P W's Tracker

The BBC's Jonathan Amos stirred up a small flutter of news over the weekend devoted to the fate of 90 yellow rubber duckies lost somewhere in the North Atlantic - if not stuck inside a Greenland glacier. Some of this site's readers may recall that climate researchers have been hoping to understand better the flow of water from the surface of Greenland's ice sheet as it melts in warm weather and plunges to the bedrock below in hydraulic conduits called moulins. So a group of them dropped probes  -- the duckies, sporting tags to tell anybody who finds them to let them know -- right down a convenient moulin. The story: no duckies on the loose yet. One expects that the bouyant little things are whirling around in half-filled ice caverns somewhere along the sub-cryoterranian...

Looking deeply into drug addiction therapy programs seems a bit like an old staple in crusading journalism - undertaking to investigate nursing homes. One knows the stories will be sad, probably infuriating, and will ask the reader to slog through reminders of some intractable difficulties of life as a human being. The lead piece in Science Times, a long look by Benedict Carey at drug addiction in Oregon and at the state's effort to professionalize its therapy, turns out to be a more encouraging read than one expects. In his telling, agencies there are doing as good a job as one could expect at documenting which programs work, at applying the lessons broadly, and at suggesting that addiction can be curbed significantly by wise application of our tax dollars. Notable also is the piece's sensitive sketches of people whose lives careered out of control as alcohol and drugs...

On Sunday, from the UN Climate Summit in Poznan, Poland, the AP's Arthur Max took time to talk with one of the attendees on the fringes of the main sessions: a representative of the Dene nation in Canada. That group is a scattering of tribes that live largely in the country's Northwest and Yukon territories. The man tells him that caribou on which his peoples' traditional cultures depend are in decline, the ice is too thin for good hunting, and the weather is no longer predictable from the clues that used to be dependable. Other game, such as muskrat, are similarly scarcer and harder to hunt. Max's source says he hears the same about reindeer and such from Arctic peoples in Europe and...

CNN has been giving environment and global climate matters a good, if somewhat breathless and teary-eyed, ride lately with its Planet in Peril project. So a stunned wave of anguish is running among US science journalists today upon word that CNN has just announced near-demolition of its science, technology, and environment news staff. One post down is news of an ancient star-destroying explosion in space; now we get a star-eating implosion in the news biz. Included for criminy's sake on the exit rolls is Miles O'Brien, a 17-year veteran who cut his teeth in the space program, has been a regular as an anchor, and now is taking his fat resume out the door. What in blazes is going on? Same old, same old, unfortunately. It's been a busy sidewalk lately, jammed with out-of-work journalists. This site's beats are no exception. The idea of cutting environment beats in particular,...

Here's a climate change-related greenhouse gas story that has neither good news nor bad about newly-found and problematic sources or their fixes. It's merely interesting. In Nature this week a Swedish-led team of mostly Scandinavian researchers reports studying a big puzzle and seems to have an explanation. The mystery, also noted by others over the years, is that arctic methane has a strange double-hump distribution over time. The big rise makes sense. It peaks during long, warm, moist days of summer when microbes are busily metabolizing biomass in the soil, emitting CH4 as they dine. But what's with a second brief, intense flurry in the freeze of fall, presumably putting the microbes on ice as well? The researchers took a close look at shallow soil perched on permafrost in Greenland.

For their answer read the only news piece that comes immediately to hand in...

If you'd like to know what can make a Smithsonian Institution paleo-botanist fall to his knees in blubbering tears, and to learn to bit more about the great Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, here is an enjoyable and informative place to start. It is in High Country News, where freelancer and longtime Time magazine contributor Madeleine Nash has a big meaty spread. She joined paleontologists digging into the snaky red strata of Wyoming's Big Horn basin.

As it happens, I spent yesterday at a good meeting for journalists on climate change at Ohio State University's John Glenn Sch. of Pub. Affairs in Columbus (thank you Boyce Rensberger for tracking yesterday). While here I asked a...

The Columbus Dispatch's Spencer Hunt visited a lab at Ohio State where workers go through 1,300 samples of bugs, parasites, and assorted diseased plants every yea rfor farmers, landscapers, other professonals, and ordinary home owners who want to know what the strange mung or odd insect is that's suddenly shown up. He organizes the piece nicely, with mystery at the top and a series of vignettes deeper to provide examples. One suspects, after this story comes out, that the service will be getting a lot more business.
Grist for the Mill: C. Wayne Ellett Plant and Pest Diagnostic Clinic, Ohio State University.

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