Har dee har all you Midwesterners and East Coasters, it's gonna be 80 degree in Northern California today. But the news says yet ANOTHER blizzard lineup is marching across the US mid-section heading toward New England. Dang those Arctic jetstreams that don't stick to the Arctic like they used to! They're wandering south with a load of frigid air and when they wander back up there they haul warmer air north, accelerating this season's melt-off of the ice pack. Gadzooks, we really are getting a whole new planet.

   So that led to a search for some snow news. First up is a story that got a good deal of coverage. It also offers a lesson in how somebody else's rewrite might really mess with your reporting.

 1) The Adelies of Beaufort Island.

   A paper in PLOS One reports that not far from McMurdo Station in Antarctica's Ross Sea a colony of Adelie Penguins has grown substantially in recent years. The paper's theme is that, in some places, climate change has so far been a distinct plus for some creatures and these birds appear to be among them.

   It has gotten considerable coverage, with a roundup coming shortly. First however, among them was a a one-minute news summary at one major outlet as both podcast and text:

• Scientific American - David Biello: Penguin Species Could Be Climate Winner ; Biello is an experienced writer but, again, was limited to what he could say in a minute. The text at this url sounds like verbatim from the audiocast. But it says that indeed one colony of this particular penguin species is thriving as glacial retreat exposes more of the rocky sort of shore that Adelies prefer. While the hed is over-general, the text makes clear that this is one nesting site for the species that is doing gangbuster business in nestling production, not the whole species.

 At another well-known site, Biello's piece is cited as the only source of a lark of a rewrite - by a reporter having some fun with it and alas missing some of the facts.

• Grist - Sarah Miller: Finally, a positive consequence of climate change: More penguins! ; Egad. Some facts are in common. And this is just a toss-off by a general interest rewriter who might as easily be spicing up some celebrity gossip. But jeez. First, the paper is about the benefit so far, the winners so far, not about a species that has not only done well but will continue to do so. Second, the story notes that rocky beaches are getting more common in the southern Ross sea and ascribes its cause this way: "And now that sea levels are falling..." which is back-asswards. One supposes the writer could know her gravitational field theory and calculates that the loss of glacial mass might alter the geoid enough to actually reduce sea level locally in the Antarctic even while it's rising on average, but that seems unlikely. More likely she missed the part in both the paper and Biello's account saying that retreating glacial margins are widening the rocky beaches.

   Again, Biello had no room for expansive context. One minute read, remember, for this featurette. The fact is that Adelies' range is shifting. Their population at its northern limit, along the Antarctic Peninsula, is getting hammered by climate change. Second, the new study looks at the southernmost limit of the range and it can't get any more southern because Antarctica proper prevents further retreat. So if climate keeps changing chances seem high that these birds could get pinched out of existence. And finally it's not just climate change helping out the Ross Sea Adelies. The paper notes that commerical fishing in the general area is taking a lot of Antarctic toothfish. With those big predators being netted up, smaller fish that the penguins eat might be thriving, providing more chow for the colonies.

    Finally, if the Grist reporter had taken a moment to look for other, primary media coverage of this news,  there would have been more to go on.

Other stories:

• Smithsonian (blog) Colin Schultz: Climate Change Means More Adelie Penguins ; Hed's poor, story has it right. Mentions their travails to the north on the peninsula. And makes crystal clear why the rocky beaches are growing and it's not falling sea level.
• ABC (Australia) Simon Lauder: Climate change a win for one Antarctic penguin ; Hed again too general, but text is a good Q&A with the study's lead author.
• New Zealand Herald/AAP: Penguins adapt to warm climate ; I'm going into deep quibble here, again with the hed. Adelies are among the most stubborn, least adaptable penguins or birds of any kind on the planet. They need food, will feed only neE sea ice, rocky beaches, and once they've decided to nest somewhere they TEND TO stick to it even when the climate changes and their nests get wet or snowed-under. In this case, the climate changed to better fit the animals' existing and bullheaded lifestyle. Just ask Bill Fraser (see New Yorker profile).

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Minnesota Press Release ; PLOS One paper ;

2) Utah Scientists Photograph Snowflakes in Flight and they don't look like no paper doilie cutout things, hardly ever!

  This is a shorty, and the news is best read in the press release. Time lapse super-fast-shutter photos of falling snowflakes shows they rarely have the classic six-sided beauty we all read about in gradeschool. Most are mushy, freaky lumps. A few look pretty good. A few gems do have symmetry. The remaining fact to keep in one's head: no two look alike.

Stories:

• Toronto Star - Curtis Rush: 3-D camera captures snowflakes in freefall ;

Grist for the Mill: University of Utah Press Release ;

3) Glacier Javelins! For Science!!

• BBC - Jonathan Amos - Science 'javelins' spear Pine Island Glacier ; I love this story. Nothing really astonishing here, but it does provide a sense of the nitty gritty hardware one needs to really look at a moving glacier without risking death by crevasse.