The beat goes on as media hunch up to cover the Copenhagen talks (even if it’s become unlikely to do much beyond set a date perhaps to get something tough done). The AP and BBC in particular rolled out two hefty enterprise yarns.

• AP – John Heilprin : CO2 curve ticks upward as key climate talks loom ; This, one infers, stems in part from a journalism workshop/fellowship at Honolulu’s East-West Center. He starts off on the slope of Mauna Loa, at the climate observatory that keeps the globe’s best record of CO2. Tracker learned something – unlike a recent post where I asserted it’s hit 390 ppm, says here I’m way off. That’ll happen in a few months. He fills it out with broad perspective and glum expectations from scientists. The lede refers to a “troubling upward curve.” The last line says, “…it’s going to stay there for thousands of years.”
• BBC – Michael Hirst, Kate McGeown: Rising sea levels: A tale of two cities ; More of a report than polemic or yarn, the package offers a summary of sea level worries up front, then visits to two cities with a common problem but drastically different plans and means to deal with it – Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Maputo in Mozambique. Read the section called “adaptation.” One nation is building schools with strong roofs – to hold people during floods. The other is building monster barriers so the floods may not come.

A few other stray climate stories for the day:

• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Climate change quickens, seas feared up 2 meters ;
• Reuters – Dina Zayed: Climate change to hit water-scarce Arab world hard ;
• Reuters – Stuart Grudgings : Amazon forest schemes await strong climate pact ; Or, a visit to the other end of your carbon offset. Fine, evocative, atmospheric lead vignette.
• AP – Julie Pace : Obama to outline US climate goals at Copenhagen ; This heavily covered news, which broke this morning, may get its ledes from the President’s plan to be there but the real news is that Obama plans to vow, with or without legislation, a  cut in US fossil carbon emissions below 2005’s level that will reach 17 percent by 2020.

Meanwhile….another kind of worst case scenario.

• Fox News – John Lott: WhyYou Should Be Hot and Bothered About ‘Climate-gate” ; If you’ve wondered how an economist who wrote “Freedomnomics” sums up the Univ. of East Anglia emails, here it is.

Grist for the Mill: COP15 Copenhagen official site ;

- Charlie Petit

In New Scientist its former editor in chief, Alun Anderson, essays on the past and future Arctic with an expert’s eye. He starts with only a thin faint knell of foreboding, in a reminiscence of a polar bear he met as a postdoc aboard a research vessel years ago, he works through well-observed if somewhat standard signs of change and how they will work out; writing like the pro he is he works the reader into sharing his vision of a world coming to evermore abundant life – yet also a drum-pounding scene of death.

The punch in the face is just a short section, a surmise really, that makes sense (and while this is primarily essay, he does cite an authority to give his speculation some heft). As the climate changes, so will the wildlife. The new creatures up there will be, The Tracker appreciates fully only after reading this, familiar ones to us. Salmon and haddock – and killer whales with bold dorsal fins slicing through the nigh-iceless main. Polar bears, walruses, beluga, narwhal? Fade, fade, fade. One can extend his musings. Adios ringed seals on the floes, ditto for harp seals that no Greenpeace campaign may save from the clubbing of the new maritime regime. Fin whales and blues may find a new place to prosper. Gray’s will frequent the whole Arctic shelf. But what of the bowhead? Sigh.

Be thankful to have lived when the old Arctic could still be glimpsed – if you can put up with the collective guilt.

Pic: Ocas off Antarctica, photo by Jeanne Cato, NSF ; source;

- Charlie Petit

One quickly gets over a first suspicion that Cornelia Dean scored a soft assignment to visit a tropical paradise for an eco-tourism semi-vacation writing and frolicking assignment. She lands the lead spot in the section following a trip to what she describes as an impoverished, decidedly non-luxury, and polluted town on the Dominican Republic’s coast. Invasive species are even mucking up the waterways. But, she writes, it has enormous geographic appeal as a potential tourist hot spot. The story is one of environmental tactics for handling with grace an almost certain wave of change. Locals and rather academic outsiders are trying to find a way to bring in tourists without, one gathers, the town’s own people being shoved aside and left dispirited by developers, giant hotels, and private beaches while limited to marginalized jobs as maids, trinket sellers, and tour guides in a place they can barely recognize anymore. Success, she writes, is no sure thing.

Other notable headlines:

• Sean B. Carroll (noted biologist): In Snails and Snakes, Features to Delight Darwin ; A fascinating and well-done look into biology and evolution’s convoluted dance. (By the way, and pertinent to a post Paul Raeburn put in a short scroll down on NYTimes puzzlements, and on which I put an overlong comment, Professor Carroll does a great job but quotes no authority other than Darwin and he cites few others. It’s a newspaper story, but not typical news reporting. )
• Natalie Angier : The Biology Behind the Milk of Human Kindness ; Oxytocin and  Thanksgiving ( and the way a few molecules can seriously upset one’s vain belief in one’s free will and cool logic).
• Nicholas Wade - Museum Is Displaying Treasures of the Other Evolution Pioneer ; The treasured but long-unappreciated chest of specimens gathered by Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s fellow discoverer of natural selection, are going on view. He tells the back story well (One must note that it’s been told before. As by Joel Achenbach at Wapost.)
• Kenneth Chang – How Hummingbirds Get Their Nectar With Tiny ‘Straws’: One of several briefs for The Observatory roundup. Its basic news – how animals manage to sip through teeny straws – as it happens has another illus circulating but this one involves butterflies: AIP/EurekAlert Press Release ;
• Pam Belluck – Sounds During Sleep May Aid Memory, Study Says ; One of the more surprising articles. But no, one can’t receive instruction very effectively while asleep, her sources say. But one may be prodded into cementing better the things one sort-of just learned while awake.

As usual, much more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Fred Pearce is a vigorous and determined British climate and science reporter whose pieces don’t disguise his personal opinions. He’s a campaigner only too happy to share his outrage as he disturbs the status quo. The Tracker finds his pieces generally refreshing in their candor, and The Tracker also gently advises Pearce’s readers to take a deep breath before deciding whether to believe such accounts in their entirety.

For instance:

He has a fine and rollicking piece in The Daily Mail in the UK, under the hed “How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world.” One might be forgiven for thinking somehow he means pollution as in all pollution as in as much CO2 and soot and and oxides of nitrogen and of sulfur and of ozone and of everything else that comes out of smokestacks and tailpipes.

But no, it’s just sulfur pollution that he means. Plus, perhaps, as the ships he describes are all huge bulk freighters run by enormous diesel engines, one might mistake “cars” for “vehicles” and thus surmise that he includes all the world’s diesel trucks in this particular competition. He does not say.

But perhaps it becomes conceivable that all the world’s cars, most of them burning gasoline or as held in the UK, petrol, and thus using fuel that tends to be exceedingly low in sulfur, are out-billowed by the plumes that rise over a mere 16 huge ships combusting sulfurous bunker fuel many times fouler than what typically comes through a hose at a filling station.

Thus, he may have compared apples to oranges here. Maybe it is no surprise that cars, by this one metric, are outdone by ships.

But even with all those cautions, the story is quite commendable. Something really ought to be done – even if the piece is true only in a narrow sense – to stiffen the fuel requirements on huge freighters and tankers.

- Charlie Petit

If you just crawled out of a three-day visit to a news-free burrow, a storm has roiled for three days spawned by fury over theft of e-mails from a top British climate research center and counter-fury by those who interpret them as documentation that global warming science has been mostly an exercise in cooking the books. That is, some say, this is not just a smoking gun, but  proves that the scientists worried over global warming are committing some kind of fraud.

The data cache about 1000 emails  and 3000 documents  was hacked Thursday or so from the Climatic Research Unit of the Univ. of East Anglia.  A few have intemperate language aimed at the persistent crowd of doubters who deny that climate change is real, bad, and our fault. Like, one researcher saying he fantasizes about punching one skeptic in the face should he come across him. Another  calls the deniers idiots. Considering what the global warming deniers say right out in open about, say, Al Gore, that’s pretty mild.

And one talks of using “tricks” in data presentation to emphasize recent anthropogenic warming. Others reflect exasperation that the abating of climate warming for the last few years is not accounted for by top computer models, and other suggest that a journal editor open to papers skeptical of global warming ought to be fired. This may be seen as conspiratorial strategizing. Or, that only wildly biased cherry picking and willful ignorance in interpreting the emails could make them appear to discredit the science cited by such as IPCC.

A question is how deeply media reporters are looking into the content of the emails for themselves. So far, it appears, most are relying on the reactions of various partisans in the debate over global warming policy.

Stories:

• AP – David Stringer: Hackers leak e-mails, stoke climate debate ; One of the earlier media stories to run, after a blogstorm was well underway.
• Telegraph (UK) University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes ; Indeed most contentious (see “cherry picking”) ;
• Guardian (UK) : Climate change champion and sceptic both call for inquiry into leaked emails / Both sides of climate change debate urge investigation as Met Office dismisses ’shallow attempt to descridit robust science” ; That’s a long hed – perhaps it should have been longer and called it a political debate rather than implying it’s a genuine one about the latest science. But the call for a look-see from something like the UK’s Research Integrity Office may well in order.
• The Australian – Brendan O’Keefe: Hot and bothered ; Mostly relies on sources from the camp of skeptics.
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin: In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes / Stolen e-mails reveal venomous feelings toward skeptics ; She makes a nice point about the difference between substantial debate among authorities, and the public debate. Plus, she writes, the Hadley scientists and those with whom they exchange messages harbor no warm feelings for their denialist critics.
• Hey, here’s one who did go deep into the stolen trove: Guardian (UK) George Marshall: Leaked email climate smear was a PR disaster for UEA ; He read a bunch. Mostly are terribly dull and not damning to anybody’s integrity. And the seemingly damning ones were selectively trawled by “the denial industry (and a horde of climate nerds) ” to enforce their story line. And response by the Univ. of East Anglia, he writes, “was pathetic.”

There is more, but so far not much else aside from that last one seems to  reflect enterprising digging by reporters. Blogs are going nuts. Here, in the grand tradition of false balance, are two, one from each “side.”

• Real Climate – Gavin Schmidt and others: The CRU Hack plus The CRU hack: Context. ; the site generally tries to put the most contentious e-mails into the context of honest but harried scientists speaking honestly (ie, not cooking the books) to one another.
• BIGGOVERNMENT – Christopher C. Horner : Media Missing the Plot on ‘Climate Gate’: It’s the Fraud, Stupid!

And one media blog that sought a long perspective, and a scientist’s blog that separates the impact of the theft on science, and on public opinion:

• Washington Post/Capital Weather Gang – Andrew Freedman: Science historian reacts to hacked climate e-mails ;
• Climate Audit – Judy Curry: On the credibility of climate ressearch ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. East Anglia Climatic Research Unit update ;

- Charlie Petit

Just in case anybody out there is at all satisfied with either the scientific understanding or the management of global warming, the AP’s Seth Borenstein pulls together a list of reasons – none new but not all usually seen in one pile – to believe that such words and terms as urgency, emergency, crisis, and crash program are all too mild to describe the predicament.

The piece kicks off a series of pre-Copenhagen packages that AP plans to run in advance of the big meeting to lay plans to eventually write something for nations to, one hopes, agree to do. Its repeated theme is that back at the Earth Summit nearly 20 years ago and the subsequent writing of the largely unheeded Kyoto Protocol, the IPCC gang badly under-estimated how quickly and how hard climate change’s impacts would hit. No need to hunt up any grist for this mill – Seth puts links at the bottom of his story.

- Charlie Petit

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