"There has never been a golden age of science journalism, but certainly there were more characters, better writers, more newsgathering zeal, and more originality in the recent past."
Category: Global Warming
"There has never been a golden age of science journalism, but certainly there were more characters, better writers, more newsgathering zeal, and more originality in the recent past."
So writes a critic on The Huffington Post. Those are fighting words--and tired words. We've heard these criticisms before, and I should probably ignore them, but, as The Dude put it in The Big Lebowski, "This will not stand, man."
The critic is David Whitehouse, whose HuffPo bio says that he is an astrophysicist, a former BBC science correspondent, and the author of four books. Despite those bona fides, his criticism echoes down the line as if it were coming to us via a bad connection from the 20th Century.
He begins his argument with the contention that "science, and communicating science, is too...
Time Magazine...
Time Magazine's Bryan Walsh had a good way today to put into context a new journal report that stokes the long standing fear of a significant new source of greenhouse gases - the warming soils of the arctic tundra and boreal zones. He writes, despite last week's somewhat calming report on a possibly smaller range of climate sensitivity to greenhouse forces, that overall "most of the science on climate change is dire and getting direr."
The news comes via Nature. It is not from a new round of research but from a commentary, or essay, by...
A meeting of delegates to an Intergovernmental Panel...
A meeting of delegates to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Uganda concluded today that the world must prepare for more frequent and perhaps more severe episodes of wild and disruptive weather : heat waves most assuredly and a high risk of more floods, droughts, violent wind storms, and downpours .This does not sound like a different story than we've heard many times, but the certainty is a bit higher. Thus reporters have a tedious but important chore: write it again, try to find a wrinkle that is different, prepare to get flack from contrarians who don't believe a bit of it
Brief Aside: Those scientists. They just mess with data to get more grant money. I just saw it explained, perhaps you...
One finds a pretty good example of broad-brush story...
One finds a pretty good example of broad-brush story with a telling, finely-focussed example to give it punch in the Sunday Charlotte News & Observer.
Reporter Bruce Henderson has a story that, as a type, is common enough. North Carolina is warming up. Birds and other wildlife are shifting their ranges. (Link goes to sister paper, the Raleigh News & Observer). OK, that's important but it's been reported, in general, many times. Also not unusual is to find a naturalist quoted on fear that surprises are in store, nobody knows what. But what is gratifying at that...
Much has been made of President Obama's call...
Much has been made of President Obama's call for accelerated pursuit of clean energy in his State of the Union speech, which he managed without once assembling any syllables sounding remotely like "climate change" or "global warming" or any of that sort of red meat to inspire the elected right wing in Congress to do any more sneering than it already is.
If you can navigate past the pay wall, the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, stalwart liberal, Jimmy Carter speechwriter, and frequent anchor for ToftheT commentary, does a nifty job sort-of-laying-into the President for his...
NASA researchers who looked at satellite data say...
NASA researchers who looked at satellite data say some of the worlds large, deep lakes are doing what the air and the ocean have been doing lately: getting warmer. Their analysis, in the American Geophysical Union's journal Geophysical Research Letters, is boosted by press releases from both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the AGU.
Given that high profile, and that one of the world's best known lakes, Tahoe on the California-Nevada border high in the Sierras, it's a bit of a surprise there is not more coverage for this. Could be climate change burnout and weariness with dealing with contrarions. On the other hand, none of the media coverage I've seen wasted time calling up a few such...
Nature has a poser of...
Nature has a poser of a paper in this week's issue. It's like discovering that when one's strips the ice from the Arctic, the polar bears actually LOVE it. The gist is that when three researchers at Imperial College London and one at the University of Colorado, each an esteemed place in the climate change game, went to document the cooling effect on Earth's surface rendered by the recent low in solar output (and in sunspots and storms), their presumptions hit a brick wall. Data said the result was the opposite. The London team leader told the UK Guardian's Damian Carrington...
It will be another scorcher here in the Bay Area. The water is flat. San...
It will be another scorcher here in the Bay Area. The water is flat. San Francisco highrise lights reflecting off the Bay have no wiggly shimmer. I feel no sea breeze at all. The condensed vapor in the predawn light, from industrial plants near the shore, is going straight up and fading to invisible fast. It's already 70 degrees F before the sun rises. And while a day in the 90s is all one expects here, in downtown Los Angeles yesterday it hit 113, an all-time record with no real break expected for days.
Sometimes a reporter can leave a mis-impression even while couching a story entirely in terms that are defensibly in accord with what evidence says is correct. Take the story on line at San Francisco NPR-PBS station KQED...
For more than two years a dramatic conclusion from two...
For more than two years a dramatic conclusion from two researchers at the National Solar Observatory on Kitt Peak, with offices in Tucson, has bounced around smaller news outlets and, notably, among bloggers. After analyzing 20 years of data on the magnetic field strength in sunspots - revealed by a warping of OH spectra known as Zeeman splitting - astronomers Matthew Penn and William Livingston see a trend that could have dramatic impact on Earth. This includes a possible replay of the great cooling in the 1600s and early 1700s known as the Little Ice Age - blamed on a prolonged sunspot drought and slight overall dimming of the sun, the Maunder Minimum.
A new version of the paper gets a big boost from a small but...
In Science today two Carnegie scientists at Stanford...
In Science today two Carnegie scientists at Stanford University report a thought experiment and what they calculated when they ran it. Which is, how much would CO2 rise if we let all the coal plants and cars and fossil-fueled whatnot live out their useful lives, but as they expire replace them with low or no-carbon machinery? They conclude the rise would be significant but well this side of certain catastrophe. It seems that people have not yet built the plants and other gear to double or triple or even more expand our air's CO2. Ergo, there is still time to reconfigure the world's economy into a low-carbon system without immediately abandoning its current stuff.
It's a little bit wonky, as such academic exercises...
A study by a formerly obscure but, on paper, quite august group, the...
A study by a formerly obscure but, on paper, quite august group, the InterAcademy Council, issued this morning its findings on the performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has managed to stub its toes again and again in the last year or so. The council represents national academies of science. Thus, it has ability to sample the opinions of the senior hot shots in the world's research effort. It gave the IPCC a scolding.
Here are some sample headlines racing through the world wide web from prominent news agencies:
- Daily Hindu - Narayan Lakshman: Sharp criticism for IPCC leadership ;...
A few days ago there appeared here a...
A few days ago there appeared here a lamentation (previous post) that several reporters covered some news without remarking that it came hard on the heels of another spot of news on precisely the same topic. And the two pieces of research came to somewhat different conclusion. What ought to have been pieces reflecting the contrast instead blithely ignored the opportunity.
It has happened again. This time in a field - terrestrial climate change (rather than Martian, as in the other). It also, by...
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