Water and ice at the bottom of the Antarctic Ice Sheet

The uncertainty of science: Unexpectedly large amounts of flowing water and refrozen ice found at the bottom of the Antarctic icecap. Key quote:

It’s too early to know whether this new finding means that global warming will melt ice sheets slower or faster than scientists have predicted. But the work does suggest that current models of ice sheet dynamics are missing a huge factor, said glaciologist Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas, Austin. “The take-home message of this work is that [the bottom of ice sheets] can no longer be ignored” in the models, he says.

More press release journalism,
this time about sunspots

Did you hear the news? Scientists have solved the mystery of the missing sunspots!

You didn’t? Well, here’s some headlines and stories that surely prove it:

The trouble is that every one of these headlines is 100 percent wrong. The research, based on computer models, only found that when the plasma flow from the equator to the poles beneath the Sun’s surface slows down, the number of sunspots declines.
» Read more

Traffic and more roads

Puncturing the myth that more roads mean more congestion Key quote:

Read enough of these studies and you get a sense that much of the induced-demand hubbub is really a sub rosa extension of the war on the suburbs: Stop highway expansion and you can make life miserable enough for the minivan-driving masses that they’ll move out of their gauche “urban-fringe developments” and back to high-density metropolitan cores, where they belong.

In reading the full essay, I was struck by how much the scientific campaign against road construction reminded me of climategate.

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