Category: Environment & Energy Stories

With atmospheric CO2 bouncing along at the 400 ppm milestone, a level not seen in the geologic record for millions of years,  a new report from a host of mainly European institutes called the Ice2sea consortium provides a timely additional news peg - a newly refined estimate of the range of likely sea level rise for the rest of the century.

   In a welcome development the press has widely varied first-reactions to the news. This is good. To see the press thinking for itself - it does happen often but not as often or as incisively as is should - is better than reading stories all taken slavishly from a limited number of press releases. On the other hand, the disparity in some cases is marked. Perhaps it is that reporters are making too much of a rather narrowly focussed report that extrapolated new, modified global numbers from an analysis of the behavior of glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica as they debouch from their fjords into the sea. It may also be that...

David Corcoran, the editor of Science Times at The New York Times, got a break when he opened an email with the first draft of "In Pursuit of an Underwater Menagerie," this week's lead story in Science Times.

The story was written by C. Drew Harvell, a Cornell scientist who had not written for the Times before, and Corcoran wasn't sure what to expect. What he found was a lovely description of Octopus ornatus, "a foot-long creature in an amber shade of orange with bright white spots and dashes along all its arms." The story continued:

It sat stolidly in the light of the camera, 30 feet below the surface, unfazed by the attention. I reached out a...

As regular tracker readers surely all know, something is killing off honey bees across large stretches of the world including North America and Europe. Nobody has shown overwhelming evidence of a specific reason for this die-back, aka colony collapse disorder. But agricultural commissioners in the European Union moved this week against one of the prime suspects: a class of pesticides used widely on crops. Farmers soon, if this sticks, will have a hard time getting permits to use these "neonicotinoid" formulations on crops that attract the world's most common pollinating livestock.

   The expected  ban is not as sweeping as some agri-environmentalists hoped and lacked a strong enough vote to be open-ended in time, therefore is to be in force for two years. It  fits generally under the precautionary principle - a tenet of low-risk living. It has more adherents in European governing circles than in those of the US. It means better safe than...

  Raindrops keep falling and the next thing you know the neighborhood is full of water and deputies in boats are yelling "evacuate!" It's always good to get that warning sooner than that. The sequestration as illustration of America's legislative face-plant got attention today (Thur Apr 25) from the Associated Press. Its prolific science writer Seth Borenstein highlighted an announcement from the US Geological Survey that budget cuts appear poised to force closure of many stream and river gauges nationwide. About 100 of these these automated sentinels are located where they are vital if communities, farmers, and others are to get warning of flooding and thus reduce loss of life and of property damage. Particularly in the flatter parts of this country where flood plains can reach well into or clean across riverside towns, not to...

Links--too numerous to describe in detail, but too good to pass up:

--Nicola Jones had a short update April 2 in Nature on the muzzling of Canadian government scientists in seven federal agencies, which has drawn protests from Canadian science writers, among others. Jones reports that Canada's information commissioner has launched an investigation into the practice. Roxanne Palmer of International Business Times asks, in a longer story, which country is more open with regard to scientific research: Canada, the U.S., or China? The Tracker's carefully considered point of view...

  Here's a switch on the usual cute critter story. While perhaps nothing is cuter than a newborn fawn gangly-hopping along beside its mother unless it is twin newborn fawns, one West Coast newspaper writer forthrightly celebrates them with a thought other than awww, lookit that.

• SF Chronicle - Tom Stienstra: Fawns are food for predators in 2013.

  Stienstra, who looks a lot like an old-time Rocky Mountain fur trading man, is the Chronicle's outdoors writer. He puts words down in a deliberately manly way. He also is as romantic as anybody about the soul-filling blessings of a solitary, meditative walk through the wild and is often rapturous upon spotting its native residents. One is unsure what the animal rights and PETA crowd generally will make of this piece. The story riffs off his recent encounter, at...

 Har dee har all you Midwesterners and East Coasters, it's gonna be 80 degree in Northern California today. But the news says yet ANOTHER blizzard lineup is marching across the US mid-section heading toward New England. Dang those s0-called Circum-Arctic jetstreams that don't stick to the Arctic like they used to! They're wandering far south with a load of frigid air and when they wander back up there they haul warmer with thwm, accelerating the summertime melt-off of the ice pack. Gadzooks, we really are getting a whole new planet.

   So that led to a search for some snow news. First up is a story that got a good deal of coverage. It also offers a lesson in how somebody else's rewrite might really mess with your reporting.

 1) The Adelies of Beaufort Island.

   A paper in PLOS One...