Several years ago reports circulated on massive die offs of farmed oysters in Oregon and Washington with the prime suspect a change in pH – level of acidity – due to an unusual upwelling of cold deep water into coastal shallows. Now a set of experiments studying in detail a hatchery’s success as waters from various sources circulated through it delivers a verdict: guilty as charged.

While the specific reasons that deep water off the Pacific Northwest might be less alkaline than is typical and are prone to occasionally surge near shore may be a regional peculiarity, the slowly changing acidity of the oceans in general is what makes the study news. The levels that did mischief to oysters there are not unlike what some project for the broader ocean as mankind’s CO2 keeps seeping into the seas – and a lot more shellfish and other sea life aside from oysters, so they say, could suffer.

The study, largely by researchers affiliated with Oregon State University which boosted it with a press release, is in the journal Limnology and Oceanography. It was immediately hailed by an activist orgnanization, the Center for Biological Diversity, which issued its own press release (in Grist below).

It gets good coverage, with a narrative on top reporting the issue’s history, at the Seattle Times by its environment reporter Craig Welch. REad this and you get a good sense of exactly how the experiments were done and why the conclusion appears so solid.

Other stories:

• AP – Jeff Barnard: Study blames ocean CO2 for oyster declines ; Barnard wades deeper into the specifics, even explaining how a juvenile oyster’s transition from aragonite to calcite as the basis of shell growth seems to get bollixed by a lower than usual pH. All Barnard’s quoted sources are authors of the paper.
• NYTimes Green blog – Leslie Kaufman: Study Links Raised Carbon Dioxide Levels to Oyster Die-Offs ; Her story transitons quickly from the basics of the science to lawsuits and petitions filed by the Ctr for Biological Diversity to get federal agencies to make ocean acidification an action priority.
• Oregon Public Broadcasting/NPR – Cassandra Profita: Oyster Decline Linked to Ocean Acidification ;

And so on, which leads us to….

• Forbes – Larry Bell: Is Your SUV Killing Ocean Coral Reefs? ; This popped up in searching for coverage of the oysters of Oregon. Bell is a professor, a real scholar. But his field is space architecture. He wrote a book, Climate of Corruption, calling CO2-caused anthropogenic global warming a hoax. And this piece is a fine example of a column that appears to have the most research behind it, full of citations explaining in selected passages from published literature why the oceans won’t acidify on our account, and that nobody knows the effects if they do. Here’s why it is not journalism: he quotes no authority in the field as saying worries over acidification are bogus. We have only his own non-expert selected skein of literature snippets to go by. This, in other words, appears to be a well-dressed example of a stated polemic point that on closer examination has no reliable backing to it at all.

Grist for the Mill: Oregon State University Press Release , Ctr for Biological Diversity Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

I’ve got a small quibble and a big kudos for a story that is latest out of the gate. I also have something to say about a mass media industry that seems to have included nobody who checked the basic figures presented in a press release.

But first the news : last month the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that its gigantic National Ignition Facility’s 192 huge, converging lasers had set a world record for a pulse of light. In just 23 billionths of a second, the machine – designed to test nuclear weapons physics and also maybe lead to fusion energy for peace – placed 1.875 million joules of ultraviolet light into a target chamber. Divide the energy by the time it took to put it in, and one gets roughly 411 terawatts of peak power. I didn’t do the math myself (it looks fishy to me, though), but somebody must have. 411 TW, says the press release, is about 1000 times the power that the US economy consumes day in, day out. It’s a record for both energy in one laser dump, and for power from such a setup. Of course it didn’t last long, so the energy isn’t’ so much, really. But boy, it got used up fast.

The run occurred March 15 and the lab let the world know a week later. Several outlets ran it pretty much immediately.

Sample Stories:

• Discovery News/Fox : World’s Most Powerful Laser Fires Most Powerful Blast:
• Register – Rik Myslewski: Record-breaking laser pulse boosts fusion power hopes ; Right off the release, and as so often happens with NIF, ignores that its main purpose is to give H-bomb scientists something to do research with that doesn’t involve blowing holes in the Earth. It says it’s all about fusion energy. Some, not even close to all.
• Daily Mail – Rob Waugh: Most powerful laser pulse in history is fired in US nuclear fusion plant, as scientists bid to harness power of the H-bomb ; Waugh know what NIF is for, and says so. Still, took his figures off the press release, without reflection.
• San Jose Mercury News – Lisa M. Krieger: Lawrence Livermore lab achieves record laser energy ;
• Nature.com – Eric Hand : National Ignition Facility fires record laser shot ; Note – this one does NOT say it momentarily generated power 1000 times greater than do all the generators, diesels, sportscars, solar plants, and what not in the whole US.

Here’s a problem with reporters and press releases. The latter can lead the former astray. Be dubious, people. The press release says this test’s power, 411 trillion watts, or terawatts, was 1000 times beyond that of the United States of America for the 23 billionths of a second that it lasted. Say what? Since when does the US get by on only 0.4 terawatts? This is the kind of math I CAN do. No way. Googling around, including on Wikipedia, confirmed my instant suspicion. Depending on source, the US economy runs at about a 4 TW clip, and if one counts just electricity, it’s still at about 1 TW. So the larger point that this machine briefly outstripped US energy transfer rates is true, but by a factor of a few hundred at most. That’s roughly in the same order of magnitude, nearly, but still. A factor of 1000 is too high

I do not know how LLNL got its factor of 1000, but that’s not the point. It is that few reporters, none in mass media, blinked at the offered figure. To be sure, no one can imagine a press corps with time to check every figure in every press release. But that this got NO challenges in general media, none that I saw, is telling.. I’ve asked LLNL’s press office how they got this figure but no answer yet. Nightmare is that I’ll learn my figuring is totally wrong. Hope not. Fortunately, I have a more fundamental  point to make and it’s coming up.

More important is the so what? issue. Hand’s piece at Nature raises some doubts on this announcement that is not, one adds, a scientific report that got any peer review. Which is whether shooting laser beams into an empty target chamber with no fueled up pellet or hohlraum or whatever they call it is equivalent to a big step toward fusion.

So, to the great if flawed story that was on the front page of my local paper this morning:

• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Fusion energy progress by Livermore scientists ;

My esteemed friend and mentor Mr. Perlman, or Dr. Perlman as he’s called with fond inaccuracy in the city room, does alas get a little off track on the difference between energy and power. He writes at one point that for 23 billionths of a second the machine generated a thousand times more power than the entire United States consumes in a single second. It consumes it for a second, a week, a year too — but pinning it on a second makes it sound like an energy quantity. And he equates without explanation a watt and joule (a watt is one joule per second). Oh well.

More important – Perlman did some responsible reporting. He tells me he did what he always does, when the release first came out. He called old friends and the experts to whom they referred him for explaining the so what? He smelled something fishy, so didn’t rush a story out right away.

What he reports is that Livermore’s brass may not be all that confident that when they load NIF with actual hydrogen, or tritium and deuterium or whatever they’re going to fuse, it’ll hit paydirt. They need not only thermonuclear ignition, but enough ignition to compensate for what it takes just to charge up those lasers and light them off. He points out the many delays already in trying for ignition. One source tells him the test is a gimmick, that Livermore’s effort is floundering and looking to find some good news, somehow. And it has budget pressures. The story does not take sides, but it does provide a glimpse of the skepticism this report met in some technically savvy circles.

Grist for the Mill: LLNL Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

During the heat wave last month, the one that gripped most of North America and that, as one recalls dimly, lapped its hot breath into the UK as well, plenty of news outlets took note. They hardly could miss it. Records fell in droves. Now it’s official – hottest March, ever, since before modern record keeping even started, and the overall first quarter was the warmest too.

Thus we have a big new round of reports on the extent of the heat. Reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provide a lot of new numbers. Also in the news is reporting of proximal as well as underlying reasons that might be behind it. The main. down-deep possibility is global warming. Not that anybody thinks the whole globe could have popped to a dramatically higher level. Concentrated heat here means, by mathematical requirement, the rest of the globe must have cooled off from its recent mean in compensation – perhaps just a tad spread widely, perhaps via a few dramatic cold pools here or there. The latter could fit expectation by some that as the average temperature goes up weather’s stability also declines and extremes at both ends, favoring hotter to be sure, become more dramatic.

The illus with this post on one thing that was happening in the far north is a hint to where I am going to wind up with this. But first…

Stories on the Hot Heights of March:

• *UPDATE: Scientific American – Jillian MacMath, AccuWeather: NOAA confirms Unprecedented Warmth in March ; Added this one Thursday because, first, AccuWeather modestly says it expected a warm spring all along. Second, the old timey, vivid, and instantly readable map is worth looking at.
  
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Start of 2012, March shatter US heat records ; Not just broken but “deep fried.” Borenstein’s quote selection injects a tone of deep worry. “Everybody has this uneasy feeling. This is weird. This is not good,” one source says. He notes that the US and Canada came with countervailing examples elsewhere, with the rest of the Northern Hemisphere a bit cooler than average. He includes a nod to a recent paper by NASA’s James Hansen that put numbers on the rise not only in average temperature but the degree to which extremes are departing from the norm (see earlier post).
• Slate – Ben Johnson: Already, 2012 Has Destroyed National Heat Records ; Looks, in part at least, derived from the AP account.
  
• MSNBC – Miguel Llanos: US sees record for warmest March – and first three months of the year ;
• Middletown Journal (Ohio)  Steve Bennish: NOAA report: Global warming a factor in March record highs ; One tends to forget, after the carnage in US mainstream (old fashioned) media since the early 2000s, that not ALL the good reporters were let go at local and regional dailies. This is a decent, professional piece of reporting.
• The Atlantic/Wire – Dashiell Bennett: It’s Hot Out There ;
• Time Mag – Tim Newcomb: America Had the Warmest March on Record ;  He does say the rest of the world “had plenty of average weather (and sometimes colder than average temperatures)’ but does not pause to explain that the rest of the world had no other option, short of being hit by a comet or something, than to keep its cool in the short run. This is a planet. Its thermal inertia is, um, sizeable.
• Houston Chronicle – John Nielsen-Gammon: An extremely unusual March ; The writer is the Texas state meteorologist. He’s no contrarian. But he does make a case that such things as the USA’s March 2012 can happen, and have, with or without global warming.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA March 2012 State of the Climate monthly report ;  NOAA preliminary report Meteorological March Madness 2012 ;

ON THE OTHER HAND DEPT:

Little noticed in media generally is that weird, triple-humped map of the aerial extent of Arctic sea ice. It was running for most of the last six months two standard deviations below the long-term mean, dancing with a tie for 2007 as the least icy summer’s ever and staying well below par into the winter freeze season. Then whump, after hitting a seasonal high about on schedule in late February, the plot goes a little nuts. It pops to a new level of ice sheath upon the northernmost seas. A series of rolling hills, a plateau on average, continuing through most of March. Now its shrinking. But how about that?  Just when the US middle and east coast and the densely populated corresponding parts of Canada were heating up, the Arctic ice pack was unseasonably hanging on and sometimes growing around the margins. It’s as though some meteorological genie put up a wall – keeping the warm southerly breezes that might help melt that ice bottled up in the mid-latitudes, and similarly preventing any breakouts of polar air from looping through the Northern Hemisphere as a welcome cool breeze.

Seems to me that the cold snap to the north would have made a good bolster for coverage of the heat wave down here. I’ve no idea whether there is a direct link in Arctic vortex or decadal oscillations or La Nina-influenced storm tracks. But the two events surely offer a lesson in weather extremes and an opportunity to illustrate with well-defined examples how an average that creeps upward is hardly the whole story. It may hide a lot of drama on the margins of the distribution chart.

Grist for the yin-yang Mill: National Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis ;

- Charlie Petit

It’s the story’s lede and headline that lands this on Reuters’s rss for environmental news, but it may have missed an angle or two:

Verna Gates: U.S. island was green victory to save slice of paradise ; The lede is:

When the Mackle brothers, Elliot, Robert and Frank Jr., first set foot on the deserted beaches of Marco Island in 1962 there were more pelicans, terns and mosquitoes than people.’

There are about 16,000 people residing today on this island along Florida’s southwest coast. Population goes up considerably if one counts the tourists. One can believe people  may outnumber the pelicans and terns, judging from that picture up there, lifted from a Marco Island real estate site. If there are fewer than that many mosquitoes there, one can only marvel. How’d the mosquito abatement district manage that in swamp country?

Verna Gates, one learns from her interesting web site, is a regional writer of considerable experience and a clear love for her part of the country. She writes for Reuters often. The news here is that as densely populated and developed is most of this 24 square mile island, the original business plan failed. A coalition of environmental groups and the Army Corps of Engineers blocked its final phases of dredging, filling,and building. So, about a fifth of the expected condos, apartments, homes, marina-lagoons, shops, and pavemented area is still mangroves and shallow bays and  sloughs typical of the region’s barrier islands. In large part her piece is a nod to a book that hails the stop orders as a turning point, ending decades of unchecked construction of retirement and resort communities on the state’s shoreline. An archipelago called the Ten Thousand Islands of such low-lying islets (really, not 10,000 of them, but a lot) stretching to the south now seems off limits to developers.

Fine, as far as it goes. Just one thing. Look at that place. It’s Florida. No natural hills other than sand that piled up around mangroves. This epitomizes vulnerable, low lying coastal land. Look at it – so many canals have been dredged through it that this town, in normal times, looks a bit like New Orleans while still drowned in Katrina’s surge. One recognizes that the main story here is to acknowledge this thriving community is a punctuation mark closing an era when “natural wetland” meant just one thing: bulldozer bait. However, if it is to run on Reuters as an environmental yarn, it would be better also to have a hint of what lies in store. Does the city have any plans to defend itself against erosion and incursion as sea level rises?  Do the city planners deny that such a rise is plausible? That’s be news. If they do have a plan, readers would benefit from a hint to its scope. Either way, one doubts that this city represents a long-term equilibrium state for the locale’s geography.

- Charlie Petit

USFWS photo by Gary Kramer

This week the BBC One channel broadcast a two-part documentary in the UK, Land of the Lost Wolves, that triggered some reaction in the rest of the UK press. The video can be streamed for those there, but not for the rest of the world.

But the BBC‘s Matt Bardo worked up an on line, print feature story to go with it. Looks pretty good. The news is that, in partnership with Discovery Channel (although I can find no easy reference to the effort, or when the program will air in the US, at the latter’s site), BBC sent a camera and reporting crew to Washington’s Cascade Mountains. There, a wolf pack had recently moved in from Canada. It ran smack into an aroused local populace, including ranchers and others determined to stop these hungry canines from a dinner of beef, sheep, deer, elk, or anything else that many would prefer be preserved for human pleasures. That, and worry about any person, kids especially, that might find him-or- herself with wolves all around and coming closer – rare as such event may be. It is illegal, without special permit, to shoot wolves in Washington State. But it happens. Wolves, one learns by noodling around, have been back and breeding in the state for five years or so.

Bardo’s story includes an evocative video excerpt showing a wildlife cameraman and tracker patiently waiting for wolves, eliciting a chorus of howls while doing so.

Reviews in the UK give it high marks, and remark upon the element of hostility in American who live near newly-introduced on in-migrating wolves, as well as prospects that wolves may return to their islands.

Stories on BBC show:

• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Land of the Lost Wolves, BBC One, review ;
• Staffordwhire Sentinel: Pack return to the snowy peaks ;

Other Stories on Washington State Wolves:

• Columbia Basin Herald – Dennis L. Clay, three-part series in March. Wolf plan is acceptable, so far ; Five wolf packs so far in Washington ; The life of a wolf ; Mr. Clay is not a highly stylish writer, but is a good organizer of facts and a plain-talker with a clear voice.
• KPIU/NPR (Seattle)  Tom Banse: Wash. hunter pleads guilty to wolf poaching conspiracy ;

Other stories on wolf reintroduction to UK

• Express – John Ingham: Wolves Aren’t So Bad in Real Life ;

Grist for the Mill: Wash. Department of Fish & Wildlife Press Release ; WDFW Gray Wolf Conservation and Management page ; WDFW Fact Sheet ;

I usually ignore Examiner.com stories. For one thing, I can’t tell exactly how it selects its stable of writers, whether they’re paid anything particularly notable, or what standards are expected of them. The reporting and sensibility of the stories are erratic to say the least. But here’s a fine job of blending several threads of news into a coherent essay (and that is what it is, for it appears to have involved no direct conversations between the writer and anybody – derived instead off what can be turned up, written by somebody else, on the internet). It’s nearly a week old, but came up on the radar just now.

• Frank Regan (Rochester Environmental News Examiner) : Great weather now but a lousy climate coming for the Rochester, NY region ;

I put a link to his name and that leads to his bio and evidence he’s a writer, a greenie, and a seriously engaged guy. His essay ties the recent warm US March to a recent and to-me persuasive arXiv paper by a frustrated climatologist who will definitely go down in history and probably as the boy who was not crying wolf, James Hansen (with two colleagues), and to global and US insurance industries.

   Both Regan’s essay and the Hansen et al paper are good reading for anybody on the climate beat.

Late Addition: Closely related news and views:

• Neorenaissance blog – Paul Douglas: A Message from a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change ; Not what you might expect, which is its point. (found via Andy Revkin at DotEarth).

- Charlie Petit

At his DotEarth perch former NYTimes science and environmental reporter (‘former’ by the gray lady’s official nomenclature) and now NYT opinion writer Andrew C. Revkin this week offered a breath of fresh air in describing what the recently visible third wing of the global warming debate is all about. At least, for me, it clarified things a bit.

This crowd has confused me recently. I won’t name them, but the general theme is that environmentalism (as it has been) is dead, that hectoring people to be green will never work, that we need to adapt to climate change while working on technologies that might someday avert or reverse it, and that not all the contrarians are lunatics and calling them that only makes things worse. I’ve felt the general tenor, which I won’t pin on anybody specific as this is just a hunch, is an argument that progressive people should stop talking truth to power. If one wants to get a climate, low-carbon policy in place, don’t say anything as scary as that the situation is desperate, or as insulting as that it is our own stupid fault, or generally to be hysterical and deluded, hypocritical ninnies. Rather, disguise it as a road to energy independence, as a route to prosperity via efficiency, whatever…

Back to Andy’s column. It offers a much-deserved salute to Paul Voosen at Greenwire (one of the E&E newsletters that mostly cost a bundle to read) , and links to ructions emanating from Peter Kereiva, the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. He lashes into the fantastic, almost magical thinking of many greens (think EarthFirst! etc.). It seems to me a desperate long shot to think a new, hard-headed and inclusive tone in climate change policy discussions will lead to faster progress than we’re getting now. But since the latter is measured in units of zilch, it’s worth talking about. And, it says here, it is gaining traction.

Here is the the direct link to Voosen’s recent story, a catalyst to Revkin’s column.

*UPDATE – While we’re on Andy Revkin, I nominate his April 1 column, which he stresses is no April Fools joke, as the most sensible reaction and put-down to all the hullabaloo and loud expressions of disgust and dismay about so-called pink slime. It’s an ingredient in beef that is taken out of dead animals. Just like all the rest of the ingredients including of course the antibiotics. Don’t worry about the ammonia used in its processing. The stuff is beef. If it’s disgusting, his column implies but these are my words, that’s because almost everything in a slaughterhouse would be disgusting if one stopped to ponder. What is done – my thoughts again, not Andy’s – to get the pink slime is little different from what you do with your own teeth when gnawing the last goodies from a barbecued rib. And the industry calls it LFBT, for lean, finely textured beef. Plus, as Revkin tells us, if the mad rush to remove this relatively healthful portion of a patty from the American food chain succeeds, that will impel a million+ extra steers and heifers to slaughter to make up the difference.

- Charlie Petit

Princeton's NSTX simulation - http://tinyurl.com/76axcnx

Mention fusion around most Americans, maybe they think of a popular Ford sedan. Maybe of chic blends of traditional and localvore foods at trendy restaurants. And maybe a few will think of a nifty way to harness energy that has never worked unless one counts  sunshine by day and the star-spangled sky at night … plus hydrogen bombs,

I cannot recall the last time anything from fusion physics – the real kind, not the cold kind – made big news. But the New York Daily News‘s Bill Hammond, a general-purpose opinion page columnist, had yesterday a full-throated lament over recent budget cuts for fusion research that the US Department of Energy sponsors. It and its predecessor agencies have been backing the field since, as memory serves, Project Sherwood back in the 1950s. Inertial confinement with converging photon and particle beams has been blasting pellets while magnetic trap hover-chambers such as stellarators, spheromaks, and tokamaks have been leaking their plasma innards and quenching (a bad thing)  for decades at national labs and DOE-funded university facilities. It has cost many billions of dollars with little to show. But the lure of nearly limitless energy and the clear evidence it works (such as a suntan) is powerful. The physics is sort of fun, a grand challenge worthy of a great nation’s time.

Hammond has a son who had planned graduate studies and perhaps a research career seeking a way to harness fusion’s potential. That predicament gave him a window into the money and personnel dynamics of American expertise in a field it largely created. Now, he writes, “Obama is basically shipping jobs overseas” and, doing so, draining the nation of ability to take much advantage (ie, capture market share) should the big ITER project in France hit a homerun. He calls it robbing Peter to pay Pierre. He doesn’t get into physics, or the dismal history of the field, but does go through reasons why, as policy, US frugality might backfire badly.

I didn’t know a thing about Hammond’s usual topics until this column bobbed on by. Here’s his recent list. His politics are pretty clear from this one on Obamacare.

Grist for the Mill: DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Research Page (many of the projects described here, save ITER, may be goners, one guesses, judging from Hammond’s column).

- Charlie Petit

First of all, it’s not as though all or even the extreme majority of conservative Americans distrust science. This is the science, presumably, that has conclusions that the National Academies and other learned societies endorse as the most solid. But a fair splash of coverage sort-of implying as much greeted word late last week that, according to a post-doc at the University of North Carolina, while most Americans have maintained a steady, but iffy, regard for science for many decades there is one, glaring demographic exception. The study author  reports that at the start of the time period whose surveys he studied, 1974 to 2010, conservatives were the political group with the highest trust in science. Unless something weird happened in the past 24 months or so, they now have the lowest. At the start, according to the review, it was nearly a tie. About half of liberals and conservatives alike said they trust science (moderates came in at about 46 percent). Liberals have remained about 50-50. Conservatives are down to 38 percent trust. Moderates fell away too, now at around 40 percent. Thus is confirmed, the paper says, a proposition by the author of The Republican War On Science, journalist Chris Mooney, several years ago asserting just such a trend.

Second of all, on a less important point, what does ‘trust science’ mean? I suppose it’s in the paper (see Grist). If you want to find big fans of science, talk to science journalists. We tend to think it is full of wonderful stories and that scientific method is a poor way to find certain truth but it tends to be a lot better than any other way to do it. Thumbs up for science! Do we trust science? Does Mooney trust science? Our trade collectively regards it as reliably full of wonder and progress, and also full of bombast, argument, and error. Long run it’s been the main engine to surprise, discovery, and awareness of ourselves and our universe. Snapshot: An awful lot of stuff in journals will be found to be untrue and some of it deliberate fraud. We don’t trust it, but do rely on it, which I think is a distinction with a difference.

So, do the Americans who make some states red or purpler on election-night tallies have so-called Republican brains, ones  that have suddenly gone crackpot on all science just because they cannot stomach environmentalist policies including ones that could stem the global warming they don’t believe in anyway?

Stories:

• Los Angeles Times (March 29) John Hoeffel: Conservatives’ trust in science has declined sharply ; His lede says one need look no further than the Republican presidential candidate debates for confirmation. See also the LAT‘s Editorial (April 1, not a joke) highlights the study’s counter-intuitive finding. Which is, the more educated conservatives are the less apt they have become to trust science. That’s why, one ventures, the more professors there are testifying to the Senate science or environment panels that the Nat’l Academy has things about right, the more Senator James Inhofe will snort about global warming. He’s heard the standard line already; he just doesn’t believe it.
• Mother Jones (Mar 29)  Kevin Drum : Chart of the Day: Conservatives Don’t Trust Science ;
• NPR – Eyder Peralta (blog) Study: Conservatives’ Trust In Science At Record Low ;
• NY Post – Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Faith in science? Why skepticism is rising ; Proof of the theme – Reynolds, one guesses, is a well-educated man. He’s conservative. Ergo, there’s too much politics in science these days and he’s convinced that superior logic is why the brainier conservatives see that more clearly.
• Slate – Ankita Rao: Conservatives’ Trust in Science at All-Time Low ;
• Deseret News – Mercedes White: Conservatives increasingly distrust science ; Her first quoted source, not the author, gives here this analysis. The question “do you trust scientists?” is translated in conservative brains as “What do you think about climate change?” Not a bad guess. I bet David Koch would do exactly that. But he also is an enthusiastic benefactor of WGBH’s NOVA program. Broadly anti-science he’s not. Anti-IPCC science, yep.

Related Story. We mentioned that Chris Mooney’s hypothesis gets explicit mention in this paper. For a blast on the same topic and from the mouth of the one and only…

• AlterNet (Part of The Guardian’s Environment Network) Chris Mooney (March 26) : The Strange Conservative Brain: 3 Reasons Republicans Refuse to Accept Reality About Global Warming ;
• THIS JUST IN! Salon – Chris Mooney: Why the GOP distrusts science ; With clever and snarky illus. The new study, Mooney writes, just underscores the merit of something he has long called The Smart Idiot effect, a coinage by himself.

Sort of Related Story:

• Columbia Journalism Review/Observatory – Curtis Brainard: Q&A: The NYT’s Justin Gillis: Gillis, whose work we’ve caught here at ksjtracker several times, writes the Times’s solidly scientific Temperature Rising ongoing series. Here he spills the dope on our parent body, the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowships, confirming conservative suspicion on how the elites, many of its membership being scientists at big-shot universities, bias the media toward embrace of global warming as something genuine and  important. One hazards to guess that any Republican brains that read this may well think, “Lookit here. I told you so. It’s a plot.”

Even more vaguely related story:

• RealClimate – Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Rein Haarsma: Evaluating a 1981 temperature projection ; More than 30 years ago, how science started to go to pot when the conservative brain still trusted science more than typical other Americans. James Hansen was lead author of a temperature projection. Except for somewhat underestimating the degree of warming we’ve had, it was on the mark. This blog post’s conclusion, from a pair of climate scientists is, no April Fool’s day nonsense, a serious declaration: The ‘global warming hypothesis’ has been developed according to the principles of sound science.”  Hmm, I wonder if these authors, employed by a Dutch meterological institute, wrote that in awareness of the peculiar, politically-loaded meaning that “sound science” has in contrarian, conservative circles?

Grist for the Mill: American Sociological Association Press Release ; American Sociological Review: Politicization of Science the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.

- Charlie Petit

A lot of us may not have known that bumblebees have seen a major decline of their own while news focussed over the past five years on colony collapsse disorder among those most vital of domestic livestock, honeybees. This is a surprise. Not so much, given that they already are banned or tightly restricted in several nations due in part to fear for bees, is that two new reports in Science report disturbing if not quite conclusive evidence that bee declines may have a chemical cause. Systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids, which suffuse into plants and make them toxic to many insects, seem able even in small doses to confuse honeybee and some bumblebees. They get lost. They don’t mate as successfully. Plugged into population dynamics equations, the changes seem able to drastically reduce or eliminate colonies.

As just one example of coverage in years past demonstrating that these substances have been suspects for awhile:

• Discovery Treehugger (May 15, 2010) Roberta Cruger: “Nicotine Bees” Population Restored With Neonicotinoids Ban ; Any outlet called Treehugger is going to be susceptible to anything blaming anything industrial for bad news from nature, but even so. This is the first one that came up when I went looking for similar news as we’re getting today. It is enough to show there is wide context for the new reports.

The new reports, on honeybees in France that appear to suffer lower foraging success after exposure to the suspect pesticited, and another from England indicating bumblebees ability to reproduce new generations of queens, are getting wide play in US media and elsewhere.

Stories:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Study: Disorientation from pesticides a clue to bee disorder ;
• NY Times – Carl Zimmer: 2 Studies Point to Common Pesticide as Culprit in Declining Bee Colonies ;
• Wired – Brandon Keim: Controversial Pesticide Linked to Bee Collapse ; Keim declared this to be important, while hedging just a bit of the studies, “..they dont’ conclusively explain global bee declines, which almost certainly involve a combination of factors, they establish…a prime suspect.” Considering how many place these sprays are banned, plenty of regulators clearly already regard them as prime suspects.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Latest buzz on the decline. Maybe it’s pesticides ; The term “latest buzz” implies this is a new suspicion, but Borenstein’s story makes clear the suspicion has been around. He also scouts up  significant doubt, some but not all from industry, that these studies are enough for conviction. He also gets quotes from activists ready to ban them right now.
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: Studies show how pesticides make bees lose their way ;
• AFP – Pesticides harm bee populations: study ;
• Ars Technica – Jonathan M. Gitlin: More evidence links a family of insecticides to bee colony collapse ;
• LA Times – Eryn Brown:  Pesticides suspected in mass die-off of bees;
• The Economist: Subtle poison: Evidence is growing that commonly used pesticides, even when employed carefully, are bad for bees ; The usual well-organized copy from TC.
• Bloomberg – Makiko Kitamura, Rudy Ruitenberg: Pesticides May Quell Queen Bees and Hurt Homing Abilities ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Pesticides hit queen bee numbers ;

Grist for the Mill: AAAS Press Release ; University of Stirling Press Release ; Related – INRA (France, Feb. 2010)) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Last week this site posted on the amazing run of warm weather the central and eastern US enjoyed over the closing weeks of winter. Some said it was global warming. Some said can’t be, because there’s so much cold weather out there too. This week a duo of recent reports says the two responses are actually consistent with one another. One of the reports is from a prominent member of the American right-wing’s list of devil (or is it merely socialist? Is that the same?) organizations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The gist is that hotter weather is indeed more common than colder weather, it is getting clear that see-saw weather – extreme events – is up and sometimes global warming is a persuasive reason it is happening. That means that it is no surprise that the recent hot spell in the US came while it was cold other places – in fact, by necessity given that the running mean temperature of the Earth doesn’t change fast, a spell of above recent-average surface temps in one region compel the rest of the planet to be cooler than its corresponding average. In the short run the heat distribution is zero-sum. It’s the long run change, and the erratic patterns while it changes, that are the problem.

  At the world’s mega-news service, the AP, Seth Borenstein didn’t mush around with nothin’ but generalities on top about extreme weather becoming more common and it will cost people out there somewhere a lot of pain, money, and mourning. The service’s hed is ‘Mumbai, Miami on list for big weather disasters,” which has a chilling specificity to it (and why pick on poor N’orleans, which surely is there too/ No, hold it. The story’s illus is flooded New Orleans adn it ocmes up in graf 7). His lede is a punch in the nose: “Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters…”.

His story, unrelenting in passing on the IPCC’s report and its conclusions that global warming’s signature will not be the averages, but the wild swings that add up to them, reads almost as though it is calculated to drive the contrarian wing of weather discourse into high dudgeon. We have not just New Orleans but the Maldives drowning, we have the phrase “global weirding,” we have the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri (one of climategate’s piñatas) given respectful audience, and not a line from anybody solemnly declaring global warming a fraud cooked up to generate grant money and to steal our freedom. Nicely done.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Nina Chestney: Link builds between weather extremes and warming ;  See also, David Fogarty, Deborah Zabarenko: Plan now for climate-related disasters – UN report ; It notes the obvious that also needs noting. The IPCC has for now given up telling people and government to get cracking and get the warming rate back down to zero, fast. Now the message is to learn somehow to live with it.
• Climate Central – Andrew Freedman: Report Details Climate Change, Extreme Weather Links;
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin, Brian Vastag: Reports link heat waves, deluges to climate change ;

*UPDATE:

• NYTimes – Justin Gillis, Joanna M. Foster: Weather Runs Hot and Cold, So Scientists Look to the Ice ; Provides context, and snappier writing, to help readers who already saw the breaking news. Gillis and Foster report that the ‘weather weirding’ of recent years may reflect, so to speak, the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic and the cascading results from the change in Earth’s albedo, or reflectivity, as a result.
• speaking of sea ice.. Discovery News  – Keiran Mulvaney :Arctic Sea Ice Hits Maximum Extent for 2012 ; A set up for  another very loe-ice summer in aerial extent and average thickness.

Grist for the Mill: IPCC Press Release ; IPCC Special Report: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation ;

- Charlie Petit

The earliest piece of news I covered that depended heavily on the internet and, if memory serves, the old Mosaic browser, for information other than by email, phone, and regular mail was the collision of fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in 1994. Astronomers watching the spectacle set up a web site that they updated continuously. In some stories editors let us write out the website location, http and everything. So let’s just say it has been nearly 20 years since the web began to transform the way the ordinary public gets to look deeply into current events.

I bring this up this morning after noticing, very tardily I am sure, that stories at New Scientist display tight integration of links and web references in the texts of science news stories. That also leads also lead one to wonder why it has been so many years since this immediately-available info resource emerged and, while all outlets use it in reporting not so many share the easy links with their customers. If it were the norm for science stories to link to the main journal and similar  papers on which they rely (even if only to abstracts), and more important the press releases that waved breaking news under the reporters’ noses, it would sharpen the craft. For one thing, if readers could see how many news outlets were plonking their escutcheons on nothing but press releases with different adjectives and ordering of facts, maybe the writers would work harder to add something distinctive other than a style born of exaggeration and outlandish extrapolation. It could also prompt more editors to give their reporters time to contact researchers and talk (or otherwise converse) with them about what it all means.

I mentioned New Scientist. A few recent examples of stories, good on their face but bolstered with a routine provision of links, are:

• Jude Isabella:  Prehistoric fisheries offer clues to sustainable catch ; The news is that archeologists are learning that, in Hawaii, perhaps in Florida’s key and among the Kwakwaka’wakw people of coastal British Columbia is evidence that many pre-industrial societies were punctilious about not fishing out their local waters (the lattermost people make great totem poles and ‘big house’ community centers – and a local carver once coached me how to pronounce this First Nation’s name with scant success. I can say it’s no more mellifluous than it looks). Readers get linked to the main sources’ home pages, and to one of the journal articles that inspired the story.
• Lisa Grossman: Stars put up safety barriers for planets ; Radiation and orbital dynamics clear out some lanes as the disks around young stars agglomerate into planets, moon, asteroids etc. Story links to the primary scientist’s pages and departments (and via that to a Univ. Arizona press release), and to the meeting where the researchers presented their results. It also links to pages with basic stats on planet discovery.
• Fred Pearce: Arctic sea ice may have passed crucial tipping point ; The news is – um, perhaps this is a counterexample from New Scientist. Even with links, it’s thin. Most of the links go to earlier news stories in the same mag, one by Pearce. And cited evidence backing the ‘tipping point’ idea appears meager – based mainly on the ice cover for the past five years and that’s not much of a run on which to declare a mode change. It’s been steady in and around a record-setting low during late summer, which as easily marks a quasi-equilibrium (if it means anything) as it does the runaway that a tipping point generally implies. To be sure, all the hed says is that maybe it’s tipping.
• Andy Coghlan: Pressure to tighten up antibiotics on US farms ; It mentions a court ruling and then links to the actual, old-fashioned typed-and-filed-with-the-clerk ruling itself. Or do courthouses now have word processing routines that spit from the printer something that looks just like it rolled out of the top of a clacking old Royal typewriter? Also linked, a journal article on how livestock full of antibiotics are factories for breeding microbes that eat the antibiotics for snacks and scoff at them when they infect US.

Getting plenty of links into feature stories, or anything that takes more than a day to report and write, should not be hard. Truly breaking news is tougher – reporters don’t need more chores when the editor is already screaming for copy. But with optimized software for easy insertion, that too might not be onerous.

New Scientist is featured in this post merely because one of its stories sparked the question about linking policies – and  it does use a lot of them. I’ve not evidence at hand whether it is particularly aggressive in providing them, but I would guess yes. If anybody at New Scientist or any other news outlet has the written guidelines for when to insert links and which ones are preferred and which are not, please send me a copy. That might make a very interesting post. For one thing, if any outlets encourage them generally, but forbid direct links to press releases, that would be fascinating. One can think of no reason not to link to press releases that reflects concern primarily for service to readers. Sure, it’s always good to be selective. Some handouts are crap, few give any side of the story that doesn’t reflect well on the release-writing institution, but many are rich in information (and more links onward).

- Charlie Petit