Par for the MSM course

by Niko Herlin
Shoddy journalism from Stephen Sackur:
[Via Deltoid]

Read this passage (from a Greenpeace news story):

A recent NASA study has shown that the ice cap is not only getting smaller, it’s getting thinner and younger. Sea ice has dramatically thinned between 2004 and 2008. Old ice (over 2 years old) takes longer to melt, and is also much harder to replace. As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.

They say you can’t be too thin or too young, but this unfortunately doesn’t apply to the Arctic sea ice. Polar bears are the first to suffer from it, but many other species could be affected as well.

Is this passage about:

A: the Greenland ice sheet

or

B: Arctic sea ice

If you answered “A”, then you may be Stephen Sackur, presenter of the BBC’s HARDtalk, who, despite the repeated references to “sea ice”, decided that Greenpeace was saying that the Greenland ice sheet would melt by 2030. He then ambushed Greenpeace’s Gerd Leipold in an interview, claiming that the passage was “plainly misleading” (See Youtube video). Sackur compounded his error by only reading out one sentence from the passage: “As permanent ice decreases, we are looking at ice-free summers in the Arctic as early as 2030.”, thus not giving Leipold a chance to explain what the passage was about. Leipold agreed that Greenland wasn’t going to melt by 2030 and that if that is what the Greenpeace story had said, then it was a mistake.

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Greenpeace is not one of my favorite organizations and some of their tactics may not be the best strategically, but to take them to task over this? I hate ambushes, because the only real purpose is to make someone LOOK bad on video. There is not real attempt at informing the viewers.

It is all gotcha media, something that tabloid TV does. I’m sorry to see that the BBC is using these approaches. I guess they have to make a buck but if so, there are so many other places where I can get real information and not ‘reality TV.’

Don’t they realize they lessen their brand with crap like this? Maybe not, since they have not made any sort of correction yet.

Technorati Tags: Government, Science

Your pessimistic post of the day

Perfect storm:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

Will water, energy and food run low worldwide in 2030?

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As with most projections, this one examines what will happen if things continue along the current path. There is nothing wrong with that because part of its premise is that we will not really continue along the current path.

Studies like this help inform us of ways we can change things. We will make changes. Will they be enough? Well, life would just be no fun if we knew how it all turns out!

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

A great idea

by stuttermonkey
I got my Galileoscopes!:
[Via Bad Astronomy]
My Galileoscopes arrived in the mail!

Yay! There were some shipping problems, and it took longer than expected (they arrived about a month ago but I’ve been too busy to write up this post). But still, very cool. I ordered three; one for my daughter and me, one to give away …

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I had heard about these several months ago but had not done any real investigation. It is really nice to hear just how well they work, and for only $20 dollars.

When I was young, I had both a refractor and a reflector telescope. Even in the light pollution of Houston, I still remember looking at craters on the moon or seeing the disk of Venus. I ended up a biochemist but I really enjoyed examining the night sky.

Having simple ways for people to see the wonders of nature can only enhance humanity’s investigations of the world around us.

While the Seattle sky always seems to be cloudy whenever anything really interesting happens, like meteor showers, there are enough clear nights to have some real fun. I’d love to look at Jupiter or Saturn again.

And it is a great education tool. I can see why some people are buying two and donating one to a school. This is a nice way to put the power of optics into the hands of kids.

I think it is a nice idea to provide people with the ability to see the stars the same way Galileo or Kepler did. That permits personal experience to resonate with historical perspectives. Now if there was only a similar device for microscopes. (Of course, my real dream would be a scanning electron microscope for home use but the price would have to come down substantially.)

Technorati Tags: Science

The Encyclopedia of Life is “open for business as never before”

by Fremlin
Cool new tools let public contribute to massive interactive online biodiversity encyclopedia:
[Via EurekAlert! - Biology]

(Encyclopedia of Life) EOL’s inventory of Earth’s species — now 150,000 pages of vetted information, en route to 1.8 million, is shedding light on everything from conservation strategies for endangered species to human longevity and climate change. It will also help slow the spread of disease-bearing or invasive pests.

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This has the potential to be a sort of Wikipedia for species. It will have more vetting but with the ability to include public interactions, it could become very useful. Having photos added will also be very useful.

There are a lot of exciting projects going on, such as this one:

Under an initiative of the EOL Education Group, undergraduates at four universities – Harvard, Oregon State, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse – are creating species pages. Under their professors’ supervision, students at these institutions have prepared more than 100 fungi species pages, vetted by experts at MushroomObserver.org. Undergraduate student contributions to content partners Amphibia Web and Animal Diversity Web are also being served on EOL.

Properly vetted citizen scientists will be very important. The database itself will become increasingly important as we create more and more databases dealing with DNA, proteins and others hard facts. The EOL looks like it is well designed for the sorts of collaborative links that will be required in order to help people understand the world around us.

And people can contribute what they know also. Check out a page. Or find some pictures in their Flickr group.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science