A letter to Nature published today a letter from a few cryosphere experts (they know their  ice) in Boulder at the Univ. of Colorado and the Nat’l Center for Atmosphere Research. It’s mainly a celebration of the growing ability to measure with great precision the  integrated impacts of small changes scattered around the globe. Most important, the two GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) give continuously-updated snapshots of how much ice is locked in glaciers at mid-latitudes, in big ice caps and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic, and so on. The result: melting ice is raising sea level just like we thought. But more of it is from the big ice sheets and less from mountain glaciers including on the Tibetan Plateau. And overall melting appears to be about a third less than had been thought – but it still handily explains the observed rise in sea level. And, GRACE has only been running for eight years. That’s not much from which to extrapolate.

So it doesn’t drastically change the general story as much as it adjusts the partitioning of the action.

But check out these headlines:

• Daily Mail (UK) Rob Waugh:  New satellite data reveals that Himalayan glaciers are melting far more SLOWLY than predicted ; A story that quotes a reporter at the Register (next bullet down) as saying the info in Nature helps to rubbish the UN’s and the IPCC’s belief that ice melt in the HImalayas is a problem.
• Register – Lewis page: New sat data shows Himalayan glaciers hardly melting at all ; This does, as he points out, demolish once more – as in making the rubble bounce -  the IPCC’s stumble into deep muck just about the time of the Copenhagen climate summit debacle. That was when it was revealed that an IPCC summary report erroneously declared Tibet’s glaciers to be doomed to disappear before mid-century. That’s minor news by now, as the error is widely acknowledged.
• The Telegraph – Louise Gray:  Melting glaciers on the Himalays not contributing to sea level rise ;

Press in the UK appears to be, from over here, still quite fascinated by Climategate – and has a number of reporters who regard that episode as a serious sign that standard global warming calculations and observations are a colossal, perhaps even deliberate, error. But the Nature letter’s authors say explicitly that their study does not much alter reasons to worry that ice melt is raising sea level (and if scientists know at all what they are talking about, is sure to accelerate it). It’s newsy enough to learn that Himalaya will keep its glaciers a good long while, but to package it as evidence that the same is true of, oh, Glacier National Park in Montana, is a stretch. So is to frame the letter generally as a blow against standard climate science’s ice-melt division. It makes climate science more robust and not precarious.

Other outlets take a more relaxed view of the news:

• The Guardian – Damian Carrington: The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows / … loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern ;  Still has its focus on the Himalaya surprise, but does not imply that revision is a proxy for major recalibration of global ice loss ; The Guardian also has further exploration of the report and its reception in media generally – via its Ecoaudit man Leo Hickman: Are the worlds’s glaciers threatened by climate change? ; Scroll down through this to the part that says “My verdict.” Amen.
• E&E Greenwire – Paul Voosen: Melting ice sheets already seen driving sea-level rise ; Voosen turns the theme of the topmost stories listed in this post entirely on its head. In short, while researchers have expected that lower-latitude glaciers, impacted earlier and harder by warming, would contribute most of the globe’s ice melt for some time to come with the vast reservoirs of Greenland and Antarctica taking over eventually, Voosen writes that the baton has been passed already, or:  “the future is now.”
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter Spotts: Ice caps not shrinking as much as one thought, new data show ; Yes, but the huge ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are pretty much making up for it.
• NYTimes/Greenblog – Joanna M. Foster : From 2 Satellites, the Big Picture on Ice Melt; A straightforward account of the new data and the incremental refinement they provide to the larger picture.
• Reuters – David Fogarty: Study: Himalayan glaciers melting more slowly than thought, but seas are still rising ; His lede’s final phrase : “…which should aid studies on how quickly coastal areas may flood as global warmng gathers pace.”  Minor quibble here – Fogarty refers to the GRACE mission as “the name of the satellite.” It’s two tag-team satellites, their slight relative movements a keen gauge of the varying gravity field they encounter.  With aid of fancy mathematical deconvolution, that in turn indicates the distribution of mass (including big wads of frozen water piled up on the ground) behind the wiggles.

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Colorado Press Release ; Includes a very cool video color coded for where ice is accumulating (reds) and vanishing (blues). Not much red to be seen.

Other somewhat pertinent news:

• e360 Digest: Louisiana Report Urges State to Brace for 3 Feet of Sea Level Rise ; This summary, I see on reading more closely, is derived from …
• AP – Cain Burdeau: Low-lying Louisiana prepares for sea level to rise ; Bobby Jindal’s administration put the report out, yet manages not once to mention global warming, it says here. Sometimes Denial is not just a river – it’s a whole ocean and it’s moving into the neighborhood.

- Charlie Petit

From Bangkok comes what the AP says is an exclusive story, and is definitely a good example of how to use a dramatic development to illuminate a larger, chronic issue. The development, writes reporter Thanyarat Doksone,  is that an official of Thailand’s wildlife agency reports that poachers are not only killing Asian elephants for their tusks, but their meat, giblets, sweetmeats, and other edible parts. The issue is the near-global concern that growing, hungry human populations may eat many endangered species out of existence.

The story illustrates the sort of small detail that can make news come alive. It reports that the poachers were filling an order from restauants in the resort, seaside town of Phuket. Official near Phuket, it also reports, are offended and deny that their restaurants are serving up elephant stew or anything of the sort.

- Charlie Petit

Nice piece here  of enterprise writing about the Russian rush to make money in the Arctic Ocean. (alliteration is wit almost as cheap as puns. Almost but not quite. I try to draw the line at puns.) Reuters‘s Albina Kovalyova and Alissa de Carbonnel spoke with the captain of the Russian tanker that just delivered fuel oil to Nome, Alaska (with the help of the overworked USCG ice breaker Healey ). They filed from Severodvinsk after reaching the skipper by phone in Vladivostok. A tagline credit goes to reporter Gleb Bryanski.

The enterprise is not just in reaching the man, but in using this news event as a springboard to the larger Russian ambition to dominate commerce in the Arctic Basin, now that a good part of it can be navigated without icebreaker escort during the late summer and, with global warming running apace, sure to get even more navigable soon.

- Charlie Petit

A little announcement at the National Arboretum in DC, about a new version of the handy climate zone maps that the USDA and its Agricultural Research Service publishes to help home gardeners and others know whether figs, peonies, or passion flower vines will do well in the yard, included a delightful round of fast-talking. That is, if the AP‘s Seth Borenstein got it right, and he’s a diligent reporter. AP has a video by Lee Powell on the news, too.

Now, he could have written portentiously that the affair reflects recognition by a federal agency that global warming is making a practical impact, and compared the kibosh laid down on such revisions when they were considered during the administration of George W. Bush.

Instead, one gets a delightful vignette in which a USDA spokeswoman insists that the map should not be taken as evidence of global warming (was she also there during the Bush administration and still feeling the sting? Yes, if this press release from 2002 is any indication) . Seth immediately follows his sketch of the evasive tap dance with quotes from several horticultural authorities who say of course it’s global warming, sheesh and wottayathinking? The USDA woman had one good point, one thinks. What wipes out many plants is cold weather, so the maps rely only on a region’s cold extremes, not the average temp. But, one bets, there is a pretty strong correlation between the two in how they change.

   There is more to this, one suspects after hunting around for the previous map, pasted here. the colors are a bit different so it’s hard to be sure whether zones are heading north without a  ponder.  Go to this site where I found it and see that there was a 2006 edition of the map too. But USDA didn’t publish it. The National Arbor Day Foundation, apparently stepping into the breach, did that one. It includes a swell subtraction-comparison of zones to show the migration north that was apparent even then. See the arbor day group ‘s own posting of the 2006 effort and the press release it had that year. Nobody that I’ve seen in this weeks news round gives any credit toe NADF for its intermediate map, which sure looks as nicely done as the USDA’s. The Tracker had a brief post on it at the time.

The USDA is not going to make printed posters of the new map, reports say, relying on the web to circulate it. Maybe the nice people at the arbor day organization will step into this breach, too, and run some off.

Other stories on the USDA’s 2012 catch-up hardiness map:

• NPR – Dan Charles: Gardening Map of Warming U.S. Has Plant Zones Moving North ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – Stacy Finz: USDA releases new Plant Hardiness Zone Map ; Gives a plug to Sunset Magazine – a source says it does better job on its maps, for the western US,  than does the USDA.
• Newsday – Jessica Damiano: New Plant Hardiness Zone map released today ;
• USA Today – Janice Lloyd: New USDA climate zone map reflects northward warming trends ;
• Washington Post – Adrian Higgins: New plant map shifts area to warmer zone ;

Grist for the Mill: USDA Ag.Res. Service Press Release, Oregon State U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

At IPS  a general news service that includes a good deal on  climate change, (*Correction 1:  earlier post erred in saying it runs mainly climate news,and there was an even bigger error as noted below) Canadian crusading journalist Stephen Leahy reports a surprise, if it’s true. But one sees in the story an element of bait and switch. It’s not enough to refute the main point, which could well be perfectly valid. But the brush is broad.

Compare the lede, “The only green in biodiesel fuel is the money producers make from it, new research has revealed,” with the followup: “Biodiesel from palm oil plantations may be the world’s dirtiest fuel – far worse than burning diesel made from oil when the entire production life cycle is considered.”

Thus the target is just one way of making biodiesel. It is a widely used and still-growing one to be sure. It would be no surprise that clearing vast natural forest tracts to grow palm oil makes biodiesel overall a product that accelerates rather than retards global warming. But the story ought to tell readers whether there are are some biodiesels that are as green as advertised. I’m thinking of the small operations that turn used cooking oil into biodiesel, but one can imagine others that pass muster on the greenhouse gas scale.

[*Correction 2: As Leahy politely notes in comments, the story does, well along but it's there, tell readers that cooking oil-derived biofuel may be a net plus in the carbon department. ]

Leahy, whose work has been posted on here several times, is among the more innovative freelancers in the struggle to get the money to keep working. Among his strategies for covering travel and other expenses is to seek donations on the web. I’ve made a small one myself to his community supported journalism venture. He uses it to do good, if clearly agenda-driven, work. Being a crusader and being honest are not incompatible.

[*Correction 2 Cont'd: Scratch this whole graf. I'll still maintain Leahy's lede is too strong, but he has the caveats explicitly] He already did what I asked But one more paragraph in this story would be welcome, one that might reassure the public-spirited lady driving her old Mercedes diesel around the streets of Cambridge or Berkeley that she is doing the world a favor when fueling up (for high cost) at a little neighborhood biodiesel outlet.

Other Biodiesel News (some may enforce Leahy’s angle):

• Reuters – Michael Hogan: Green fuel taxes choking German biodiesel growth ;
• Des Moines Register – Dan Piller: Fragile future for biofuel industry foretold ; This is off topic, but a prime source here is named Joe Jobe. He is executive officer of the National Biodiesel Board in Missouri. I usually have the discipline to suppress puns, and also making much of people whose names seem right for the job. Not this time. Jojoba plants, full of wax and natural oil, were for a while the hottest-promoted feedstock for biodiesel. If I were a reporter, I’d ask about that mellifluous name of his. Maybe it’s his given name, or not. Apt for sure.
• Bikya Masr (Egypt independent news) Sharifa Ghanem: Biodiesel buses on the move in UAE ; A little hunting around reveals that the supplier, Lootah Biofuels, says it makes it from used cooking oil. It doesn’t say if it is palm oil, which seems unlikely. The problem, one gathers from Leahy’s story, is palm oil produced for direct conversion to biodiesel.
• Forbes – James Glassman: Liberate Biofuels From Abroad ;He cites Elisabeth Rosenthal of the NYTimes and quotes a five-year-old article of hers, quite badly out of contest, to build enthusiasm for import to the US of exactly the palm oil-based biofuel that energizes Leahy’s report. The headline on Rosenthal’s story (to which Glassman links): Once a Dream Fuel, Palm Oil May Be an Eco-Nightmare. Had any editor at Forbes read Rosenthal’s story, he or she would have done well to tell Mr. Glassman he may not cite it as ammo for his argument. Glassman, one notes, is a free-market crusader and head of the George W. Bush Institute, at the library of the same eponym at Southern Methodist University.
• Malaysia Star – Hanim Adnan: Cries of EU biofuel discrimination grow louder ; This one was in he paper yesterday. Ms. Adnan is quite the fan of her nation’s palm oil – here‘s what she wrote in October.

Grist for the Mill: US Dept. of Energy Biodiesel Production page. Main reference is to conversion of vegetable and animal fats; doesn’t mention palm oil. Implies production in US relies on used and locally-produced feed stock materials.

- Charlie Petit

Everybody (especially in the news biz) likes a fight. One may not approve of the behavior, but it is difficult to look away. Maybe there should be an emotion named for such rapt attention (see today’s post on NYT Science Times, annoyance, and disgust).

Case in point: the continuing loud debate among environmentalists, energy industrialists, and atmospheric scientists over the green merit of natural gas, especially that recovered by hydraulic fracturing or fracking. It got intense after Cornell biologist Robert Howarth and two co-authors reported last spring in the journal Climatic Change Letters that so much natural gas (methane) leaks into the air unburnt from such drilling that the industry’s overall addition to greenhouse forcing is worse than from coal mining and use. Some colleagues of his say he used outdated data, distorted other figures, and generally got it wrong. That is, it may not be doing the planet any good but it’s better than coal and it’s a bridge toward a low-carbon economy. Howarth for his part is sticking to his guns. This is a fight for sure.

In a recent issue of the same journal, two teams, both from Cornell and one including Howarth, offer dueling papers stating their cases.

Perhaps the most partisan account of all this runs as an op-ed in the Murdoch tabloid New York Post, but it’s more than a cut above the paper’s usual. Writer Jon Entine makes no pretense of neutrality in this article that clearly tells the reader to think Howarth spewed bunk or, in the headline’s term, farcical science. It’s hard to tell if he’s a journalist or pure opinion writer (job title is senior research fellow at the George Mason U. Ctr for Health & Risk Communication). As a litigator, he’d make a good living. He’s not a contrarian or denialist on the larger issue of climate change, quite the contrary. But Entine does appear to be deeply insulted when he perceives somebody on the side of the angels (ie, of an Earth not careering into climate chaos) going past good science to make the case. One can quarrel with his label of some anti-fracking forces as “hard leftists.” Some of’em must be such – whatever a hard leftist is these days. But it’s off-base to declare that an overt, radical political agenda is a prime incentive for fracking opponents. Maybe Entine simply stuck in some red meat language to get the story past the NYPost’s editors.

Other Fracking Duel stories:

• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: Fracked: The Debate Over Shale Gas Deepens ; Great line: “So what does this all mean – other than the fact that the Cornell faculty club may be getting a little testy these days?” One offers that Walsh should explain why natural gas may have twice the global warming punch as coal over 20 years, but only about the same over a century. It has to do with methane’s fairly short persistence in the air, a reason interesting enough to be described. The piece does tilt a bit – and against Howarth.
• Business Week – Jim Polson: Fracking’s Greenhouse Gas Contribution Splits Scientists ; This one picks no winners.
• Scientific American – Mark Fischetti :Fracking Would Emit Large Quantities of Greenhouse Gases ; Pretty much reports the anti-Fracking argument by Howarth et all straight and without counter till the end, when doubters get a brief say.
• Canada Free Press – Dennis Avery: Shale gas: Boon for humanity or bane? ; Boon, says this piece from a stoutly conservative pub ;
• Essential Public Radio (Independent, lots of NPR, from Pittsburgh) Jared Adkins: Natural Gas From Shale Could Worsen Climate Change ; That’s a non-sequitur in the hed. Of course it’ll worsen it. The question is whether it is a worse worsener than coal. The story relies only on Howarth and his co-authors as sources.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Ben Cubby: Gas no good to bridge coal and renewables, says study ; The perspective from Australia, leads on Howarth and the fracking doubters, and acknowledges doubts of that doubt’s evidence from both academia and industry.

*UPDATE:

• IPS – Stephen Leahy: Shale Gas a Bridge to More Global Warming ; States the case against shale gas, ignores arguments by some academics that it is still better than coal ;
• New Scientist – Mike Stephenson: Frack responsibly and risks – and quakes – are small ; A pure opinion piece. The author is head of energy science at the British Geological Survey. Not on greenhouse gas forcing, but on the local risks from such drilling practices.

There are some more. In recent years media has faced heavy criticism, overblown in the tracker’s view, that it has engaged in false balance in climate change reporting, portraying contrarians as of equal debate stature as, say, the National Academy of Sciences. In this fracking fight, one is forced to conclude, the scientific debate does demand balanced coverage.

Grist for the Mill: Original Cornell Press Release in April ; Latest paper Press Release from its authors, apparently;  (A funnier press release out from Cornell is out right now, and totally off the fracking topic, on the kinds of people who think they are taller than they are. )

- Charlie Petit

This week, as has gone on for quite awhile this time each year, separate offices within the two US agencies best known for monitoring our planet – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – released their summary numbers on climate in 2011, specifically its warmth. Their differences are the kind that are addressed in the phrase “a distinction without a difference.” They are different but it doesn’t matter. But still. News agencies often choose one or the other.

A look through the scattering of stories finds US climate scientists saying 2011 was, globally, the 11th warmest on record. No wait! Some outlets go with 9th warmest. The reason there is not one voice of authority of course lies in the advantage of having independent groups monitor important things. NOAA has its crew at the National Climate Data Center, which is surely more official than NASA’s team of climate scholars in Manhattan at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Not that it’s maverick or anything like that, but the impression is that NASA’s GISS assigned to itself, decades or more ago as a responsible thing to do, the constant scrutiny of world meteorological data to create a long term climate record. At NOAA and the NCDC, that’s no option

NOAA Uniforms

or whim. It is the job explicitly assigned by high decree. And at NOAA things are very top-down and disciplined, yes sir and ma’am. The good suits for the bigshots are uniforms like they’re in the military. NASA, the slightly looser goosier agency, says 9th warmest-ever, straight-laced NOAA says 11th-warmest. So what? The difference is easy to understand given the tiny changes in temperature year to year – meaning it is hard to assess exactly what has happened. Fine grained differences in how the data get smooshed together produce slightly different results. For one thing, as I recall, GISS takes a more adventurous (but plausible) way of filling in gaps in sparsely-instrumented places including the Arctic.

Most of the few US press outlets that paid attention is going with NASA’s GISS. For sure, #9 is a newsier figure than #11. Not that the NASA-GISS’s figure is not defensible, but if I were at NOAA where the  the sign outside its Asheville, North Caroline facility says it’s the national center for climate data, I’d be miffed that NASA gets climate priority in some eyes.

And for the record the world’s third-best known global thermometer reading, from the UK’s MET office,  already said last week that its accounting puts 2011 at #11, same as NOAA.

The real news is that last year had a strong La Nina condition in the Pacific, which experts say cools the planet. It was the warmest La Nina year on record, but managed to drop the year under the long term trend line. And with La Nina expected to fade over coming months, the Met office expects 2012 to be a contender for hottest ever. Ditto, one presumes, at NASA and NOAA. All three agree that the number, despite jitter-bugging one year to the next, is due to rise dramatically in coming decades. The other news is that whatever the exact temperature, 2011 had a lot of weird weather and related catastrophes.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: World not quite as hot in 2011 ; ranks 11th warmest ; Borenstein’s story stands out for choosing the NOAA yardstick. He also stresses for his mostly-US readers that Americans had temperatures not far above the long-term average, with ’11 merely 23rd warmest overall on the record since 1880. But the UK had the second warmest year ever, and Spain the warmest (as did some US cities including drought-hit Austin, Texas.) He mentions NASA’s “slightly different” figure and its global assignment of temperature to #9. This seems the right call.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: NASA Finds 2011 Ninth-Warmest Year on Record ;
• NBC – 2011 is 9th Warmest Years on Record: NASA ;
• USA Today – Doyle Rice: La Nina cooled the globe in 2011 ; Wise move Mr. Rice. Don’t put a number in the headline and put both of them in the second graf, equally prominently. The story gives a tagline credit to AP.
• Washington Post / Capital Weather Gang blog – Jason Samenow: Extreme weather 2011: warmest La Nina year on record, around 10th warmest overall ; Another equal-handed handling of the double-voiced federal analysis. Also, perfect selection of illus (reproduced above right), which lets readers decide for themselves whether to compare apples to apples or not.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA NCDC Press Release/Analysis ; NASA GISS Press Release ; Data Analysis Page ; UK Met Office Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The decision by the White House to, at least for now, block permits for the Keystone pipeline and thus stall Canadian shale-oil crude from reaching Texas refineries, plus delay or nix all the jobs building it would bring, is news that hardly anybody who pays attention will have missed.

It would have gotten a pass here at ksjtracker, except eye happened to fall on a superbly wide-angle look at it, found at the BBC by its enviro correspondent Richard Black. Leave it to the outsider to give a fine rendering of the larger facets of the decision while not getting bogged down in the sticky details of this heavy oil from north of the border. Black dances quickly through the political meaning on both the small and large scale, its history, and runs a map from the pipeline’s main backer showing the plain fact of the matter that pipes loaded with the stuff already reach into Oklahoma, so keeping Canadian tar sand glop out of the US entirely is not in question.

Which leads to a short roundup of other big-picture, enviro-focussed articles on this development.

Other Stories:

• Guardian – Suzanne Goldenberg: Keystone XL pipeline: Obama rejects controversial project ; Another good one for those (including yours truly) who haven’t been paying much attention to this, and also aimed at a non-US audience (Goldenberg writes from theUS) ;
• CNN World – Sarah O. Ladislaw: Keystone XL Pipeline blown way out of proportion ; By a ringer – a high-level analyst at a DC think tank. Also, reads sensible.
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou Jr:Keystone XL Pipleine Seen Moving Ahead on Alternative Route ; Little here on the enviro issues, but a lot on whatever they are, this decision means little.

- Charlie Petit

For several years geothermal energy prospectors and would-be renewable energy tycoons have been nosing around the Newberry Crater volcanic area in Central Oregon, south of the small city of Bend. The AP‘s Jeff Barnard has a hefty update out this week with explanation, stats on energy potential, quotes from officers of a company about to start pumping water in hopes it’ll crack the hot rocks, flash to steam and come back up turbine-ready, concerns about induced earthquakes, and a smattering of national context and history of the ever-promising geothermal energy sector. Included is recognition that recently abundant natural gas and soft electricity demand are conspiring to make business rougher for renewable energy of all sorts.

By the way before going on, the story capitalizes things that may not necessarily need it. The nation’s recent economic slump is the Great Recession, and the technology of preparing hot dry rocks for exploitation is Enhanced Geothermal Systems. These are mere style oddities, not sins, to put big letters on the words’ fronts. But, if I write a story is it ever with an Inverted Pyramid, or a Buried Lede, or a Feature Style?  Not that I can recall as written quite that way.  Just because trade sites like to write about Enhanced Geothermal Systems is no reason reporters ought to put it that way.

The effort has been in the press before, chiefly via the local paper, the Bend Bulletin, plus a few national outlets. The Bulletin puts its archives behind a modest paywall. But it’s a good system – just 75 cents on PayPal for all day & all you can eat. That’s pretty simple and pretty fast and so cheap it’s painless. Methinks newspapers really need to establish a nationwide syndicate that, for a modest prepaid sum (fifty bucks comes to mind), provides a cookie for instant access to member newspaper stories for just a tiny marginal cost – a nickel or a dime – per hit. It could add up. It’s not an original idea of course. Too bad it has not caught on that I’ve noticed.

Earlier Stories:

• Bend Bulletin (Aug 21, 2011) Dylan J. Darling: New geothermal firm in the hunt / Newberry Volcano lures third operator ... ; One thinks Barnard’s AP story might have mentioned that the company he profiled, AltaRock, is not the lone ranger at Newberry Volcano. Darling by the way is the “public lands” reporter at the Bulletin, recently arrived there from enviro writing for the Redding Record-Searchlight in the far north of California’s Sacramento Valley.
• Bend Bulletin (Mar 20, 2011) Kate Ramsayer: Geothermal project advances / Experiment to use 142 million gallons of groundwater ; Which also means that the test Barnard describes was also supposed to have happened last year. And yes Ramsayer, as a few earth science reporters may already have noticed, has since left the Bulletin and landed in DC at the American Geophysical Union’s press office. The Bulletin has kept pretty close tabs on this venture – put in AltaRock at the paper’s home page search engine and you’ll see a list of stories. An even earlier story of Kate’s is tracked in a previous post.
• NYTimes/E & E Greenwire – Phil Taylor:  Geothermal Advocates Tout Plants’ Smaller Environmental Footprint ;
• IEEE Spectrum (April 2011) Peter Fairley: Earthquakes Hinder Green Energy Plans ;

*UPDATE:

• EARTHFIX (Oregon  Public Broadcasting/ Dec. 23, 2011) Vince Patton :  Geothermal Energy Challenge: Getting Hot Water From a Dry Hole ; A solid summary of issues and technology, with superb maps and other illus, from this public media project and posted on the OPB site. The TV and radio effort gets support from many other Pacific Northwest public outlets plus the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Brought to our attention, thank you, by Morgan Holm, a VP at OPB who tells us he’s a regular tracker follower and thank you very much for that, too.

Grist for the Mill: AltaRock Energy Inc.,

- Charlie Petit

.

At Miller-McCune Magazine is a story by Bruce Dorminey of the sort one ought to salute. And I do, with caveats we’ll get to.

It describes basic research into ancient climate processes pertinent to the big climate questions humankind faces. It relates some detail on the process of science and its testing of hypotheses and search for new ones, in this case via large-scale geological sampling. It has grandeur to it.

The news is that drill rigs have pulled cores from the Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone in Wyoming, bounded by the Rockies and the Wind River Range on the west, the Bighorn Mountains to the east. If you’ve driven the road from Cody to Mount Rushmore, you’ve been through it. The cores penetrate sediments laid down during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a name so evocative one need not know what it means to be intrigued. It is an example of hyperthermal, a time when Earth’s temperature rose due in large part to increased greenhouse gases – CO2 released over a few to many thousands of years by flood basalt events or other immense increases in volcanic eruptions, or disintegration of methane clathrates in sea beds, and so on. The usefulness of  understanding past examples of warming is manifest. Analysis of the cores is now underway.

Included are hyperlinks to background information, including the web site where a University of New Hampshire team describes the project in geological detail. One learns there that CO2 levels may not have risen nearly as fast as they are today, but they peaked at a far higher level – probably more than 1000 ppm compared to the roughly 400 ppm we’re at now, on the way to perhaps twice that in this century.

The magazine provides a list of previous stories Dorminey has written for it. They have variety and indicate a knack for finding news on big, weighty topics. The story is just one example why Miller-McCune, a 3-year-old, non-profit with its offices in Santa Barbara, CA, is a place for serious science writing.

But … one does have a few questions. For instance, we read that this mid-continental drilling program is very different from most searches for geologic sequences through the warming of 56 million years ago, ones in which cores are from sediments under the ocean floor. Okay. But what kind of sediments are those from Wyoming? Are they accumulations of mountain river runoff and flood plains, from lakes, aeolian deposits, maybe buildup in  inland seas, or all that or more or what?  Why are they more revealing then ocean cores taken from under places that are still ocean? One assumes they include evidence of vegetation changes, deserts or verdant forests, wildlife population rhythms, things like that. But the reader should not be expected to fill that in.

Second, and here’s a little one, we read that the outpourings of CO2 in that ancient time were greater than what we are doing (albeit over a much longer period eons ago than our current burning of fossil fuels is taking). And we read that the source of that CO2 was probably a surge in volcanism. Here’s a quote in the story from one professor:  “One idea is that you had a lot of rifting and volcanic activity associated with the North Atlantic’s mid-ocean ridge … Volcanic activity in the midst of large petroleum deposits would be a way of burning a lot of fossil fuel quickly,” thereby releasing loads of carbon. Volcanism may not, today, emit CO2 on a scale anywhere near what the burning of coal and petroleum achieves, but I’d thought that these ancient, persistent volcanic eras carried their own CO2 – and didn’t need to ignite oil or coal deposits to drastically change greenhouse forcings. But if they did, how such coal or oil fields could be right next to a mid-ocean ridge, a place of newly-born oceanic crust and not the ancient sedimentary basins that generate oil and coal, is tough for me to imagine. Maybe it was so. Don’t read this to find out how that happened. Perhaps it was Yellowstone caldera-type eruptions that torched part of our eventual fossil fuel supply but that’s not what the quote suggests.

The story merits attention. I now know to look forward to the analysis of the cores. But the account would have been more satisfying if several holes had been filled.

- Charlie Petit

For some years now James Hansen, one of the the world’s more overtly political, anti-global warming scientists (he’s terrified of it), has been urging world governments that can’t break the deadlock over how, when, and whether to curb CO2 emissions to at least go after some other low-hanging fruit in the meantime. Here’s one reference, from 2002, stemming from a report in PNAS. He said soot and methane are natural first targets. And Hansen, when he is not out pissing some people off for dropping the recommended scientific cloak of disinterested logic and instead just shouting at the world to wise up, is the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in Manhattan. It should not be but often is, as we’ll see, confused with the agency’s Goddard space flight center in Maryland.

Maybe it’s just coincidence. But probably not. Several other GISS climate analysts, along with an international cast of colleagues, call this week in Science for exactly such a near-term strategy, with a focus on reducing black carbon particulates and methane emissions. Same as Hansen said nine years ago, but this has tons more detail.  It should, it says here, not only pay off in the long run by helping to avoid planetary and economic catastrophe but might make money right away. It could shave a half degree Celsius or more off this century’s projected warming all by itself. Plus, unlike CO2, black carbon (soot) makes people sick directly. It’s a ‘win-win” the team says. It should buy some time, they further say, to get serious about the bigger challenge of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.

By the way, Science’s usually superb SciPak advance, embargoed tip sheet for reporters has an error and a flub. First, it tells them there is a press release from NASA’s Goddard, but identifies it as the wrong one – the huge Maryland facility. Then, the link goes to a press release from an entirely different agency, on another topic (wrong yet perfect: a climate and wandering albatross report. If you’re curious, Science’s Sid Perkins has that story). Reporters appear to have dealt with it.

The AP‘s version no doubt gets the largest circulation. Washington Bureau reporter Seth Borenstein runs readers briskly and expertly through the main points. He includes, well along, a quote from an outside admirer of the paper: “So rather than focusing only on carbon dioxide emissions, where we have to make a tradeoff with energy prices, this strategy focuses on `win-win-win’ pathways that have benefits to human health, agriculture and stabilizing the Earth’s climate,” said University of Minnesota ecology professor Jonathan Foley, who wasn’t part of the study. “That’s brilliant.” First, good on Borenstein for calling around. Second, on a craft note, that’s a lot of quote. The front end of it simply restates what the paper says and that Borenstein’s story has mostly already gone through before getting to the quote. It might have been better to whittle that direct statement down to “That’s brilliant,” because that’s the best part, and of course while being sure the reader knows, in the reporter’s own telling, what it is that is brilliant.

Other stories:

• NPR – Christopher Joyce: To Slow Climate Change, Cut Down On Soot, Ozone ; Joyce starts off on the larger political arena of climate change + politics and then, ta-da, offers the Science paper as pointing to a palatable way forward.
• Guardian (UK) Damian Carrington: How to tackle the climate, health and food crises, all at the same time ; He recognizes this tactic is not original, but calls it the most authoritative look yet.
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag, Juliet Eilperin: Study: Simple measures could reduce global warming, save lives ; Maybe, but one outside source provides an example from Uganda and India that it’s easier said than done.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Nicky Phillips: Fourteen Steps to Reduce Global Warming ;
• Scientific American – David Biello: How to Buy Time in the Fight Against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane ;
• Science News – Devin Powell: Small efforts to reduce methane, soot could have big effect ;
• Ars Technica – Kyle Niemeyer: Test of 400 options shows we can save money while limiting climate change ;
• IEEE Spectrum – Bill Sweet: An alternative Way to Avoid “Dangerous Climate Change” ;
• AFP – Cut back on soot, methane to slow warming: study ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA-GISS Press Release ; Columbia University/Earth Institute Press Release ;

Grist for another Mill: One of the paper’s authors, V. “Ram” Ramanathan, is a personal hero so I checked his home institute for any press release there. None. But here’s a good, pertinent one: UC San Diego/Scripps Institution of Oceanography Press Release on weather extremes in the long range forecast.

RELATED ARCANE NEWS:

This morning I came across a press release from Sandia Laboratories so clever and audacious as to be entertaining, yet so completely over-the-top in its enthusiastic description of a new chemical discovery in terms so technical it was almost laughable. I thought hey, too bad nobody will use this. It is SO interesting. Wrong about getting no media traction. Somebody bit, and at a big agency that seems to have ignored the big soot and methane report and glommed instead on this one. It is also in Science this week. Further search found several other takers. The key term: Criegee intermediate. I’d never heard of it either but to chemists with an interest in combustion, it is catnip. So is another key word new to me: Ozonolysis.

Here are samples from news outlets.

• Reuters – Nina Chestney: New molecule could help cool planet ;
• LiveScience – Joseph Castro: How mysterious molecules may help cool Earth ;
• Int’l Business Times – Genalyn Corocoto: Researchers Find Mysterious Particle That May Be Able to Offset Climate Change ;

Grist for the Mill: Sandia Labs Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Chronicle outdoors environment writer Peter Fimrite has a front page follow today on the young male gray wolf, known as OR7 and wearing a radio beacon on its collar, that recently entered the state from Oregon. It has crossed through Siskiyou County and now is in eastern Shasta County looking, he surmises, for a mate he may never find.

This is a news story that bears frequent revisit (earlier post). And Fimrite’s story addresses the fear and objection the animal has inspired in some residents up there, including ranchers.

It’s a natural angle, unavoidable really. But the story is perplexing. Its intent seems to be to reassure those who are worried, and to provide some cover for environmentalists and range managers who would not mind if wolves were to reestablish at least part of their former range in the state – from which they have been absent for the better part of a century.

But this is not a story likely to change anybody’s mind. For all the lengthy verbiage Fimrite provides on the rarity of wolf attacks on people, and the ways that livestock owners can respond short of re-extirpation, he includes, unvarnished, some facts that no amount of data will dilute in its emotional impact. These include two fairly recent incidents: A woman taken down by several wolves who caught her jogging in Alaska, and a Canadian man who was similarly killed by a pack, and partly eaten, in Saskatchewan. Gadzooks. One cannot mention such things and then think a barrage of statistics will expunge the viceral feelings they inspire.

Not that any reporter sympathetic to wolf repopulation should withhold such information, which cannot be covered up no matter how hard one might try anyway. But one has to confront, I would think, their psychic impact in a more straightforward yet understanding fashion. For instance, a passage noting that a few sensational attacks make it hard to think logically about wolves, but here is what the experts say. It’s like saying “I understand, I understand” to calm someone’s nerves. The right tone might get some people now leaning toward total anti-wolf NIMBYism to stop and at least try to take a deep breath and think things through afresh.

I’d need some help in that regard, too. In principle, bring back wolves. Sure. Shasta County sure looks like a fine place for them. But if I heard that a wolf just showed up from Wyoming and now is in Tilden Regional Park between Berkeley and Orinda, the town over the hills where three of my grandchildren – all avid hikers (well, maybe not James yet) – live, I’m unsure I’d keep my bearings either.