Ocean Phytoplankton Apocalypse - Perhaps Not
...So good news: No massive decline in ocean phytoplankton after all. Over at his excellent New York Times blog, Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin takes readers through the whole saga (really folks, please go read it). Revkin points out that this is how science is supposed work - claims are made, challenged, defended, rechallenged, with the process leading us ever closer to actually describing reality.

However, how the study was reported in the mainstream press illustrates a big problem with journalism. Alarming studies get reported prominently and at length, but when they are later called into question, the mainstream press reports the refutations with a buried paragraph, if that much. Googling around, this seems to be happening in this case. Of course, the problem is that, for reasons of evolutionary psychology, only bad news is actually news to most editors and consumers....

...Setting aside the thorough-going politicization of climate science (assuming that's possible), I believe that a more general problem with peer-review is that studies that tend to confirm the dominant narrative in a science have a much easier time getting through the peer-review seive than those that challenge it. And this is especially so, if the claimed results are strikingly novel, e.g., phytoplankton declining massively....