"What We Know" Climate Report From Leading Science Organization Seeks to Persuade Citizens. #FAIL.

The “What We Know” report about climate change issued today by the august American Association for the Advancement of Science is intended to persuade ordinary people that our climate really is changing, we’re largely responsible, and we need to do something about it. Soon.

The report features clear, straight-forward language without overly complex and opaque scientific jargon.

And as the black non-image at the top of this ImaGeo post symbolizes, there is another thing that the report lacks as well: imagery.

In fact, there is not a single image in the report — not one visualization to help us understand what’s happening to our world, not a single photograph to dramatize the impact of climate change on people, not even one little graphic to show a trend in, oh, I don’t know, temperature maybe.

Okay, I exaggerate just a little. The title page does have one ambiguous photograph of someone using a surveying instrument on some ice sheet somewhere, for what reason God only knows.

And true, the “What We Know” web site includes, in addition to the report, a number of videos. One is actually mildly entertaining and effective. It features a mountain biker racing down a trail to symbolize the perilous path ahead and the need to slow down. (Our carbon emissions, of course.)

But the rest consist of talking heads (scientists telling us what they know) intercut with what broadcast journalists call “B-roll” — time lapse video of cars, smoke pouring out of stacks, a little snippet of water pouring into the New York City subway system during Hurricane Sandy —  you get the idea.

So here’s some unsolicited advice to the creators of “What We Know” from someone who thinks visual communication is actually an incredibly powerful way to communicate complex information and also connect with the heart as well as the mind: Cliché B-roll can’t change the fact that a talking head is still a talking head. Nor will people necessarily listen, let alone understand or care, simply because those talking heads happen to be scientists.

I’ve never written a post like this here at ImaGeo. I felt compelled to do it because I’m simply dumbfounded that one of the leading scientific organizations in the world decided to launch a public persuasion campaign that lacks one of the most important ways that humans beings can be persuaded: through visual communication.

Is the AAAS not aware that imagery can convey emotion far more powerfully than the written or spoken word, no matter how clear, concise, and free of jargon those words may be? Do they not know that visuals provide an incredible capacity to tell compelling, persuasive stories? Can it possibly be that they haven’t heard about the synergy made possible by the use of words and images together?

And did they not bother to read the literature on visual communication and persuasion?

To offer just one example: “Visual Persuasion,” which appeared in the journal Communication Research Trends in 1999. Here’s a relevant snippet:

…visual images in persuasive messages reduce the information processing burden, make a message more attention-getting, and reinforce message arguments. Also, it is believed that visual images have the superiority in memory over words.

If any of the people responsible for the “What We Know” report read this post, I have a suggestion for you: Try “Google.” It can be really helpful. With the search terms “visual communication and persuasion” you’ll find a lot of helpful tips there for your next campaign.

View the original article here

Scientists Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants

An ant is not exactly the picture you see in the dictionary next to “rule-breaker.” Colonial ants work together to collect food and generally act in the best interest of the group. Yet certain enormous ants in South America break a basic rule in biology: as you move up the food chain, you should find a smaller group of organisms at each step. These ants are top predators that take up far more than their fair share of space. To find out what their secret is, scientists staked out the forest floor.

“We’re all ant nerds,” says Chad Tillberg, a biologist at Linfield College in Oregon, of himself and his coauthors. So when they started visiting a park in northeastern Argentina and noticed what seemed like a whole lot of Dinoponera australis ants, they thought it might be an illusion created by their excitement. Plus, Tillberg points out, “Dinoponera are huge.” The seven species in this genus, which can be more than an inch long, are some of the largest ants in the world.

There are many plentiful bugs in the rainforest, of course. But an abundance of this particular ant—which locals call hormiga tigre, the “tiger ant”—demands an explanation. That’s because the species is known as a top predator of the soil. Other champion carnivores—like, say, an actual tiger—are rare, compared to the things they eat.

To see why, imagine that in a given area, you could gather every individual plant or animal of one species and pile it onto a huge scale. Usually, as you moved up a food chain, each group of living things would tip the scales less. It takes a large mass of plants to feed a moderate mass of herbivores, which can satisfy a smaller mass of carnivores. If the animals are bulky, it will take fewer of them to make up their species’ allotted weight on the scale. Dinoponera australis ants are both hefty and high up on the food chain—so something about them must be out of the ordinary.

Maybe, for a start, they’re not as abundant as they seem. To find out, “we started mapping and digging up colonies,” Tillberg says. First the researchers found ant nests by spotting ants on the park trail and following them home. (He notes that this type of research would be harder if the ants weren’t “so enormous.”) Within three plots of land, they marked the location of each nest and calculated how close the ants lived to their neighbors. They also left “pitfall” traps—like buckets for bugs to stumble into—along other trails in the area.

They found that D. australis ants aren’t equally dense everywhere in the rainforest. But within the study plots, there were lots and lots of them—about 180 underground nests per hectare (a hectare is about two and a half acres), holding almost 8,000 ants. Each ant weighs about 320 milligrams. That means the “biomass” of these animals (their total on that huge imaginary scale) is more than 2,500 grams, or 5.5 pounds, per hectare. That’s at least four times the biomass of other predatory rainforest ants.

The ants were as abundant as they’d seemed. But could they be lower on the food chain than scientists thought—not truly the tigers of the soil? To find out, the researchers stole the food from the jaws of worker ants returning to their nests. Almost all of it was the bodies of other insects they’d hunted. “They weren’t secretly collecting lots of nectar or honeydew,” Tillberg says.

Another way to find out where an animal sits on a food chain is to chemically analyze its body. Heavy nitrogen isotopes start out in plants at the bottom of the food chain, then accumulate in the bodies of animals that eat them, and build up even more in animals that eat those animals, and so on. The researchers measured nitrogen isotopes in the ants’ bodies and compared them to other insects and food items around them. This confirmed the status of la hormiga tigre: not only were these ants top predators, but they probably ate other predatory insects as well.

D. australis is just what it seems—a huge, predatory ant that roams the rainforest in huge numbers. How does it break the biomass rule? Taking one more stab at solving the mystery, Tillberg and his coauthors used paint to make distinguishing marks on the backs of ants. Then they staked out the ants’ nests. “We were marking workers and watching nest entrances for hours and hours every day,” Tillberg says. Each time an ant left the nest, the researchers recorded where it went.

They saw that most ants stuck to a single hunting route. Rather than roaming freely, each ant set out on the same path whenever it looked for food.

This behavior may make the whole ant colony more efficient. “Different individuals head in different directions from each other,” Tillberg says, “so on the whole, the entire surrounding habitat of a nest gets searched.”

There may be other factors that let D. australis ants take up so much room in the forest—a lack of competition from other predators, for example, maybe because other species can’t thrive in this disturbed habitat. But Tillberg says he thinks their hunting efficiency is “at least part of the story explaining their abundance.” It seems that if you want to take over the forest floor, it pays to be efficient as well as ruthless.

Image: by Alex Wild (via Wikimedia Commons)

Tillberg, C., Edmonds, B., Freauff, A., Hanisch, P., Paris, C., Smith, C., Tsutsui, N., Wills, B., Wittman, S., & Suarez, A. (2014). Foraging Ecology of the Tropical Giant Hunting Ant (Hymenoptera Formicidae)-Evaluating Mechanisms for High Abundance. Biotropica, 46 (2), 229-237 DOI: 10.1111/btp.12097

View the original article here

Can The Doppler Effect Help You Beat The Speed Camera?

The shortest answer is no.

Thanks to the curiosities of physics, there is this paradoxical yet plausible notion that you could beat a camera meant to photograph you speeding by going so fast that it won’t pick you up. In theory there is some speed at which the very light reflected off of your car will become undetectable to the human eye. But how fast would that be?

Don’t have time to read? Listen to the whole post below!

When you hear an ambulance headed your way, the blaring sirens increase in pitch* until the vehicle reaches you, and the pitch slides back down as it passes. This is “Doppler Effect.” Sound waves traveling in the same direction can “bunch up,” making them seem at a higher pitch. The same thing can happen with light. Edwin Hubble, the astronomer whose name christened the Hubble Telescope, discovered that galaxies moving away from us had light waves that were stretching apart. Like a fading sound, the light from the galaxies was getting redder—being “red shifted.” What happens as the galaxies gallop away from us means that if you were to go fast enough, there is some point were the light reflecting off your car would be red-shifted below human (or camera) detection.

In a paper from the Journal of Physics Special Topics, authors Worthy, Garner, and Taylor-Ashley do the Doppler number crunching. They assumed that a car would be moving away from the camera when the photo was taken, that the average license plate reflects basically yellow light, and that a license plate is undetectable when the light is red-shifted below 430 terahertz—the human limit.

Using those values and this equation, the authors concluded that the minimum velocity to beat the speed camera with the Doppler Effect is about 0.178c, or 18 percent the speed of light. Unfortunately for your outstanding tickets, even in the fastest supercar ever built, you have no hope of getting to this speed. 18 percent the speed of light is over 33,000 miles per second—if you crashed your car at this speed you would be obliterated by 10 times more energy than was released by the supervolcano Krakatoa.

So no, you can’t red-shift your way out of a ticket. But you could still speed your way out of one.

The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters actually established that you could outrun the speed camera. So long as you passed the camera at 300 miles per hour or more, you would be far outside of the camera’s range as the photo snapped. If you want to break the law but now the laws of physics, invest in a dragster.

–

More Geeky Science:

What The Nerdiest Chart of Sci-Fi Ships Says About Our Dreams of Space

Excerpts From The Mad Scientist’s Handbook: So You’re Ready to Vaporize a Human

The Coroner Report: Weekend at Bernie’s

Getting the God of Thunder’s Science Straight

What Really Happens When Lightning Strikes Sand: The Science Behind a Viral Photo

–

Image Credit: Roads At Night: She’s Gone by Cayusa on Flickr

Paper Link: Red-Shifted Speed Cameras

Reference: Worthy, D., Garner, R., Gregory, J., & Taylor-Ashley, J. (2013, November 19). Red-shifted Speed Cameras. Journal of Physics Special Topics, 1-2.

*An earlier version of this post incorrectly linked the Doppler Effect to changes in amplitude, not pitch.

View the original article here

About that Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted:

NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB

— Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014

If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I want to know more about that.

Click.

The piece cuts to the chase in the opener:

A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

What follows is a straightforward summary of the paper, which the Guardian writer tells us has been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal called Ecological Economics.

I’m going to discuss the actual paper separately in the second part of this post. First, let’s talk about the Guardian write-up, its author, and how his piece went global, the latter of which is a sad commentary on journalism today.

Technically, the story appears on a blog in the environment section of the Guardian. The blog’s host is Nafeez Ahmed, who in his Guardian bio describes himself as “a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.”

Since joining the Guardian’s blogging network in 2013, Ahmed has carved out what I would call the doomsday beat. He highlights individuals and academic papers that reinforce the thesis of his 2011 documentary, “The Crisis of Civilization,” which is about

how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

In a post last year, I briefly mentioned him, saying, “If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse, Ahmed is your guy.” Understandably, he didn’t appreciate this backhanded compliment.

In fairness to him, there is a seemingly never-ending supply of journal papers with apocalyptic themes to choose from.

A good example, of course, is the collapse paper he disingenuously hyped as being “NASA-sponsored.” (You’ll soon understand why that was deceptive.) Evidently, Ahmed  was shown the paper by its authors ahead of publication, which he turned into an article/post with this headline:

Nasa-funded study: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Ahmed thinks of himself as a journalist, so he writes many of his blog posts in a superficial news story format. He even refers to some of his posts as “exclusives,” which is how he characterized his write-up on the supposedly funded NASA study. Journalistic gloss, however, doesn’t mask fundamental journalistic shortcomings.

In the collapse paper Ahmed wrote about last week, he explains how the authors came to their conclusions, sprinkling in quotes from the paper. But he provides no reaction to the study from independent experts. If he questioned the three co-authors themselves, you wouldn’t know, since they are not quoted in his piece. To Ahmed, getting an exclusive apparently means not having to do any actual reporting.

On twitter, Ahmed was challenged to respond to rebuttals of the study he uncritically accepted. He demurred: “I’m just the reporter- ask the study authors.”

Chew on that for a second.

Ahmed’s summary of the soon-to-be published Ecological Economics paper at his Guardian blog–which he thought of as a big scoop–wouldn’t pass Journalism 101. Nonetheless, it was picked up by many other outlets around the world and became a sensation on social media. He was thrilled:

My NASA study exclusive has not just gone viral, it’s gone global and is making headlines in national newspapers all over

— Nafeez Ahmed (@NafeezAhmed) March 17, 2014

Naturally, the Daily Mail jumped all over it, as did the New York Post, which headlined its piece, “NASA Predicts the End of Western Civilization.”

Other headlines included: The National Journal: “Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse”; The Times of India: “NASA-Funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades”; and Popular Science: “NASA-Sponsored Study Warns of Possible Collapse of Civilization.”

Do you notice anything familiar about those headlines? NASA did and was pretty steamed. It recently issued a statement saying that the collapse paper

was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions.

So much for the sexy NASA angle that was undoubtedly a big selling point. Not that it matters anymore. The marginal NASA connection was played up and successfully dangled as click bait. Mission Accomplished, Guardian editors and Ahmed.

So what else fell through the cracks on this story? Well, if you bother to read through all the herd-like media coverage of the study, you’ll notice that every piece essentially duplicates what the Guardian published. As far as I can tell, all the other similarly sensationalist articles did was reproduce or restate what appeared in the Guardian. And we know how much reporting went into that big exclusive!

Nobody from these other outlets talked to the study’s authors or solicited opinion from independent experts. Everyone willingly ceded the story to the Guardian. After teasing its readers with a few excerpts, PopSci gushed:

You should really head over to the Guardian for the full story; it’s worth reading.

This was not an isolated sentiment. Many people retweeted the story, including journalists in my twitter feed. There were a couple of skeptical outliers, some folks who know about mathematical models and were incredulous after reading both the study and the Guardian story. One is Robert Wilson, a UK Mathematical Ecology PhD Student who wrote up his impressions at his personal blog. Another is the U.S. science journalist David Appell, who offered his thoughts on the study’s model and (like Wilson) also took note of Ahmed’s conspiracy theorist leanings.

The huge, uncritical pick-up of the Guardian story perturbed me. Why was everyone so quick and seemingly content to parrot a story that contained no actual reporting? After all, it was just a blogger’s interpretive summary of an unpublished journal paper. Why didn’t anyone reach out to the paper’s authors or bother to call a few sources to examine the merits of the study?

So I thought I’d fill that journalistic vacuum myself. In part two of this post, I’ll report what the authors of the paper had to say after I contacted them, and what numerous, highly regarded experts think of their study. This is completed. I’m just proofing the material and breaking it out into a separate post.

Check back in several hours for part two.

View the original article here

How Sea Snakes Survive Without Water to Drink

Earth is awfully wet: about 70 percent of the planet is covered by deep, blue expanses of water. But to ocean-faring sea snakes, their briny habitat is an oxymoron: Home is a vast aquatic desert.

Creatures like the sea snake were thought to live completely independent of fresh water, by quenching their thirsts through some type of saltwater adaptation like other marine animals. But now researchers have discovered that one species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, in fact relies on rainfalls for drinking water, and in between rains is able to make do in an extreme state of dehydration.

Scientists have recently started questioning whether marine vertebrates, such as the sea snake, truly live independently of fresh water. Several species of animals, including sea turtles, bony fishes, dolphins and whales developed specialized adaptations to thrive in saltwater. For example, birds and some marine reptiles have salt glands to excrete excess salts from the water they drink. 

It was commonly believed that sea snakes adapted to their environment in a similar fashion. But several studies published within the past few years have shown a link between fresh water availability and the distribution of sea snake populations. The only sources of fresh water in the open sea are narrow bands of freshwater lenses that are known to form on the surface of the ocean following heavy rainfalls. Since sea snake populations are often concentrated around these bands of freshwater, researchers believed they depend on the water for survival.

If this was true, it must mean that sea snakes can survive extreme dehydration. To see if this was indeed the case, researchers captured 500 yellow-bellied sea snakes on the Guanacaste coast off of Costa Rica. They wanted to test if the snakes would drink fresh water immediately following capture. If the snake was thirsty, it was a good sign that it was also dehydrated.

The researchers dried the snakes off, weighed them and measured them before giving them fresh water to drink. They found that snakes tended to drink more following periods of low rainfall, and the lighter they were (and thus the more dehydrated they were), the more they drank.

Their findings show that sea snakes live in a dehydrated state for several months at a time, due to the length of the dry season on the Guanacaste coast (December through May or June). The researchers published their results this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The results show both the tenacity and fragility of yellow-bellied sea snakes, and perhaps other marine snakes. Dehydration at sea could be a unique challenge to marine vertebrates like the sea snake, and may explain their rapidly declining populations in some parts of the world.

Further study of these thirsty reptiles could help scientists determine how changing precipitation patterns in tropical oceans will impact these animals.

Photo credit: RobHamm/Shutterstock

View the original article here

Humans Made Conchs Shrink (And One Kid Saw It Coming)

The classic, swirling shell of a conch helps protect it from hungry birds and sea creatures, but when a human decides to pluck one from shallow water and boil it for supper, there’s not much the animal can do. Its only defense is to evolve, as a species, to be smaller and less appealing to people. That’s what conchs in the Caribbean have done—today’s humans get 40 percent less food out of a conch than our ancestors did. But that’s not so surprising to a 12-year-old girl who described almost the same thing in a piece of fiction.

To explain the fictional version, I have to insert myself into this story—hello! In my day job I edit a kids’ science magazine called Muse. We recently ran a contest that asked readers to write a brief, made-up story in the style of the magazine’s science news page. (The results were sometimes hilarious. “Too Much Coffee Makes Adults Feel Young” was an office favorite.)

One winner of this contest was a 12-year-old named Madeline. Her submission was about a new species, the “broken-shelled hermit snail” (Mendacious latibulum), discovered on the beaches of North America. It had gone undetected until now, the story went, by evolving a mangled-looking shell that kept human collectors away.

“She is almost certainly right in theory,” says Aaron O’Dea, a marine historical ecologist and paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. As long as the mollusk were still alive while on the beach and vulnerable to collection, evolving an ugly shell could help it survive. O’Dea knows all about mollusks evolving to avoid humans; he recently discovered that the West Indian fighting conch (Strombus pugilis) has done exactly that.

O’Dea and his coauthors studied conchs living on the Caribbean side of Panama. To see how the animals had changed over time, they gathered shells from three general time periods.

The first was modern shells, which they collected by snorkeling, visiting tourist shops where the shells are sold as souvenirs, and sampling trash piles left by locals who eat the animals. (People sometimes denied gathering conchs for food, even when heaps of shells under their homes told a different story. The authors explain that there’s a regional stigma around eating the conch, nicknamed el raton del mar or “the sea mouse.” In Brazil, though, it’s sold as an aphrodisiac. Earmuffs, Madeline.)

Prehistoric conch shells, from humans’ earlier days living in the region, came from an archaeological site with material dating from around 690 to 1410 AD. In these days humans probably hunted the conch as they do today, wading into the shallows whenever they needed some for dinner. Finally the authors looked at local fossils, about 7,000 years old, to see conchs that had never met a human.

The researchers measured the length and width of the shells, as well as the thickness of each shell’s “lip,” the part overhanging the opening. O’Dea explains that this reveals whether a conch is a juvenile or an adult. When they’re young, conchs hide under the sand, slowly growing the spiky whorls of their shells. When they’ve stopped growing and are ready to emerge and find a mate, conchs develop the final portion of their shell, a thickened lip that makes it harder for predators to get inside.

By measuring the lip thickness of each shell, the scientists could tell whether a conch was mature. They found that over time, conchs have grown smaller and begun reaching maturity at a smaller size. The shells shrank between the 7,000-year-old fossils and the 1,500-year-old archaeological samples, and again between the archaeological samples and today. For as long as humans have been gathering conch, we’ve been driving their evolution.

“I had seen the conch in the field and noticed size differences,” O’Dea says, “but when I put it together empirically it was astounding!” Using each shell’s dimensions to estimate the size of the animal inside, he found that ancient conchs contained a “truly impressive” two-thirds more meat than modern ones. Today’s humans need more animals to make a meal than their ancestors did.

Conch sizes varied somewhat among the five modern areas the researchers sampled. The smallest mature shells came from a reef surrounded by homes with shell piles. Another group of small conchs came from a site that sells many shells to tourists. The largest conchs lived in a lagoon where no one is known to eat them. Other larger shells were found at a site surrounded by humans who prefer farmed meat to shellfish, and another site that’s been protected in recent years by scientists.

This shows that the conchs may be able to bounce back in size when people hunt them less. Still, none of these populations was as large as the ancient conchs. O’Dea says it’s not clear whether shrinking has hurt the species as a whole. Conchs may have initially evolved to be large, he speculates, because it helps them win fights for mates. He hopes to find the answer by comparing the fitness of larger and smaller conchs.

O’Dea says that Madeline’s broken-shelled snail story may be coming true in other ways. For example, “There is evidence that the desire for big, impressive antlers for trophies by deer hunters has led to the evolution of less impressive, or less ‘beautiful,’ antlers,” he says. “This is exactly what this girl is talking about, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see fish or anything else that is selected against by humans for a certain trait follow suit.”

I tracked down Madeline herself to tell her the story of the fighting conch. She wrote back to say, “It’s really cool that something similar to what I thought might be plausible as an adaptation really works.”

Madeline says it’s funny that humans can alter the evolution of a whole species without knowing it. But given how easily we reshaped the conch, she’s more concerned about how many other, still-unseen effects we’re having on the world. Focusing on the single example of the conch while ignoring the rest, she says, “would be making a mountain out of a mole-usk hill.”

Image: by Loren Sztajer (via Flickr)

O’Dea, A., Shaffer, M., Doughty, D., Wake, T., & Rodriguez, F. (2014). Evidence of size-selective evolution in the fighting conch from prehistoric subsistence harvesting Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281 (1782), 20140159-20140159 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0159

View the original article here

About that Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization

The end of the world, like everything worth knowing these days, will be tweeted:

NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? | Nafeez Ahmed http://t.co/nWqOcD3UkB

— Guardian Environment (@guardianeco) March 14, 2014

If a study with the imprimatur of a major U.S. government agency thinks civilization may soon be destined to fall apart, I want to know more about that.

Click.

The piece cuts to the chase in the opener:

A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

What follows is a straightforward summary of the paper, which the Guardian writer tells us has been accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal called Ecological Economics.

I’m going to discuss the actual paper separately in the second part of this post. First, let’s talk about the Guardian write-up, its author, and how his piece went global, the latter of which is a sad commentary on journalism today.

Technically, the story appears on a blog in the environment section of the Guardian. The blog’s host is Nafeez Ahmed, who in his Guardian bio describes himself as “a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar.”

Since joining the Guardian’s blogging network in 2013, Ahmed has carved out what I would call the doomsday beat. He highlights individuals and academic papers that reinforce the thesis of his 2011 documentary, “The Crisis of Civilization,” which is about

how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

In a post last year, I briefly mentioned him, saying, “If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse, Ahmed is your guy.” Understandably, he didn’t appreciate this backhanded compliment.

In fairness to him, there is a seemingly never-ending supply of journal papers with apocalyptic themes to choose from.

A good example, of course, is the collapse paper he disingenuously hyped as being “NASA-sponsored.” (You’ll soon understand why that was deceptive.) Evidently, Ahmed  was shown the paper by its authors ahead of publication, which he turned into an article/post with this headline:

Nasa-funded study: Industrial civilization headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?

Ahmed thinks of himself as a journalist, so he writes many of his blog posts in a superficial news story format. He even refers to some of his posts as “exclusives,” which is how he characterized his write-up on the supposedly funded NASA study. Journalistic gloss, however, doesn’t mask fundamental journalistic shortcomings.

In the collapse paper Ahmed wrote about last week, he explains how the authors came to their conclusions, sprinkling in quotes from the paper. But he provides no reaction to the study from independent experts. If he questioned the three co-authors themselves, you wouldn’t know, since they are not quoted in his piece. To Ahmed, getting an exclusive apparently means not having to do any actual reporting.

On twitter, Ahmed was challenged to respond to rebuttals of the study he uncritically accepted. He demurred: “I’m just the reporter- ask the study authors.”

Chew on that for a second.

Ahmed’s summary of the soon-to-be published Ecological Economics paper at his Guardian blog–which he thought of as a big scoop–wouldn’t pass Journalism 101. Nonetheless, it was picked up by many other outlets around the world and became a sensation on social media. He was thrilled:

My NASA study exclusive has not just gone viral, it’s gone global and is making headlines in national newspapers all over

— Nafeez Ahmed (@NafeezAhmed) March 17, 2014

Naturally, the Daily Mail jumped all over it, as did the New York Post, which headlined its piece, “NASA Predicts the End of Western Civilization.”

Other headlines included: The National Journal: “Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse”; The Times of India: “NASA-Funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades”; and Popular Science: “NASA-Sponsored Study Warns of Possible Collapse of Civilization.”

Do you notice anything familiar about those headlines? NASA did and was pretty steamed. It recently issued a statement saying that the collapse paper

was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions.

So much for the sexy NASA angle that was undoubtedly a big selling point. Not that it matters anymore. The marginal NASA connection was played up and successfully dangled as click bait. Mission Accomplished, Guardian editors and Ahmed.

So what else fell through the cracks on this story? Well, if you bother to read through all the herd-like media coverage of the study, you’ll notice that every piece essentially duplicates what the Guardian published. As far as I can tell, all the other similarly sensationalist articles did was reproduce or restate what appeared in the Guardian. And we know how much reporting went into that big exclusive!

Nobody from these other outlets talked to the study’s authors or solicited opinion from independent experts. Everyone willingly ceded the story to the Guardian. After teasing its readers with a few excerpts, PopSci gushed:

You should really head over to the Guardian for the full story; it’s worth reading.

This was not an isolated sentiment. Many people retweeted the story, including journalists in my twitter feed. There were a couple of skeptical outliers, some folks who know about mathematical models and were incredulous after reading both the study and the Guardian story. One is Robert Wilson, a UK Mathematical Ecology PhD Student who wrote up his impressions at his personal blog. Another is the U.S. science journalist David Appell, who offered his thoughts on the study’s model and (like Wilson) also took note of Ahmed’s conspiracy theorist leanings.

The huge, uncritical pick-up of the Guardian story perturbed me. Why was everyone so quick and seemingly content to parrot a story that contained no actual reporting? After all, it was just a blogger’s interpretive summary of an unpublished journal paper. Why didn’t anyone reach out to the paper’s authors or bother to call a few sources to examine the merits of the study?

So I thought I’d fill that journalistic vacuum myself. In part two of this post, I’ll report what the authors of the paper had to say after I contacted them, and what numerous, highly regarded experts think of their study. This is completed. I’m just proofing the material and breaking it out into a separate post.

Check back in several hours for part two.

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