So there are a few fish left in the sea!

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Greeting from Abaco Bahamas.  I am here for a few days to help one of my grad students, Andrea Anton, who is working on lionfish which are EVERYWHERE here as they are across the Bahamas.  The densities, only a few years after arriving, are truly remarkable.

But the real purpose of this post is to show some pictures of the amazing site we worked at today.  It was a remote, shallow reef and easily had more fish and sharks than nearly anywhere else I have ever been.  As soon as we entered the water a large school of tarpon come in to check us out.  Within minutes we were being circled by four 5 ft black tip sharks.  There were very large jack, barracuda, massive snapper, and incredible numbers of a variety of grouper everywhere.  And ocean triggerfish seemed especially abundant.  There were also plenty of Diadema and a fair number of parrotfish, surgeon fish and blue tangs, so there was little macroalgae.  Many extremely large gastropods and more cyphoma that I have ever seen.

Unfortunately the coral cover was very low.  In the shallows, probably < 1%, but this is a very exposed site.  In deeper water, it was roughly 5-8%.  But there were a lot of A. palmata colonies near the shore.  And despite the low coral cover, this was without doubt a thriving and productive ecosystem.  I heard an NGO head recently declare that once coral cover goes below 10%, the reef is functionally extinct and lost.  I couldn’t disagree more.

The funny thing about this reef was that it isn’t in an MPA or in any way managed.  No NGOs are protecting it.  No scientists are studying it.  And the lack of coral clearly hasn’t caused the fish community to collapse. Likewise, the presence of the fish and top predators didn’t maintain “reef resilience”, i.e., the corals still died when they bleached in 98.  Funny how the real world mucks up all those cozy ideas academics dream up.

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Palau bans shark fishing-once again, tiny nations take the lead on marine conservation

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The Republic of Palau, the island nation in the western Pacific, has banned shark fishing in its waters.  The overfishing of sharks, really the outright devastation of their populations, is one of the really big problems in marine conservation.  The causes run from the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws in 1975 (which turned the world against sharks and initiated global hunts, much like the crazed efforts to kill off wolves and panthers in the US) to the Asian market and appetite for shark fin soup.

Baum et al (2003) and many others have documented the collapse of shark populations and the many cascading effects removing top predators from ecosystems has.

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Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — The Pacific nation of Palau is creating the first shark sanctuary, banning commercial fishing of all sharks in its waters from vessels that hunt the predators for their fins, coveted in soups as an Asian delicacy.

Johnson Toribiong, president of the island republic, announced the commercial shark-fishing ban today at the United Nations General Assembly, saying “the strength and beauty of sharks are a natural barometer for the health of our oceans.”

Shark populations are in danger of collapse along with salmon and tuna commercial fisheries because of scant protective measures. Great whites, hammerheads and a third of deep-sea sharks and rays face extinction as fishing fleets trawling worldwide seek them for meat and fins, according to the Gland, Switzerland-based IUCN conservation group.

“The situation for sharks at the moment is catastrophic,” said Carl-Gustaf Lundin, head of marine conservation at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “Their populations around the world are at risk of collapse.”  Palau, with 20,000 inhabitants spread over about 200 islands, today formally established a France-sized area of sea banning shark hunting, setting up a protective zone to help preserve the predatory fish and support local tourism.

“Palau will become the world’s first national shark sanctuary,” Toribiong said, “ending all commercial shark fishing in our waters and giving a sanctuary for sharks to live and reproduce unmolested in our 237,000 square miles of ocean.”  Sharks often become snared in nets meant for tuna, which remain in high demand among consumers. About 10.7 million blue sharks are killed annually for their fins, many of which are sold at the Hong Kong shark fin market, according to a June report from IUCN.

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From DotEarth:  The Pacific island nation of Palau has declared all of its waters a sanctuary for sharks. The archipelago, famed among biologists and divers for its rich marine life, has seen increases in illegal shark fishing, driven by the high prices paid for shark fins in China. I met President Johnson Toribiong earlier this week as the United Nations climate summit ended, and he described the problems, which are particularly troublesome in a place where tourism revolving around reef diving is a top source of income.

Today, while addressing the U.N. General Assembly, he planned to announce a ban on all commercial shark fishing in Palau’s 242,858-square-mile exclusive economic zone, while also calling for a global moratorium on catching sharks only for their fins. Given that, for the moment, Palau has only one enforcement vessel to patrol an ocean zone a bit smaller than Texas, the challenge of turning a ban from rhetoric to reality remains. But Palau is getting significant support from private groups, particularly the Pew Charitable Trusts, which worked with groups and government officials in Palau to create the sanctuary plan.

Sadly, I am skeptical that such a proclamation can have much effect, given the industrial scale fishery for shark fins that has developed over the last decade.  And also the difficulty of monitoring such a large area to enforce the decree.  Shark fishing is in theory illegal within many large reserves like the Galapagos Marine Reserve, yet in reality, illegal shark fishing there, and elsewhere is common.

Jennifer Jacquet, who used to write the shifting baseline blog, recently published a paper on the surprisingly large size of the shark fishery in Ecuador alone:

Sharks never stop growing and neither does the Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Ecuador is one nation of many that feeds the demand for fins, and fishers there catch more than 40 different shark species. But shark catches have been considerably underreported worldwide. Until the 2005 update of fisheries data, the United Nations ood and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) did not report elasmobranches for Ecuador indicating that the Ecuadorian government did not report on these species. This study reconstructs Ecuador’s mainland shark landings from the bottom up from 1979 to 2004. Over this period, shark landings for the Ecuadorian mainland were an estimated 7000 tonnes per year, or nearly half a million sharks. Reconstructed shark landings were about 3.6 times greater than those retroactively reported by FAO from 1991 to 2004. The discrepancies in data require immediate implementation of the measures Ecuadorian law mandates: eliminating targeted shark captures, finning and transshipments, as well as adoption of measures to minimise incidental capture. Most of all, a serious shark landings monitoring system and effective chain of custody standards are needed.

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Also see “Belize passes a law to limit the fishing of reef herbivores” here

References

Baum J.K., Myers R.A., Kehler D.G., Worm B., Harley S.J. & Doherty P.A. (2003) Collapse and conservation of shark populations in the Northwest Atlantic. Science, 299, 389-392

Jacquet, Jennifer, Juan Jose Alava, Ganapathiraju Pramod, Scott Henderson and Dirk Zeller. In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador’s waters. Environmental Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 4, December 2008, 269–283

About that CRU email hack..

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As defined by wikipedia:

Distraction. The diversion of attention of an individual or group from the chosen object of attention onto the source of distraction

As Tim Lambert over at Deltoid points out:

This is the science that the cracker who stole the emails from CRU wants to distract you from.

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More about the hack over at Real Climate (background here, more context here). Head over to the Copenhagen Diagnosis to read the report in full (in update to the IPCC 2007 Working Group 1 report before the Copenhagen negotiations (COP15) next month).

Less light than heat – a note from David Horton

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I confess, and it is like confessing to a murder, that I was once a smoker (I stopped 18 years, 3 months, 5 days, 6 hours ago, but who’s counting). There was a lot of it about in the fifties and sixties. My uncle and grandfather both smoked, pretty much all the men I knew did. Film heroes on screen smoked, and so did their audience. Doctors smoked, patients in hospital smoked, James Bond smoked, sportsmen smoked. Many of my peers smoked, in fact the coolest guy in school, Robert Patterson, used to smoke behind the sports pavilion while the rest of us played cricket – how cool was that? So I began smoking. Who knew there was a problem eh? There were giant billboards with cowboys smoking, ads on buses, television ads of really cool guys and gals in tuxedos smoking, radio ads, full page newspaper ads. And there were doctors and scientists who swore on a stack of chesterfields that smoking wasn’t harmful (lies, damned lies and statistics, where was the proof?), and tobacco company executives who swore nicotine wasn’t addictive, good heavens no, what an idea. Little did anyone know that the executives were lying, knew they were lying, but that not only were they being paid big dollars by cigarette companies but so were the scientists and doctors in their white coats.

All of us smokers agreed with each other in pubs and restaurants, in trains, in cars, in planes, smoking was doing us no harm, oh my goodness gracious no. Coughing in the morning was from dust in the bedroom, sneezing was hay fever, perfectly natural in Summer, breathlessness was just old age, lack of appetite was weight watching, inability to smell and taste – never been good at that. It was in fact, good for us, calmed the nerves, slowed us down, cleared the lungs, made a natural end to a meal, was essential to accompany coffee. And we knew, or knew of, smokers who lived a long time. Not many, but one was enough to prove that there was nothing to worry about, smoking didn’t damage health. Anyway, we could give up, or at least cut down, any time we chose. Not addicted at all, just enjoyed it, why, at times I could avoid opening that third pack of cigarettes in a day. Willpower was all that was needed, and if I ever thought I needed to, could cut down slowly, steadily. So no need for alarm – doctors, mothers, friends, children – panic merchants, alarmists, totally over the top.

But as I got older the symptoms got worse, the cough constant, the blocked nose also, and playing sport became a memory. And then there was that odd sensation in the lips, and mouth. What was that? Finally, a bit chopped out, and “pre-cancerous” the last stage before developing something that would kill me, quickly, nastily. And I stopped, not quite cold turkey, but with help from the chewing gum and patches that eased me towards being a former smoker. Not easy, but what was the choice?

And it all came back to me – the self-deception, the denial, the anger at well meaning friends, the acceptance of fake experts and the rejection of real ones, the refusal to change anything in my life even at the certain risk of losing it – these last few weeks listening to the so-called skeptics among the Liberal and National parties (the Labor skeptics have their heads down). It could have been me talking about cigarettes 20 years ago. But where I was just being stupid on my own behalf (and, well, I suppose, family and friends), these parliamentary representatives of the people of Australia are being stupid on behalf of 21 million Australians. Particularly stupid on behalf of rural Australians, in the front line as the continent fries and dries and burns. That awful image last week of a fire burning through, and destroying, a mature wheat crop, should be played over and over to all members of parliament, as a symbol of what we are in for.

And I wonder how those SA Senators, in particular, trotting out the most arrant rubbish (some coming from the same “experts” who, funded by tobacco companies, denied the harm in cigarettes – coincidence or what!) while refusing to listen to a delegation of actual climate scientists felt as the state they represent broke more and more temperature records and catastrophic fire warnings were issued?

Guilty, I hope. But I wouldn’t count on it.

There is a place in hell for climate change denialists, particularly those who should know better – it’s called Australia.

——-

David Horton is a writer and polymath. He has qualifications in both science and the arts with careers in biology, archaeology, publishing some 100 scientific papers and a number of books on biology and archaeology.

Now retired to become a professional writer and farmer, he often screams at tv news bulletins, writes a blog, writes a newspaper column, and edits his local paper.

His books include The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia (1994 – winner NSW Premier’s Literary Award) and The Pure State of Nature (2000).

Obama to America: “We’re going to show young people how cool science can be”

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Obama gave a fairly impressive speech as part of the presidential “Education To Innovate” campaign, including this gem:

Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House we’re going to lead by example.  We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.

Surprised? It goes on:

It’s about an informed citizenry in an era where many of the problems we face as a nation are, at root, scientific problems.  And it’s about the power of science to not only unlock new discoveries, but to unlock in the minds of our young people a sense of promise, a sense that with some hard work — with effort — they have the potential to achieve extraordinary things.

Why is this so important? Read this posting to the ‘coral list’ earlier this month by Professor Pam Hallock Muller for a little context:

Americans have long been schizophrenic about education and intellectual issues in general (read Wallace Stegner), and science in particular (think Scopes Trial). As a child in rural America, I recall neighbors discussing higher education as something only men who were disabled (e.g., polio victims) or inept would pursue; a “real man” worked with  his hands. School was for the 3 Rs.

The anti-intellectual/anti-science  undercurrent in America was reinforced in the late 1940s into the 1960s, with the government-sponsored campaigns and regulations aimed at getting women out of the workforce (where they were encouraged to go during  WWII) and into the “consumer force”. Women who sought higher education were tracked into elementary education, where they were told not to worry their pretty little heads about science and math because it was “too hard”. Public university degree programs were legally allowed to reject women until 1972 (I was rejected from at least one graduate program specifically because they did not accept women – they told me that in the rejection letter). Thus, despite the “space race” and an emphasis on science and math in the 1960s, education programs were turning out eager young elementary teachers who had been taught that science and math were “too hard”, which too many promptly taught their students, both boys and girls. Combine that with the reluctance of teachers to even mention anything related to evolution or reproduction to avoid the wrath of parents and administrators, and we now have a largely science-illiterate nation.

By the 1980s, the anti-education undercurrent was greatly reinforced by an ever growing portion of the American population with minimal education in science and math. That “upwelled” into the election of a leader whose attitude towards the environment was “if you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all”. For much of the past 30 years, anti-intellectual, anti-science attitudes have been mainstream nationwide. This has been especially true the past 8 years, when beliefs and “gut-feelings” consistently trumped evidence and expertise.

Scientists are “voices crying in the wilderness”, except the wilderness is now urban.

The ‘underwater rivers’ of Mexico

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These amazing photographs were taken by the Russian underwater photographer Anatoly Beloshchin.

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In his own words: “We are 30 meters deep, fresh water, then 60 meters deep – salty water and under me I see a river, island and fallen leaves… Actually, the river, which you can see, is a layer of hydrogen sulphide.”

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Check out his website (www.tecdrive.ru) for some truely great underwater photography.

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Great Barrier Reef survival “requires 25% CO2 cut”

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Reuters, November 16th 2009

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has only a 50 percent chance of survival if global CO2 emissions are not reduced at least 25 percent by 2020, a coalition of Australia’s top reef and climate scientists said on Tuesday.

The 13 scientists said even deeper cuts of up to 90 percent by 2050 would necessary if the reef was to survive future coral bleaching and coral death caused by rising ocean temperatures.

“We’ve seen the evidence with our own eyes. Climate change is already impacting the Great Barrier Reef,” Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said in a briefing to Australian MPs on Tuesday.

Australia, one of the world’s biggest CO2 emitters per capita, has only pledged to cut its emissions by five percent from 2000 levels by 2020.

It has said it would go further, with a 25 percent cut, if a tough international climate agreement is reached at U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen in December, but this is looking increasingly unlikely with legally binding targets now off the agenda.

“This is our Great Barrier Reef. If Australia doesn’t show leadership by reducing emissions to save the reef, who will?” asked scientist Ken Baldwin, in calling for Australia to lead the way in cutting emissions.

But the Australian government is struggling to have a hostile Senate pass its planned emission trading scheme. A final vote is expected next week.

The World Heritage-protected Great Barrier Reef sprawls for more than 345,000 square km (133,000 sq miles) off Australia’s east coast and can be seen from space.

The Australian scientists said more than 100 nations had endorsed a goal of limiting average global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, but even that rise would endanger coral reefs.

The scientists said global warming was already threatening the economic value of the Great Barrier Reef which contributes A$5.4 billion to the Australian economy each year from fishing, recreational usage and tourism.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the Great Barrier Reef could be “functionally extinct” within decades, with deadly coral bleaching likely to be an annual occurrence by 2030.

Bleaching occurs when the tiny plant-like coral organisms die, often because of higher temperatures, and leave behind only a white limestone reef skeleton

The Last of the Bluefin Tuna?

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I’ve often wondered whether people who eat tuna from a can have any idea what a tuna fish actually looks like? How does a can of tuna still cost less than a dollar? Mainly because the average tin of tuna comes from smaller and less tasty species (usually albacore or skipjack at roughly $25 per pound), which are still plentiful* in the oceans as they require less resources to survive and reproduce. In contrast, the closely related southern bluefin tuna commands upwards of $350 per pound, yet is IUCN listed as ‘critically endangered’. With commercial extinction looming on the horizon, who will be the last person to eat a southern bluefin?

Bluefins are amazing animals. They can live for 40 years and attain weights of 1,600 pounds, yet they blast through the water at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. In other respects, they have everything going against them. The tuna grow slowly, and young females lay a only fraction the number of eggs that older ones do. They only have two spawning grounds, one in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the Mediterranean Sea, and when they are on them, tuna form tight schools, making them easy to catch.

Should bluefin disappear, much of the blame should go to an organization called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), although Carl Safina of the Blue Ocean Institute gave what some consider a more appropriate name, the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna. There are now only about 34,000 tuna swimming in the entire western Atlantic, down 82 percent from 1960s levels when the commission started “managing” the fishery.

“Looking at the science, there’s nothing else that makes any sense,” she said. “The current quota is driving the species to commercial extinction.”

Not that ICCAT ever pays much attention to science. “Last year ICCAT’s scientists said that the quota should be no higher than 15,000 metric tons,” said Lieberman. “So they went with 23,000 tons. In reality, with overfishing and illegal fishing, what they actually took is much higher. You can pretty much figure that it was double the quota. What we’re calling for is to suspend the fishery. Let it recover, and then you can go back to fishing. But there’s tremendous opposition, particularly from the European Union, to cutting anything.” (Read More)

* For albacore tuna, North Pacific biomass is 7% above the long-term average biomass for the exploitable stocks. South Pacific biomass is 33% above the biomass needed to support maximum sustainable yield

Climate change is a “left-wing conspiracy to de-industrialise the world”

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Over the past few weeks, the debate in climate change has reached new levels of ridicule – such as this comment by Senator Nick Minchin:

”For the extreme left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do – to sort of de-industrialise the Western world,” he said. ”The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left and really they embraced environmentalism as their new religion. For years the left internationally have been very successful in exploiting people’s innate fears about global warming and climate change.” (Read More)

In which case, as part of the IPCC review process, I must too be part of this ongoing conspiracy to fill the void left by communism! Is the IPCC really at the heart of a massive conspiracy theory?

A letter writer to a newspaper recently pleaded for guidance on how to get the facts about whether there is human-induced global warming. But the writer added emphatically that he did not want to read reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because he wanted independent and reliable information.

Now, it could just be me, but I would have thought that the world’s most comprehensive assessment and review of climate science by thousands of international experts should probably be the first port of call when searching for facts.

So is the IPCC really that kooky? Have thousands of participating scientists from around the world who’ve contributed to four IPCC reports since 1990 duped the world with hidden agendas and manipulated science? Have they all got it wrong? (Read more)

It’s interesting to see how this meme has developed in recent times, and probably highlights the fact that climate change is now more about effective communication and politics as opposed to ‘proving’ science.

Supermodels take it off for climate change

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In the run up to Copenhagen even supermodels are jumping into the fray.   There is a new viral video (700,000 views in just over 10 days) in which some supermodels “strip for climate change” on behalf of Bill McKibben‘s new outfit 350.org.  How exactly this video will assist in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions or in getting us back to 350 ppm is not entirely clear.  (but I suppose the same could be said about our blog)

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Ove and Charlie Veron discussed the importance of getting back to 350 ppm here;  The coral reef crisis: The critical importance of <350 ppm CO2

The utility and some of the nuances of the 350 concept, e.g., how soon do we need to get back there,  have become a bit controversial within certain AGW circles.  Witness this dust up among AGW blogosphere titans Bill McKibben, Andrew Revkin and Gavin  Schmidt (click on the comments and read comments #3-5).  Also see this view of the idea and campaign by Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert, a University of Chicago climate scientist (and fearless debunker of the rubbish about climate change being peddled by Steve Levitt):

Hansen’s specific reasoning behind 350 was based largely on an estimate of the CO2 level when Antarctic glaciation started, plus a bit of margin of safety thrown in. There is a lot of uncertainty regarding that CO2 level, but it is certainly an interesting line of thinking. One needs to recognize,though, that this specific argument for 350 involves relatively slow climate responses. It is unlikely that Antarctica would deglaciate if we exceeded 350 for just a decade or two. So, you have a bit of wiggle room on the overshoot, so long as the CO2 doesn’t stay above 350 for several hundred years (the precise duration where you get worried being contingent on aspects of the response time of ice sheets that are still poorly understood).

Now, the problem is the slow recovery time of atmospheric CO2 after you stop burning fossil fuels. But, what is certain is that if we go to 600 or 700, the CO2 could easily remain over 350 for a thousand years, which gives a long time for bad stuff to happen. So, the “350” goal may still be attainable if it is interpreted as meaning we have to keep the CO2 300 years out (say) from exceeding this value. – Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert via a comment on Dot Earth

Update (15/11/09); a reader emailed to ask how the “dust up” mentioned above could be found.  It can be seen in the DotEarth story on the 350 movement (note the mildly critical comments by Gavin Schmidt, Andrew Revkin (the author), and Ray Pierrehumbert (above) and in articles on the 350 idea on why how we get back to 350 matters and on the Hansen paper much of this movement is based on on the Real Climate web site, and in the comments section of one of these articles.  To make it really easy, ill paste some of the comments below:

I’d hoped to retain that great final line, but in the eternal space crunch, it got dropped.

The vital question, I’m told repeatedly by specialists in the non-science arenas you list (economics, technological change, politics), is what policies have the best shot of producing a peak and decline that limits climate risks as delineated by the science.

And most of those curves are quite similar no matter what end point is chosen, given the change required just to stablize at ANY concentration in a world heading toward 9 billion people seeking decent lives.

A couple of useful additional perspectives that didn’t fit in print were offered by Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC (who endorsed the 350 campaign):

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/a-global-focus-on-a-hot-number/?permid=169#comment169

“We are dealing with a dynamic system. Hence, what would really be relevant is the trajectory of concentration levels and therefore emission trajectories. The 350 number has some appeal, because it would to some extent determine the peaking period and the rate of decline. Of course 350 by itself provides no solution. It would merely be the end point of a trajectory which theoretically can have infinite alternatives.”

And Mike Hulme, the British climate maven who wrote “Why We Disagree About Climate Change”:

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/a-global-focus-on-a-hot-number/?permid=170#comment170

“I never quite know what targets like 400, 350 or 280 mean…. If we mean stabilise back at 280 by 2200, say, then we can pump a lot of CO2 in the meantime, before some really good carbon scrubbing technologies in the 22nd century come along. Same argument actually for 280 by 2100 if you’re a technology optimist. So really if one wants to deal in long-term numbers then talk either about future C budgets (how many gigatons are you going to allow), or else set the peak concentration and by when. My guess is that for CO2 we will hit 500ppm sometime this century (harder to guess what CO2-equiv will be). On what to aim for – I wouldn’t play politics will long-term numbers: far too easy for them to be hijacked and used for all sorts of dubious reasons and causes. Much better is to focus on near-term goals (2015, 2020) and to break them down into manageable sectors (e.g. aviation, municipalities, aluminium sector, etc.). The rhetoric of global long-term targets raises the illusion that we can govern globally over the long-haul (the illusion of Copenhagen) – and we can’t.”

Many thanks to Gavin for his clarification, and for his work (and everyone else’s at RC) over the years. For whatever reason Andy chose to paint the 350 effort as unlikely in his story, but it was reported the day before we actually showed you could mobilize millions of people in 5200 events in 181 countries in what the press is calling ‘the mose widespread day of political action in the planet’s history,’ all around a scientific data point. I think tht should be heartening to all.

The biggest point the number gets across, i think, is that climate change is not some future threat but a present crisis. If you have a moment, I recommend browsing through the photos we’ve got up at 350.org (a tiny subset of the 21,000 now in our flickr photostream) to get a sense of the people who are waking up to this reality.

thanks to all who participated Saturday

Andy Revkin says:

27 October 2009 at 2:31 PM

Just one last thought here, upon reading Bill’s comment.

There were two things to report on (and my reporting continued through the actual day of action):

1) The amazing coordinated globe-spanning mosaic of actions
2) the basis for the focal point of that action.

On the first, there’s no question an epic effort was carried off with astonishing scope and skill.
On the second, there remain large, substantive and vital questions. As I said in a comment response somewhere on my blog, a keystone question is 350 by when? As Pachauri and others explained, 350 ppm on its own is kind of like judging a car’s mileage by “miles” without the “per hour.”

My story had to examine both the news and the context. We’ve been pilloried in the past for simply reporting what folks are saying without examining the evidence and argument. I’m not drawing ANY comparisons at all, but examples that come to mind are when a president pumps up the WMD threat, or when candidates rattle off jargon like “clean coal.”