ScienceInsider

by Erik Stokstad

For years, Asian carp have been slowly moving up the Mississippi River. In addition to competing with native fish, they jump out of the water when startled—sometimes even posing a hazard to boaters.

Now, with the invasive fish nearing Chicago, the Obama Administration has announced a new strategy for preventing the carp from entering the Great Lakes, where they could threaten a sportfishing industry worth $7 billion. The plan also includes money for research on how to battle the fish. However, the move appears unlikely to end a feud between midwestern states over what to do about the carp.

by Eli Kintisch

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as long as 4 years ago, hoped that NOAA would be the home of what they were calling Climate Services. Today, with the launch of a new Web site called climate.gov, NOAA's Climate Services has debuted, albeit modestly.

Congressional fans of the idea have proposed that Climate Services grow to be a $300 million clearinghouse for climate prediction tools, adaptation services, and analytical data streams to equal the National Weather Service—with an equally diverse set of customers in business and government who want to know what the changing climate will mean for them.

For now the Obama Administration has aimed low, with a flashy but easy-to-use Web site that brings together some of NOAA's climate information but acknowledges that there is much government climate data yet to be synthesized and made easy to understand. And its proposed funding for this year is also modest: $1.5 million, for the Web site.

by Gretchen Vogel

German researchers are moving their field tests of genetically modified peas to North Dakota. University of Hannover plant geneticist Hans-Jörg Jacobsen says that Germany's unclear regulations regarding field trials of GM plants and the continuing threat of vandalism prompted the move.

And when asked about the application of the socalled precautionary principle to GM plants, Jacobsen offered this rather political response:

The precautionary principle as such is questionable. If I were to agree with the precautionary principle as a central concept, I would also have to accept George W. Bush's war against Iraq, which in my view is unjustified. I am no more able to do this than to consider this principle important in the case of GM plants. Even Bush, that total loser, needed no evidence of weapons of mass destruction before launching an attack; mere suspicion was enough for him, as it is for many ideologists in this country. English makes a distinction between the "precautionary principle" and the "precautionary approach". German sticklers for principles probably can’t make this distinction. Perhaps that explains why there is no neat translation of the term "precautionary approach" in German.

by Pallava Bagla

Speaking at a development summit, India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came out in full support of the beleaguered IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, the first time Singh had addressed the issue after IPCC offered its "regret" on the blunder it committed in predicting that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt away by 2035. The Indian prime minister, who is an economist, said: "Some aspects of the science that is reflected in the work of the IPCC have faced criticism. But this debate does not challenge the core projections of the IPCC about the impact of greenhouse gas accumulations on temperature, rainfall, and sea-level rise. Let me here assert that India has full confidence in the IPCC process and its leadership and will support it in every way that it can."

Hit by the poor economy and lower funding from the government, King’s College London is considering “draconian” cuts of more than 200 jobs and may abandon teaching engineering, even though in 1838 it was the first in the world to open an engineering school.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Nobel Prize– winning physicist Steven Weinberg lauds NASA's focus on unmanned flight and its decision to scrap a moon mission.

The House of Representatives has held the second of three hearings on geoengineering; a report is expected this summer.

A coalition of MIT scientists and others analyzing the potential of world proposals to cut greenhouse gasses has determined that in the month since the Copenhagen Accord has passed, the world has "not closed the gap" between proposed actions and the actions that would limit anthropogenic warming to 2°C.

(Widget courtesy C-ROADS) 

by Eli Kintisch

by Eli Kintisch

A panel convened by Pennsylvania State University has mostly absolved Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann wrongdoing on allegations stemming from e-mails he sent as part of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia e-mail theft last year, The New York Times reports:

In some of the e-mail messages, Dr. Mann refers to his assembly of data from a number of different sources, including ancient tree rings and earth core samples, as a “trick.” Critics pounced on the term and said it was evidence that Dr. Mann and other scientists had manipulated temperature data to support their conclusions.

But the Penn State inquiry board said the term “trick” is used by scientists and mathematicians to refer to an insight that solves a problem. “The so-called ‘trick’ was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field,” the panel said.

The e-mail messages also contained suggestions that Dr. Mann had purposely hidden or destroyed e-mail messages and other information relating to a United Nations climate change report to prevent other scientists from reviewing them.

by Eli Kintisch

A strong energy package approved last year by a key Senate panel is seen as a sweetener for passing a much more controversial cap-and-trade system to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases. That second approach is part of a bill passed by the House of Represntatives last June that is languishing in the Senate. But yesterday President Barack Obama signaled that he might be willing to separate the two issues, which would certainly delay the United States from passing a comprehensive climate bill at least until 2011. The Washington Post covers his remarks during a visit to Nashua, New Hampshire:

"The most controversial aspects of the energy debate that we've been having: the House passed an energy bill and people complained that, 'Well, there's this cap-and-trade thing,'" Obama told the crowd.

"We may be able to separate these things out. And it's conceivable that that's where the Senate ends up," he continued.

Other, more popular parts of the energy bill seek to boost renewable energy such as wind and solar power. Those parts may be easier to pass.

by Eli Kintisch

For the last few years the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been an also-ran among federal science programs. But if NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco gets her way with Congress, the agency will join the front ranks in 2011.

The agency was excluded from the America Competitiveness Initiative (a budget doubling for the physical sciences begun by the Bush Administration) and left with crumbs in the massive 2009 stimulus package. Observers wondered how a new Administration so supportive of environmental science and climate research could ignore an agency intended to be a good steward of the air and sea. (NOAA received a 9% budget increase last year, for example, but its satellite procurement efforts got the biggest share.) The second-rate status for ocean research was all the more ironic given that the president had put a world-renowned marine ecologist in the driver's seat.

But now Lubchenco has made her move, and the agency is poised for a huge investment in science. Yesterday's proposed 14% increase, to $5.5 billion, for the agency as a whole would be the largest increase in NOAA's budget in a decade. Research efforts at the agency get a 7% increase overall, to $522 million; big winners include earth-system modeling, research on marine pathogens, and studies related to ocean acidification. Each reflects priorities that go beyond the agency's bread-and-butter work of regulating fisheries and monitoring weather. Overall, climate work at the Department of Commerce, most of which is at NOAA, would rise by 21% under the new budget.

Lubchenco told reporters early last year that fixing a polar-orbiting, four-satellite observational system to provide military and civilian weather and climate data would be one of the biggest challenges of her time. That failed effort, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System launched 15 years ago, involved the Air Force, NOAA, and NASA. But the program fell 5 years behind schedule and grew $7.5 billion over budget. The solution involves the Pentagon and NOAA essentially taking two satellites each, with NOAA requesting $600 million to pay for its larger role.

The remarkable thing for ocean scientists is that this boost to NOAA's satellite work has not cleaned out NOAA's "wet" work. Between 2005 and 2010 the agency's budget grew by roughly a quarter, but the budget of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences rose by only 8%. "That was the gorilla in the room," says Kevin Wheeler of advocacy organization the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C. "But this time ocean science did pretty well."

by Erik Stokstad

Competitive grants are catching on at two agencies—the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency—that haven't been big investors in such awards in the past.

At USDA, the competitive grants program would get a $167 million boost, rising by 64% to $429 million. "It's a remarkable confirmation of the importance that the president and the secretary place on competitive research," says Roger Beachy, who heads the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the home for extramural funding at USDA. By contrast USDA's grants given via so-called formula funding to universities would remain flat, as would the NIFA overall budget of $1.5 billion. The Agricultural Research Service, which performs intramural research at USDA, would decline $51 million, to $1.2 billion.

[UPDATE: Here's a sharper focus on ARS, courtesy of USDA's Rick Borchelt. He notes that the research portion of the ARS 2011 budget request is $20 million higher than in FY 2010. The agency is requesting $61.5 million to create or expand research initiatives, while eliminating $75 million of unspent funds for facilities.]

Advocates of agricultural research are focusing on the big win of the day for competitive research. "It's pretty incredible number," says Karl Glasener, who is based in Washington, D.C., directs science policy for the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America. He attributes the jump to the efforts of Rajiv Shah, who oversaw USDA research until he was sworn in as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development last month. Glasener is also encouraged that the president's science adviser, John Holdren, mentioned NIFA in a White House briefing. "We've never had energy like this in the agricultural sciences," Glasener says. "I don't recall a science adviser ever mentioning agriculture in a budget briefing."