National newspapers engage science in front-page headlines

In the last few weeks, media reports in this venue have cited front-page articles in national newspapers that centered on politics affecting climate research, science’s bird flu biosecurity dilemma , the troubles of Russian science , and tentative excitement about CERN’s Higgs boson discovery prospects . Here are brief reports on four other science-related headlines that have also appeared on those front pages:

* “As permafrost thaws, scientists see a threat” (New York Times, 17 December; in the online version: “As permafrost thaws, scientists study the risks” ). Justin Gillis reported on “scientists struggling to understand one of the biggest looming mysteries about the future of the earth.” He explained that experts “have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil.” If “a substantial amount of [that] carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming"—not just via carbon dioxide, but also as methane, which he called “especially potent at trapping the sun’s heat.” In this long, somewhat technical article, Gillis declared that “the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science.”

* “Politics powered decisions on Solyndra” (Washington Post, 26 December; in the online version: “Solyndra: Politics infused Obama energy programs” ). The subhead summarized this above-the-fold feature piece: “Documents on green-energy program portray an administration concerned with appearances.” The authors claimed to have analyzed “thousands of memos, company records and internal e-mails,” finding that “political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials” and establishing that the “records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra.”

* “In challenge, China extends space mission” (New York Times, 30 December; in the online version: “Space plan from China broadens challenge to U.S.” ). With Edward Wong reporting from Beijing and Kenneth Chang from New York, this above-the-fold article described China’s five-year program for achieving prestige as a spacefaring nation. The plan involves a space lab, moon sample collection, a satellite navigation system, and new spacecraft. It “conjure[s] up memories of the cold-war-era space race between the United States and the Soviet Union,” the authors wrote. They made plain that China’s program seems methodical and orderly. “By contrast,” they noted, “NASA’s direction tends to shift with every change of presidency.” The authors reminded readers that in 2003, China became the third country to send a human into space.

* “At the helm of Spaceship Earth” (Washington Post, 3 January; in the online version: “Spaceship Earth: A new view of environmentalism” ). This speculative essay came from Joel Achenbach, a sometime science writer at the Post, but one with polymath sensibilities. He’s also a colorful stylist, as seen in his opening line: “Spaceship Earth enters 2012 belching smoke, overheating and burning through fuel at a frightening rate. It’s feeling pretty crowded, and the crew is mutinous. No one’s at the helm.” He admits that the spaceship is “an antiquated metaphor,” but states his thesis: “It’s also an increasingly apt way to discuss a planet with 7 billion people, a global economy, a World Wide Web, climate change, exotic organisms running amok and all sorts of resource shortages and ecological challenges. More and more environmentalists and scientists talk about the planet as a complex system, one that human beings must aggressively monitor, manage and sometimes reengineer. Kind of like a spaceship.” Achenbach emphasized that “some influential thinkers argue for a managerial approach to the planet that is short on sentiment and long on science and technology.” Concerning the possibility of “overreliance on technology to fix problems that humans have made” and the question of “how people could intelligently manage something as complicated as the natural world,” he warned: “We might not be good at it.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media . He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.