Charlie Petit's Tracker

People who follow the fracking policy battles closely may be able to tick off the technology's primary environmental and public safety drawbacks: It may cause minor earthquakes, in a few cases the hydraulic fluids used to fracture deep formations may get into local groundwater or streams, it may strain local water supplies by diverting some of them into fracking duty. And, long term, replacing coal with natural gas may be a move in the right direction but it is nothing to stick with for a long tine - it inherently maintains significant greenhouse gas emission at a worrisome if lower rate.

Such things as that seem, from here, fair game for opponents to exploit. they provide fertile enough reason for reporters to be alert to exaggerations by partisans pro, con, and sideways.

However, at the AP this week reporter Kevin Begos...

Yesterday's News & Observer got from its staffer Kerstin Nordstrom an engrossing tale of technical climbing and geological mystery that is playing out in one of the nation's foremost national parks. The story is also hobbled by some over-simplifications and errors, but not enough to cipple it.

The news is that a UNC grad student and his professor are taking advantage of the former's technical climbing skills to painstakingly sample the sheer granite monolith that is El Capitan, a 3000-foot-+ monster of almost vertical walls in Yosemite Valley. Visitors often put binoculars on the thing and are surprised and sometime terrified-by-imagining-themselve-there when they see people climbing slowly toward the top, hanging on ropes and spending nights sleeping on a ledge or even...

It looked like a tornado from some angles, felt a little like one, but it was not. It was a downburst preceded by a gust front. It was also not to be confused with a derecho or microburst but one thing nobody would deny: it was one violent, roof-removing, tree-toppling wind storm.

A staple for many small and regional press outlets has always been columns by nearby hobbyists or academics. An account in the July 20 edition of North Country Now, a small pub in upstate New York, is a sparkling example of how, every once in awhile, bringing on a public-spirited professor to write a column on nature or whatever can pay off big. Aileen O'Donoghue - astrophysicists, radio astronomer, and associate professor of physics at St. Lawrence University - explains in polished and confident...

In the Mercury-News Paul Rogers has placed a story that can only exemplify what operators of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, or MBARI, can regard as good press. It's a staple sort of story for regional press, about an institution founded by a local, wealthy, famous late person and kept going by the family. But Rogers has the advantage of writing about a place that, unless I am terribly mistaken, deserves good press. The founder is David Packard, tech-pioneer of the Hewlett-Packard electronics industrial edifice in Silicon Valley. The prime family member who keeps nourishing the better-known Monterey Bay Aquarium - of which she is exec. dir. - and its science sibling MBARI is his daughter Julie.

For its 25th anniversary the place is having an open house. Rogers goes beyond saying that it's a nifty opportunity to get behind the...

A glance at the AP's science feed this morning revealed what I thought said this, by Ramit Plushnick-Masti: NASA builds menu for planned Mars missions in 2030s. Ah, thought I, NASA believes the budget straight jacket will eventually unbelt itself and a new round of science missions will continue the tradition of the Viking landers, of the Spirit and Opportunity cuties, and the enroute Curiosity rover. One imagines sample returns, mountain and cliff climbing bots, automated drill rigs pulling deep core samples, and dirigibles able to stay aloft...

The Sun's science reporter Scott Dance, on the job there for about six months following work at the Baltimore Business Journal, put a longer perspective on Maryland's effort to grapple with climate and weather changes: a possible looming water woe.

In Sunday's edition he reported on problems hiding in plain sight - especially to hydrologists with an interest in the state's literal (and in this case littoral) plain. It is not a scoop. A USGS press release a month ago called attention to the essential news. A few outlets wrote it then. But last out, best dressed. Dance moves the ball forward with some investigative digging into what if anything public agencies - ones that have long known about the water and geology issues the state faces -  are doing about them...

Yes, we done it. At least, some of it. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, UK's Met Office, and elsewhere have a package of reports in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Association that, news reports say, add up to a nos culpa, which means I think same as a collective mea culpa. The package includes NOAA's annual report on such things, this edition being the State of the Climate 2011. Some droughts, storm onslaughts and other weather strangeness can be attributed, via one or two sigmas worth of confidence,  to the cumulative effects of greenhouse gases and other human forcings on climate.

This is getting considerable attention even in a media world that is...