*UPDATE: As seen in comments below. once again The Tracker’s habit of parading his innocent ignorance paid off with a gratis nudge from a friend and toward enlightenment. NTDTV, it appears, is an outgrowth of the Falun Gong philosophical and spiritual movement that so disturbs the gov’t in Beijing.

The local press has the story, too:

• Peruvian Times: Lake Titicaca water level drops 2.6 feet this year; Just the facts. It hasn’t rained lately, and the lake is down. It also runs (with no high def on line) the chart above. The Tracker is always content to pin a lot of things on global warming but that set of numbers suggests, to a naive eye, a lot of variation for a long time. It may not provide the best opportunity to invoke the greenhouse.
• Living in Peru (blog) Isabel Guerra : Level of Titicaca dropped 4.5 meters ; She cites reports also in La Prensa in La Paz.

- Charlie Petit

What’s this? Stories spurred by what looks like good news from Brazil’s Amazon about the rate of deforestation? In advance of next month’s post-Kyoto summit meeting in Copenhagen, Brazil’s President Lula and his ministers proclaimed a 45 percent reduction in the rate at which the trees are being felled and burned – or hauled away as timber.

The Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent Andrew Downie, filing from Sao Paulo, reports that the rate is the lowest in 20 years. Hmmm. Twenty years ago was 1989. That’s the year The Tracker went to the area to cover what was already, then, regarded as an ongoing catastrophe of rainforest destruction. That’s where I first met Andy Revkin, now at the NYTimes, covering the same general news. So, such numbers have to be seen in proportion. Better does not always mean good.  But better is better than the alternative. And Lula’s government has vowed to cut the rate much further. Downie, as one sees by going through the following bullets, had at least two customers for his reporting.

Other Stories:

• BBC – Gary Duffy: from Sao Paulo – Amazon deforestation ‘record low’ ; One source gives credit to the global recession, not Brazilian policy, for the reduction ;
• AP – Marco Sibaja: from Brasilia:  Brazil: Deforestation sees biggest drop in 20 yrs ;
• AFP: Brasilia -  Fewer trees cut down in Amazon ;
• ABC (Australia) Richard Reynolds: info credited to Brazil’s space agency -  Amazon deforestation at record low ;
• Guardian (UK) Tom Phillips, filed from Rio: Brazil celebrates 45%  reduction in Amazon deforestation ;
• Telegraph (UK) Andrew Downie : Brazil deforestation drops to lowest level since 1980s. Mr. Downie, one notes, filed for the CSMonitor too. but good for him – same facts but he wrote distinctly different pieces for the two clients.
• Reuters – Natuza Nery, Ana Paula Paiva: Filed from Brasilia, Brazil say amazon deforestation slowest in 21 years ;

Pic: What it looked like in 1988. Source Guardian ;

- Charlie Petit

The Reuters science feed has today’s top items of climate news of the day stacked on atop of the other. From two of its more stalwart reporters we find Alister Doyle with Greenland ice loss accelerating: study ; and Deborah Zabarenko adds thump to his ker-: Record-high U.S. temps outpace record lows: study ; Before moving on, a brief ponder upon the distinct grammar of headlines. Isn’t it the norm in regular English for the source or cause of an effect to be to the left of the colon? As in Study: reporters do like their free pastries at morning press conferences. And if one cites the source second, wouldn’t parentheses be more apt? Oh well, concision and news first are paramount on the copy desk.

Before we get to more coverage of those two news bites, few outlets covered another one in the last week that draws a direct connection between their general topics: Arctic and US climate shifts. A study of cave stalagmites in California, that  Earth and Planetary Science Letters published, found that over the last many thousand years periods of higher temps and presumably low sea ice in the Arctic tend to align with drought in California. A warmer Arctic, reports UC Davis researchers, apparently pulls climate bands north – drawing the aridity of Southern California across more of the state. The Tracker would put the release down there in Grist but one old-line, if recently shrunken, news outlet, US News & World Report,  put the NSF press release right on its site. At least one local TV station reporter, ABC KGO-TV’s Wayne Freedman, covered it with its own rewrite and reporting (UC Davis Press Release provided grist for his mill). It’s a story handed to him, but kudos to Freedman anyway: relatively few local TV outlets cover climate with an eye to the science at all, much less with a feature focus on local authorities.

Back on topic: The US temperature study news is via an article in Geophysical Research Letters by US meteorologists at the Nat’l Ctr for Atmospheric Research, the private Climate Central outfit, NOAA, and others. Greenland’s asserted acceleration in ice loss is in Science from a team that a researcher in Holland led, and who had US and British colleagues.

Other Greenland Ice stories:

• BBC – Richard Black: Greenland Ice Loss “Accelerating’ ;
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than ever, data shows ; Actually the data show things. The story tells readers that two different ways to gauge the change were used: one based on precip and glacial flow measures, the other and more impressive one thinks: gravitational field trends. Concise, true.

Grist for the Mill:

Bristol U. Press Release ; U. Colorado (via ScienceDaily) Press Release ;

Other US Temperature Stories:

• NY Times Dot Earth blog – Andrew C. Revkin: More Record Highs and Far Fewer Lows ;
• AP: Temperature records: More highs than lows.
• MSNBC: Warning Sign: Record Highs are double the lows ;
• Science News – Janet Raloff: Record Chills Are Falling, But Only in Number ; She gets the people story – that is, how the researchers met and decided to look deeper – behind the news. And she tells us that even in 2100, if projections hold and record highs outnumber lows eight to one, there will (natch) still be some places setting cold temperature records every once in awhile.

Grist for the Mill: University Corp. for Atmospheric Research Press Release ;

Grist for the Speaking of Unusual Low Temps Mill: NOAA Press Release on October 2009 as third coolest on record for U.S..

And for the outlier news story of the day:

• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Climate change ’sceptic’ Ian Plimer argues CO2 is not causing global warming / Carbon dioxide in the atmopshere is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes and is not responsible for climate hcange, a scientist has claimed ; Denialists are legitimate topics of news. Ms. Gray is the “Environment Correspondent” so climate change is part of her beat. One would think that, in response to the idea that most of the annual increments of CO2 are from volcanoes, she’d at least fact check it with other authorities. She and her editors let this fellow’s assertion sit there unchallenged, without rejoinder from from the mainstream side of this non-debate (who are limited mainly to saying CO2 is so warming things up). Hmmppppphht. All she had to do was run a search and perhaps come up with this report from the British Geological Survey putting volcanic CO2 emissions at 1 percent of those due to human industry, mainly fossil fuel combustion, and other activity.

- Charlie Petit