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MangaGamer To Publish “Study Abroad” Visual Novel, Hope To Expand Genre

By Ishaan . July 7, 2010 . 4:01pm

Anime Expo was an important avenue for visual novel announcements this year. While JAST USA announced newly-acquired title, Tenkuu no Yumina, for localization at their own panel, MangaGamer’s presentation involved announcements from three different visual novel producers:

Overdrive’s “Study Abroad” Exclusive

The big one was that visual novel developer, Overdrive, known for games such as KiraKira, are in the process of developing a “study abroad” bishoujo game exclusively for release by MangaGamer in western territories. The goal of the game is to offer an interactive guide to Tokyo using the visual novel system.

According to MangaGamer, players, playing the role of a foreign student, would be able to travel around Tokyo, experience the sights and so forth, with the entire scenario developed in a visual novel format, complete with the genre’s trademarks. No artwork or further information has been released as of now, but we’ll keep you posted as more details are rolled out in the coming months.

Moving on to upcoming projects, DearDrops, also by Overdrive, has been officially licensed by MangaGamer, alongside Da Capo II and Da Capo: Innocent Finale (by Circus, announced last year). Additionally, Overdrive’s newest project, titled Dengeki Strikers, was announced at the panel. While no information on the game was officially revealed, you can probably expect to see this added to MangaGamer’s portfolio down the line as well, given that every other Overdrive game has been published by them.

Age on Entering the Western Market

Best known for PC / Dreamcast / PS2 title, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, developer Age, to the crowd’s delight, voiced their eagerness at the MangaGamer panel, to bring both Kimi ga Nozomu Eien as well as Muv-Luv to the western market, should they be given the chance.

Keep in mind, Age’s presence at MangaGamer’s presentation doesn’t mean MG are going to be licensing their products. The goal of their presentation was primarily to allow Japanese developers to make their voices heard and communicate with their audience. Given Navel’s enthusiasm, it should be interesting to see when and by whom their star franchises are localized.

Navel on the Importance of Fan Support

Perhaps the most direct approach, however, was the one taken on by Navel, known for developing breakout hit, Shuffle! and publishing Soul Link. Age’s message to fans was simple: “If you buy the games, we’ll put out more of them,” alluding to the ongoing piracy problem plaguing PC visual novel sales.

In MangaGamer’s minds, the event, aimed primarily at introducing new games and taking a step forward to help expand the genre, was a success.

“We have all these great game makers who love what they do and share their enjoyment of this industry, and want to see it expand,” head translator John Pickett, said to Siliconera. “So there’s a big hope that fans will come forth and start enjoying them as well. That kind of, ‘we want to share, if you want the product’.”

TAGS: Age, Da Capo II, DearDrops, Dengeki Strikers, MangaGamer, Navel, Overdrive, PC, Visual Novel

Digital Manga Publishing To Publish Original Gungrave Manga

By Ishaan . July 10, 2010 . 4:17pm

Sega and Red Entertainment’s PS2 third-person shooter license is being revived. Following two games and an anime series, the stylish Gungrave, created by Trigun originator, Yasuhiro Nightow, is being adapted into an original manga by Digital Manga Publishing.

Unfortunately, Nightow won’t be contributing to the series’ artwork. The report comes by way of Deb Aoki, manga editor at About.com, who has a quote from DMP on why this is the case.

“We had wanted Nightow to do it, that (would have been) the ideal situation,” explained Fred Lui, VP of Production at DMP. “But because of scheduling, an alternative artist will be used to adapt the story.” Lui added, “The story concept is a long-running series, so chances for multiple volumes are high.”

According Lui, “Gungrave is a story about revenge — following the characters of two life-long friends Brandon Heat and Harry MacDowell as they rise through the ranks of the crime syndicate, Millennion. Brandon Heat is betrayed and killed and later resurrected as the vengeance seeking killing machine named ‘Beyond the Grave’.”

Simultaneously, Convergence Entertainment are developing a live-action Gungrave film for release in 2011. You can read more about the games in this fantastic piece on Hardcore Gaming101.

TAGS: Digital Manga Publishing, Gungrave, Manga, Red Entertainment, Sega

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Music Unites has joined with Rolling Stone magazine this summer to present the “In Tune” concert series featuring unplugged performances by emerging and established bands. Brooklyn-based, critically acclaimed indie veterans The Fiery Furnaces, led by brother and sister duo Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, will kick off the series with an intimate performance this Tuesday overlooking New York City from The Cooper Square Hotel Penthouse. On the road for 12 months, this is the last stop on their tour and the final chance to hear them before they began working on their new album.

“We're honored to have The Fiery Furnaces be part of Music Unites and welcome them to our community,” says Michelle Edgar, founder and executive director. “It's exciting to work with a New York based group that shares the same vision as we do and we're excited to work together and support their charitable endeavors.”

Proceeds from the event benefit Music Unites Youth Choir, made up of children from the city and its five boroughs in partnership with Young Audiences New York. Members practice weekly and are given access to well-known cultural venues for performances and the support they need to follow their dream and form their talent. Music Unites is proud to announce that the first year has been successfully funded for the choir and the organization is hoping to reach its goal of funding it for three years by fall.

“We haven't done a lot of charitable work or fundraisers. When something really special comes along its nice to be able to say yes,” Eleanor says of joining with Music Unites. “The last benefit we did was for Obama before the election so we try to choose carefully. It was hard to say no to this since it's such a great cause.”

Music has always held a special place for the Friedbergers and they have a deep understanding of the importance of choirs. They started Fiery Furnaces in 2000, but were actually involved in music much younger being raised within a musical family. Their 2005 album “Rehearsing My Choir” features their grandmother Olga Sarantos reflecting on her life and interacting with her younger self. “Our grandmother was a choir director of her church for forty years and music was always something that was very normal. It wasn't something reserved for a special occasion. We sang at family holidays. I think it's a really important part of growing up.”

Along with sponsoring a choir, Music Unites also works to keep music education in schools, something that had a deep impact on Eleanor. Despite being four years apart, she and her brother had classes together. “My brother and I both really valued our public school education especially in terms of the music. We were lucky we went to a public school where we had music classes when we were really young from the age of five to sixth grade. We had them every day or three days a week,” she continues, recalling the affect her teacher had on her. “I'll never forget him. He was this old guy who had polio as a child and had a cane and braces on his legs. You would think the kids would be scared of him but we all loved him so much.”

With the Music Unites Youth Choir children are given the opportunity to have this same kind of influence on their lives, helping them develop and grow their skills and give them direction.

“It's a shame that all kids don't have someone like that in their lives who can make music seem fun and not scary, not corny, not–just seem really natural. Our teacher was so encouraging to everyone. I think having a role model like that is really important,” says Eleanor.

Prior to the Fiery Furnaces, Matthew was a special education teacher and incorporated music into his lessons. “My brother's great gift is as a musician so when he worked in Special Ed it came naturally to him to try and use music as a tool for teaching. Some of the kids were nonverbal so music worked to get things across to them. It was a big part of the curriculum.”

Another main focuses of Music Unites is to offer children opportunities for music education, but to engage them in different genres and expose them to the many varieties of music. Eleanor still listens to the music she grew up on, noting memories of Classic Rock Record in Chicago. “I still love Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and The Who and Rolling Stones and all that stuff I've always loved.”

When asked what advice she would give to kids trying to make it in the music industry, Eleanor humbly stated that she thinks they can probably teach adults something. “Things are so confusing right now. Young kids probably have an advantage on us. They are born into this new technology that we knew nothing about. We're trying to get our heads around it still. They're going to be Twittering out of the womb. They're going to be recording on their computers and uploading it instantly to MySpace whereas to us it still feels weird to do that. We're still stuck in the old model of the music industry. I think young people have a lot to teach us in the way that the industry is going.”

Being through management companies in the past and currently without a manager, the brother and sister have even semi-seriously debated hiring a youth. “We were half joking about hiring a really young kid to be our manager, like a 12-year-old. I think that would be really cool. The young kid manager would decide everything from what our album cover would look like to what clothes we were going to wear, what songs we were going to play. Maybe we'll still do that. You have to be on your phone or online constantly. I don't want to do it. I just want to perform and make music.”

The Fiery Furnaces play different from tour to tour, trying to make it a different set. For the last ten shows of the year they have been playing an hour long 30 song medley with quick changes in a way that Eleanor describes to be “like a sporting event.” They days leading up to the charity event, the band had several New York performances at Brooklyn Bowl and Mercury Lounge. They've also moved from using lots of keyboards and synths to just playing guitar, bass, drums, vocals and creating a “rock n' roll dance party.”

For the Music Unites and Rolling Stone event they will be playing an acoustic set. Alexandra Richards will also be performing a DJ set. While Eleanor calls it a “privilege” to play in front of people, the people watching and listening know the privilege is all theirs.

For $10 a month, MOG offers a library of 8 million songs that users can stream over 3G and Wi-Fi, as well as download direct to their phone. It's the first app in this space that's really made us consider the monthly fee in exchange for the ease of access to a massive collection of music. Right now, MOG is offering a 3-day free trial (no credit card required, so it isn't one of those “you need to call to cancel” scams) to tempt users with its vast collection and feature set. And we have to admit, we're tempted.

The app is much like the one we saw at SXSW in March, providing an “all-you-can-eat” service that surpasses competitors with its ability to download any music available on the service for offline play. It's library of 8 million songs – while smaller than Rhapsody's 10 million – is certainly impressive, but immediately showed some gaps and possible bugs on first inspection. For example, when searching for “The Stereo” – a pop-punk group – the app listed a number of their albums alongside those of “Stereo” – a club/dance electronic group. While this is understandable, all of “The Stereo”'s albums were shown as available, but clicking on the “play album” and “download album” buttons did nothing, as it turned out no songs were actually available. Beyond this, initial tests of the catalog had varied results, with some more rare albums showing up and others not.

Two features, we think, really set MOG's mobile offering apart and they are its radio feature and the ability to download songs, albums and even entire discographies to save locally for whenever 3G is iffy or unavailable. The radio feature, which is much like Pandora, streams music according to whatever artist you chose. It has a slider to tune the station between focusing solely on songs from that artist to sampling songs from similar artists to anywhere in between. As for downloads, songs are downloaded as 64 kbps AAC+ unless you turn on the “high quality downloads” in the settings, which selects a 320 kbps MP3 format, but we found the audio of the low quality just fine for some ear buds. Of course, if you actually have some decent headphones or speakers, you may chose otherwise.

The final aspect of MOG mobile is music discovery. MOG offers a few ways to discover new music, from the just-mentioned radio feature to user created playlists – a feature we know many were excited to see with (still unavailable in the U.S.) Spotify. When searching, you can chose the standards – artist, album or song – as well as playlists. It's a great way to find new music that others are listening to. Beyond that, MOG offers its own charts for popular songs, albums and artists, as well as a selection of popular albums, radio stations and playlists.

The $10 service includes both Web and mobile access, meaning you can set up playlists, browse music and interact with the library on the website before letting the app sync everything to your phone. Unless you're really into creating you're own playlists, however, we see little need for the website. And if you find yourself traveling or on-the-go often, MOG mobile seems like a great way to constantly have access to new music. As for the bugs and glitches, we hope to see them fixed up along the way, but for now they don't get in the way too much.

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If you're watching Wimbledon this year, you've surely heard about the “poetry” of a Roger Federer winner or a Serena Williams blast. But this year's tournament has also led to some poetry in the literary sense of the word. It's come from one officially sanctioned source, and another, well, highly unusual one.

I wrote a few weeks back about Matt Harvey, Wimbledon's first “Poet in Residence,” whose job it is to try capture the drama and tradition of England's great tennis event in verse. Harvey has been diligently carrying out the duties of his rather choice position on the so-called Wimblewords portion of the tournament's website.

So far, Harvey has been focused on predictable topics. On Wednesday, he mused about Wimbledon's famous grass courts in a poem called “more than a lawn.”

it's a lawn – just a lawn
but it's more than a lawn
it's a dance floor, a war zone, a platform, a stage
showcase, coliseum, a ring, a fight cage
big top, debating hall, combat arena
goldfish bowl, cauldron, a cliche convener
petri dish, pressure cooker, drama provider
physics laboratory, small hadron collider

The poem includes an endearing shout-out to Wimbledon's head groundskeeper.

just a lawn, made of grass, but a lawn that's possessed
of a singular, unparalleled beauty
and Eddie Seaward expects
every blade of grass to do its duty

Earlier in the week, Harvey cleverly addressed England's on and off love affair with Andy Murray in the poem “one of ours”:

if ever he's brattish
or brutish or skittish
he's Scottish

but if he looks fittish
and his form is hottish
he's British

I think Harvey is doing a fine job, but I was more impressed with the remarkable, spontaneous poetry born out of the liveblogging of Guardian editor Xan Brooks this past Wednesday. Given the job of watching the day's matches and tossing a few e-crumbs to television-deprived tennis fans, Brooks found himself faced with covering the marathon contest between American John Isner and France's Nicolas Mahut. The stunning match–which lasted three days and had a fifth set final score of 70- 68–clearly wore Brooks down. By late Wednesday, he was writing like a reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges as sportswriter.

The website Deadspin compiled some of the highlights. I've excerpted Brooks' most poetic moments:

4:05 Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 … Soon they will sprout beards and their hair will grow down their backs, and their tennis whites will yellow and then rot off their bodies. And still they will stand out there on Court 18, belting aces and listening as the umpire calls the score. Finally, I suppose, one of them will die.

6.25 I'm wondering if maybe an angel will come and set them free. Is this too much to ask? Just one slender angel, with white wings and a wise smile, to tell them that's it's all right, they have suffered enough and that they are now being recalled. The angel could hug them and kiss their brows and invite them to lay their rackets gently on the grass. And then they could all ascend to heaven together. John Isner, Nicolas Mahut and the kind angel that saved them.

Wimbledon should consider adding a second poet in residence position for Brooks (and I mean that sincerely). They could put him up somewhere high in the grandstand. You know, where the crocodiles will not come to menace him.

Matthew Stockman / Getty Images

Harvey, from Totnes in Devon, is a mild-mannered, mischievous 47-year-old performance poet. A huge tennis fan and a regular on Radio 4, he has in the past been in residence at mental health conferences, in prison libraries, and on countless education projects. He loves residences for the “social context” they give to his writing. As he put it, though, this project is different: he’s had more attention paid to his poetry this week than he has had in his whole career to date. He’s been cheek-by-jowl with Grace Jones and Anna Wintour getting a piece of the center court action and observed at close quarters the “ferocity” of Andy Murray, and the technical mastery of Roger Federer, whom he recalls “playing for half an hour, without making a single mistake.” These, he says, are experiences that “will stay with me.”

Harvey may, too, stay with Murray after the taciturn Scot was described thus in One of Ours:

If ever he's brattish,
And brutish and skittish,
He's Scottish.
But if he looks fittish,
And his form is hottish,
He's British.

While until now the closest connection between tennis and poetry has been A Subaltern’s Love Song by John Betjeman, Harvey’s poems have been embraced and appeared in the British papers along with the scores. For all this, when I catch him between appearances on Radio Wimbledon, he says he was very daunted when approached in March.

Initially, his idea was to approach the residency thematically, “writing about the background, not the foreground [should that be forehand?]…writing about strawberries and cream and lawns.” But for all this (and he’s done that too) he’s been drawn into the live drama instead and found himself reacting to events as they happen, whether it’s getting spectators to join in a collective haiku outpouring during the epic John Isner vs. Nicolas Mahut match, or hanging out with the hopeful fans lining up at dawn for day tickets in the West London suburb.

He carries a battery of notebooks for “scribbling” at all times and has been given a spot in an open plan office at the tournament, but finds the best place to concentrate on finishing his poems on his laptop is the local library where there isn’t any distraction.

While there have been poets obsessed with football (for instance, the late Ian Hamilton and Don Paterson, whose first book was titled Nil Nil), there are those who might wonder the extent to which the audience at say a Super Bowl game or indeed the World Cup, might engage with poetry, as opposed to just the score?

That’s beside the point, Harvey cheerfully argues: “With Wimbledon, the scale of the thing is so vast, that it doesn’t really matter if it’s only a tiny percentage of the audience are interested in poetry.” Via Twitter at wimbledonpoet, where he has 312 followers, during the epic record breaking match, he elicited a stream of responses.

Material from:housetr.ru

Now Writers Can Submit Books to the iBookstore

As previously teased, writers can now submit their own books to iBookstore. I can't wait to submit my Jane Austen fan fiction! And neither can Mr. Jean-Luc PicDarcy [iTunes Connect via MacLife]

Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at mark@gizmodo.com.

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Everyone has a book in them, right? Well Barnes & Noble wants to give you the opportunity to push that book in front of a few million people using their PubIt! service.

The new service allows you to upload a document, convert it to epub, and sell it on their B&N reader system, including on the Nook and iPad. It’s coming this summer and is currently accepting sign-ups.

Interestingly, they’re focusing on independent publishers, which suggests that we won’t see too many scrawled treatises on alien mind control in the Carter cabinet or the how the ghost of Jack Ruby is coming to inappropriately touch an older man in Boca Raton.

There will be a “competitive royalty model” but they’re not announcing specifics right now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has a book in them, right? Well Barnes & Noble wants to give you the opportunity to push that book in front of a few million people using their PubIt! service.

The new service allows you to upload a document, convert it to epub, and sell it on their B&N reader system, including on the Nook and iPad. It’s coming this summer and is currently accepting sign-ups.

Interestingly, they’re focusing on independent publishers, which suggests that we won’t see too many scrawled treatises on alien mind control in the Carter cabinet or the how the ghost of Jack Ruby is coming to inappropriately touch an older man in Boca Raton.

There will be a “competitive royalty model” but they’re not announcing specifics right now.

Stuff like this should have old guard publishers making Willa Cather in their pants. If an independent house can get good distribution, albeit electronically, their chance of hitting the “long tail” reader is infinitely higher. Amazon allows for this sort of thing as well – you get an ISBN and sell through their store, often using a print on demand model – and it’s fairly simple to get onto the Kindle store without many hiccups. This doesn’t add much in groundbreaking functionality to B&N but it does put it closer to parity with competitors.

Barnes & Noble Announces PubIt!™,
An Easy-to-Use Digital Publishing and Distribution Platform
for Independent and Self-Publishers

PubIt! Enables Independent Publishers and Self-Published Authors
Access to Sell eBooks and Content to Millions of Readers
on Barnes & Noble’s Online and Digital Platforms

New York, New York – May 19, 2010 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, is extending its deep and longstanding tradition of supporting authors and publishers with PubIt! by Barnes & Noble, an easy and lucrative way for independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through BN.com and the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. The easy-to-use publishing and distribution platform offers qualified independent publishers and authors of self-published works expanded distribution, visibility and protection that only Barnes & Noble can offer.

The announcement marks Barnes & Noble’s latest move to continue to build one of the world’s largest digital catalogs, spanning eBooks, journals, periodicals and other types of reading material. PubIt! titles will be distributed through BN.com and Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore, which currently offers more than one million digital titles to millions of dedicated customers in-store and online.

Independent publishers and writers will appreciate PubIt!’s simple and competitive royalty model and compensation process, the details of which will be available in the coming weeks. Content owners’ intellectual property will be well-protected with Barnes & Noble’s best-in-class digital rights management technology and offered in the industry standard ePub format that allows publishers’ works to be enjoyed by millions of Barnes & Noble customers on hundreds of the most popular computing, mobile and eBook reading devices.

“As a company that has achieved much of its success by building mutually beneficial relationships with publishers and authors, Barnes & Noble’s new PubIt! service represents an exciting evolution and significant opportunity in the digital content arena,” said Theresa Horner, Director, Digital Products, Barnes & Noble. “Barnes & Noble is uniquely positioned to support writers and publishers and bring their exciting digital works to the broadest audience of readers anywhere.”

Whether online or on-the-go, Barnes & Noble customers will have access to PubIt! titles with the opportunity to browse, sample, buy and download the digital content in seconds to their devices with free BN reader software. Using Barnes & Noble’s breakthrough Read In Store™ technology, NOOK™ customers can also browse the complete contents of PubIt! titles while in Barnes & Noble stores.

PubIt! is a convenient one-stop-shop, allowing publishers to get their content in front of consumers for purchase and reading on the most widely adopted mobile devices and software platforms. By following simple steps to upload their content in an industry standard format for electronic titles, content creators can reach consumers on hundreds of devices including: NOOK by Barnes & Noble, PC, Mac®, iPad™, iPhone®, BlackBerry® and others. For more information on free BN eReader software and apps, please visit www.bn.com/ebooks/download-reader.asp.

More information on PubIt!, which will be available this summer, and the benefits of joining Barnes & Noble’s expansive and trusted digital content catalog can be found at www.bn.com/pubit.

Aspiring book authors face two hurdles: Rejection from publishers, and the high cost and hassle of trying to publish a book themselves. Self-publication company FastPencil has come up with a clever new option: Authors who sign up with FastPencil can now publish their books directly into Apple’s iBooks catalog.

“No permission required,” CTO and co-founder Michael Ashley told me in a phone interview. “Anyone can upload a manuscript to FastPencil, click a few buttons, and have access to a few million readers for under two hundred bucks.”

Unlike apps, Apple doesn’t review books individually. FastPencil is an approved publisher, so if FastPencil publishes your book, it goes right into the iBooks catalog.

Self-publishing is often the only route for authors unable to get a New York City publisher to print and market their work. According to book industry reporting service Bowker, in 2009 the publishing industry produced 288,355 titles, down a bit from 2008, while self-published titles shot up 181 percent to 764,448.

But it can easily cost three to five thousand dollars to design a paper book and print a small run. FastPencil already offers a print-to-order service that removes the up-front cost of printing a few hundreds books. The iPad approach is even better, because readers can buy the book, download it, and begin reading immediately.

One more thing: FastPencil neither offers advances nor takes an up-front charge. The company’s business model, beyond the sub-$200 setup price, is a revenue share on individual sales. “We don’t make money until the author makes money,” Ashley put it.

Self-publishing, once associated with “vanity press” companies that seemed designed more to separate aspiring authors from their money than to sell books, is becoming a reputable outlet for serious writing, mostly because of low-cost electronic publishing.

A Wall Street Journal story this morning told how one writer has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com, and how a more successful writer realized he might make more money selling e-books on his own than by getting a division of supergiant Hachette to publish his next novel.

Here’s the gist of how FastPencil works, from the company’s site:

FastPencil users can upload a manuscript to FastPencil.com and invite friends, family and others to read and review the book before publishing. FastPencil design templates turn the manuscript into a professional book with just a few clicks and the publishing wizard adds all the necessary copyright information, ISBN numbers and bar codes. Authors can Print-on-Demand and choose eBook distribution for Kindle, Nook, iPad, PDF and ePub.

Campbell, California-based FastPencil has raised under $1 million in angel funding and has six full-time employees. There are a handful of other companies trying to revolutionize self-publishing like Toronto-based WattPad, an e-book sharing company, and San Francisco-based Vook, which tries to blend books and video. There’s also Lulu, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based company run by Red Hat founder Bob Young.

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There are many reasons why the public doesn’t understand how dire the climate situation is.  We have a well-funded disinformation campaign, generally poor messaging by scientists, and many progressives and environmentalists who have been persuaded to downplay talk of global warming risks.

And we have dreadful coverage by the status quo media.  The media fails in countless ways, but one of its most insidious failings is to play up the occasional study that seems to suggest the threat of human caused global warming has been overblown.

Much as the media has been providing a false balance in its choice of experts to quote, creating the misimpression that there is a much greater debate among climate scientists on key issues than there really is, the media has been providing a false balance in its choice of articles to write about — and then, typically, utterly misframing the results.  Such is the case with the big malaria study in Nature.

In a AAAS presentation this year, William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge”:

New scientific findings are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

But you’d never know that from the coverage by the status quo media.

That’s because most of the media have been suckered by the antiscience crowd (and lame messaging by scientists and others) into believing that the threat of global warming has been oversold when, in fact, the reverse is true.  So they will jump at any chance to push the “contrarian” message that some new scientific study confirms what they believe — even if they have to twist that scientific study and the scientific literature completely backwards to make their case (see, for instance, “Scientists withdraw low-ball estimate of sea level rise — media are confused and anti-science crowd pounces“).

So it is with two new studies on the malaria/climate link — I say ‘two’ because the media has completely ignored one that doesn’t fit into their thesis, and they have spun up the second to make a case that doesn’t exist.

THE NON-HYPE ABOUT CLIMATE AND MALARIA

The overwhelming majority of those who report on the threat of human-caused global warming spend very little of their time on malaria.  For instance, the word never appears in my entire book Hell and High Water and it appears exactly once in Straight Up as an aside (in a satirical essay).  I’ve published more than 2 million words and nearly 5000 posts on Climate Progress and you can search “malaria” and find very little on it.  [The disinformers have scrounged this blog and found about 3 instances where I reprint sentences by written by other people that bother them, which again, proves my point.]

Why?  Many obvious reasons — it’s a second order effect from global warming, and we’ve long had intense global effort to fight the disease.

UPDATE:  Revkin now writes:

The climate blogger Joe Romm and I agree (breaking news): Scientific research and assessments examining the link between human-driven climate change and malaria exposure have, for the most part, accurately gauged and conveyed the nature of the risk that warming could swell the ranks of people afflicted with this awful mosquito-borne disease.

How about the much-maligned IPCC report, Climate Change 2007: Working Group II: Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability? Let’s start with, “8.4.1.2 Malaria, dengue and other infectious diseases,” a section with caveats that would make Judith Curry proud:

Studies published since the TAR support previous projections that climate change could alter the incidence and geographical range of malaria. The magnitude of the projected effect may be smaller than that reported in the TAR, partly because of advances in categorising risk. There is greater confidence in projected changes in the geographical range of vectors than in changes in disease incidence because of uncertainties about trends in factors other than climate that influence human cases and deaths, including the status of the public-health infrastructure.

Table 8.2 summarises studies that project the impact of climate change on the incidence and geographical range of malaria, dengue fever and other infectious diseases. Models with incomplete parameterisation of biological relationships between temperature, vector and parasite often over-emphasise relative changes in risk, even when the absolute risk is small. Several modelling studies used the SRES climate scenarios, a few applied population scenarios, and none incorporated economic scenarios. Few studies incorporate adequate assumptions about adaptive capacity. The main approaches used are inclusion of current ‘control capacity‘ in the observed climate–health function (Rogers and Randolph, 2000; Hales et al., 2002) and categorisation of the model output by adaptive capacity, thereby separating the effects of climate change from the effects of improvements in public health (van Lieshout et al., 2004).

Malaria is a complex disease to model and all published models have limited parameterisation of some of the key factors that influence the geographical range and intensity of malaria transmission. Given this limitation, models project that, particularly in Africa, climate change will be associated with geographical expansions of the areas suitable for stable Plasmodium falciparum malaria in some regions and with contractions in other regions (Tanser et al., 2003; Thomas et al., 2004; van Lieshout et al., 2004; Ebi et al., 2005). Projections also suggest that some regions will experience a longer season of transmission. This may be as important as geographical expansion for the attributable disease burden. Although an increase in months per year of transmission does not directly translate into an increase in malaria burden (Reiter et al., 2004), it would have important implications for vector control.

Few models project the impact of climate change on malaria outside Africa.

I know, the alarmism is unbearable.

Seriously, not only have they reduced the magnitude of the projected effect from the Third Assessment, but then there is Table 8.2 itself, the “main results” for “Malaria, global and regional”:

Estimates of the additional population at risk for >1 month transmission range from >220 million (A1FI) to >400 million (A2) when climate and population growth are included. The global estimates are severely reduced if transmission risk for more than 3 consecutive months per year is considered, with a net reduction in the global population at risk under the A2 and B1 scenarios.

The decrease comes about because of increased drought.  On page  400, in the section on “8.2.3.1 Drought and infectious disease,” the IPCC finds:

In the long term, the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria decreases because the mosquito vector lacks the necessary humidity and water for breeding….

Malaria has decreased in association with long-term decreases in annual rainfall in Senegal and Niger (Mouchet et al., 1996; Julvez et al., 1997).

Huh.

What about the impact to date of climate change on malaria?  Section 8.2.8.2 on Malaria says:

The effects of observed climate change on the geographical distribution of malaria and its transmission intensity in highland regions remains controversial.  Analyses of time-series data in some sites in East Africa indicate that malaria incidence has increased in the apparent absence of climate trends….

In southern Africa, long-term trends for malaria were not significantly associated with climate….

There is no clear evidence that malaria has been affected by climate change in South America (Benitez et al., 2004) (see Chapter 1) or in continental regions of the Russian Federation (Semenov et al., 2002). The attribution of changes in human diseases to climate change must first take into account the considerable changes in reporting, surveillance, disease control measures, population changes, and other factors such as landuse change (Kovats et al., 2001; Rogers and Randolph, 2006).

And so on and on and on.

And there’s even more important non-alarmism.  After all, policymakers don’t actually read all this stuff, they read the Summary for Policymakers, which gets signed off on word for word by every member government.  Surely the government hype-meisters have oversold the story.  In the 16-page summary for WGII, here is everything they say on malaria under the Health Section:

Climate change is expected to have some mixed effects, such as a decrease or increase in the range and transmission potential of malaria in Africa. ** D

If you aren’t pissed off at this kind of typically extreme alarmism from the IPCC, well, then you just don’t spend enough time reading either the mainstream media or the anti-science crowd.

Before getting to the incredibly lame media coverage, let’s look at the study that got all the attention, “Climate change and the global malaria recession,” in Nature (subs. req’d).  It concludes:

First, widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent. Second, the proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures. Predictions of an intensification of malaria in a warmer world, based on extrapolated empirical relationships or biological mechanisms, must be set against a context of a century of warming that has seen marked global declines in the disease and a substantial weakening of the global correlation between malaria endemicity and climate….

The quantification of a global recession in the range and intensity of malaria over the twentieth century has allowed us to review the rationale underpinning high-profile predictions of a current and future worsening of the disease in a warming climate. It suggests that the success or failure of our efforts against the parasite in the coming century are likely to be determined by factors other than climate change.

Hmm, you may be wondering what those “widespread claims” and “high-profile predictions” are, since they clearly are not from the most high-profile source, the IPCC.  Well, the only reference to this in the body of study says:

A resurgence in funding for malaria control10, the existing efficacy of affordable interventions, and a growing body of nationally or sub-nationally reported declines in endemicity or clinical burden11 have engendered renewed optimism among the international malaria research and control community. In marked contrast, however, are model predictions, reported widely in global climate policy debates3, 6, 7, that climate change is adding to the present-day burden of malaria and will increase both the future range and intensity of the disease. In policy arenas, such predictions can support scenario analysis or serve as a call to action, but the modelling approaches used and the accuracy of their predictions have not always been challenged.

And what is foonote 6?  It is IPCC’s Working Group II report!!

By the way, WGII also states, “Health services provide a buffer against the hazards of climate variability and change.  For instance, access to cheap, effective anti-malarials, insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spray programmes will be important for future trends in malaria.”  So one hardly accuse the IPCC of using malaria as a “call to action” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as opposed to a call to action to do the kinds of non-climate things the Nature article suggests matter more.

I doubt that the authors of the Nature article even bothered to go back to read the IPCC report they cited or spend a few minutes searching it for the word “malaria,”since that would have made clear it is inappropriate to cite it as they did.  I suspect the authors just swallowed the media/disinformer myth that the IPCC has overhyped the malaria-climate link and threat. The same goes for the reviewers, who should have pointed out that this footnote was inappropriate here.

And what is footnote 7?  It is “US Environmental Protection Agency, Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (Technical Support Document) (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2010).”

They mean 2009, not 2010, I think.  The original April 9, 2009 document is here.  The final December 7, 2009 document is here.  Their discussions of malaria are identical and reprinted below in their entirety:

Although large portions of the U.S. may be at potential risk for diseases such as malaria based on the distribution of competent disease vectors, locally acquired cases have been virtually eliminated, in part due to effective public health interventions, including vector and disease control activities. (Ebi et al., 2008; Confalonieri et al, 2007).

The IPCC concludes that human health risks from climate change will be strongly modulated by changes in health care, infrastructure, technology, and accessibility to health care (Field et al., 2007)….

And from the EPA’s section on “Overview of International Impacts”:

Mosquito-borne diseases which are sensitive to climate change, such as dengue and malaria are of great importance globally. Studies cited in Confalonieri et al. (2007) have reported associations between spatial, temporal, or spatiotemporal patterns dengue and climate, although these are not entirely consistent. Similarly, the spatial distribution, intensity of transmission, and seasonality of malaria is observed to be influenced by climate in sub-Saharan Africa (Confalonieri et al., 2007). In other world regions (e.g., South America, continental regions of the Russian Federation) there is no clear evidence that malaria has been affected by climate change (Confalonieri et al., 2007). Changes in reporting, surveillance, disease control measures, population changes and other factors such as land use change must to be taken into account when attempting to attribute changes in human diseases to climate change (Confalonieri et al., 2007)….

I assert that it is also absurd for the authors to cite this EPA document in this sentence:   “In marked contrast, however, are model predictions, reported widely in global climate policy debates3, 6, 7, that climate change is adding to the present-day burden of malaria and will increase both the future range and intensity of the disease.”

How the heck does the EPA — or IPCC — get lumped in with references that are “widely reported in global climate policy debates” that find “model predictions” conclude “climate change is adding to the present-day burden of malaria”?  Same for the assertion that they report model predictions that “climate change will increase both the future range and intensity of the disease.”

This kind of sloppy citation does not inspire confidence.

UPDATE:  My critiques of these two inappropriate citations have not been challenged by the authors (see “My critique of malaria paper, media coverage holds up“), though at least one disinformer has tried to pretend the authors used a different citation.

Now it is true that their third reference — Chapter 20 in a 2004 WHO report — did find climate change was adding to the present day burden of malaria.  But that doesn’t mean their third reference was wrong, even if this sloppy Nature article questions that conclusion.

After all, a new and very thorough literature review of 70 studies on the subject supports that overall conclusion.  The article is “Climate Change and Highland Malaria: Fresh Air for a Hot Debate” (subs. req’d) published in The Quarterly Review of Biology in March.  That journal isn’t as sexy and high profile as Nature, but one must pay attention to a comprehensive literature review like this.

The lead author, Luis Fernando Chaves is from Emory University and their release on the subject says:

Climate change is one reason that malaria is on the rise in some parts of the world, according to new research by Emory environmental studies’ Luis Chaves, but other factors such as migration and land-use changes are likely also at play….  Their review of 70 studies aimed to sort out contradictions that have emerged as scientists try to understand why malaria has been spreading into highland areas of East Africa, Indonesia, Afghanistan and elsewhere in recent decades….

After careful examination of the statistical models of previous studies, the researchers concluded that climate change is indeed likely playing a role in highland malaria. “Even if trends in temperature are very small, organisms can amplify such small changes and that could cause an increase in parasite transmission,” Chaves said.

The Science Daily story adds:

“We assessed … conclusions from both sides and found that evidence for a role of climate in the dynamics is robust,” write study authors Luis Fernando Chaves from Emory University and Constantianus Koenraadt of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “However, we also argue that over-emphasizing a role for climate is misleading for setting a research agenda, even one which attempts to understand climate change impacts on emerging malaria patterns.”

Malaria, a parasitic disease spread to humans by mosquitoes, is common in warm climates of Africa, South America and South Asia. The development and survival, both of the mosquito and the malaria parasite are highly sensitive to daily and seasonal temperature patterns and the disease has traditionally been rare in the cooler highland areas. Over the last 40 years, however, the disease has been spreading to the highlands, and many studies link the spread to global warming. But that conclusion is far from unanimous. Other studies have found no evidence of warming in highland regions, thus ruling out climate change as a driver for highland malaria.

Chaves and Koenraadt re-examined more than 70 of these studies. They found that the studies ruling out a role for climate change in highland malaria often use inappropriate statistical tools, casting doubt on their conclusions.

For example, an oft-cited 2002 study of the Kericho highlands of western Kenya found no warming trend in the area. But when Chaves and Koenraadt ran the same temperature data from that study through three additional statistical tests, each test indicated a significant warming trend. Similar statistical errors plague other comparable studies, the researchers say.

In contrast, most studies concluding that climate change is indeed playing a role in highland malaria tend to be statistically strong, Chaves and Koenraadt found. But just because climate is one factor influencing malaria’s spread does not mean it is the only one. What is needed, the researchers say, is a research approach that combines climate with other possible factors.

So on the one hand we have a sloppy Nature article that seems to have read media accounts of their references more than they actually read their references.  And on the other we have a thorough literature review.

But most of the media doesn’t seem to bother reading actual scientific studies any more.  And so we get nonsense like this from Clive Crook of the Atlantic Monthly and Financial Times last week:

The idea that malaria and climate change are strongly connected still has wide currency among casual environmentalists, even though those who know what they are talking about have been quietly retreating from this position for some time.

And this nonsense from the Economist, which asserts the Nature study is “an attempt to re-examine, and perhaps close down, long-running debates about malaria and climate change.”  I know, it kills you, doesn’t it?  The status quo media keeps telling us that the science isn’t settled, yet now it asserts that one sloppy article can override dozens of others.

But the Economist has a phony storyline it wants to sell:  “If one is going to be optimistic about the future of malaria, one might also, with caution, be optimistic about the future of assessments of climate change.”  Ironically, it’s now pretty clear the 2007 IPCC report didn’t go as far as an accurate review of the scientific literature would allow.

Normally I wouldn’t have spent so much time blogging on a study on climate and malaria.  But I didn’t see much choice after people sent me this DotEarth “opinion” piece by Revkin, “Cooling Fear of a Malaria Surge from Warming,” which spins an alternative universe storyline that would make the writers of the TV show Lost proud:

As various arguments for action on global warming have failed to blunt growth in emissions in recent years, environmental groups and international agencies have sometimes tried to turn the focus to diseases that could pose a growing threat in a warming world — with malaria being a frequent talking point.

It shouldn’t be. The science linking warming and malaria risk was always iffy, a reality reflected in the relevant sections of the 2007 reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yes, doctors and scientists and others spun up the malaria concern not because of what the scientific literature said but because other messaging stuff wasn’t working.  Seriously, this is X-Files and Fringe type stuff.  The fact is a comprehensive review of the scientific literature makes clear that it is quite legitimate to raise concerns that human-caused could put more people at risk of malaria than would be at risk absent the warming.  You can go to Revkin’s links and see for yourself that again and again the statements are well caveated and fully consistent with the literature.

I would note that, for instance, Revkin’s language for his first link somehow suggests that “researchers at Harvard Medical School” = “environmental groups.”  Here’s what the piece he links to says:

Kidney stones, malaria, Lyme disease, depression and respiratory illness all may increase with global warming, researchers at Harvard Medical School said….

The Harvard center also found climate change will increase deaths from heat waves, raise the incidence of waterborne diseases and spread afflictions such as Lyme disease and malaria.

Revkin says such assertions “shouldn’t be.”

I would also note for the umpteenth time that even the business as usual case for global warming has a high risk of radically changing the Earth’s climate (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).  And The Lancet’s landmark Health Commission found last year: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

What seems to be the case if one reads the literature is that climate change may well have played a role in some malaria today and it threatens to put more people at risk in the near- and medium-term (compared to the non-warming case), but that public health measures have a larger impact, and, finally, in the long term, warming may actually reduce the total area at risk but only by creating widespread conditions of severe drought that would have dire consequences for those living in the vicinity (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

I’m not the only one who thinks the Nature piece by itself has flaws.  Scidev.net reports:

Matthew Thomas, researcher at Pennsylvania State University, United States, said that the study “plays down the potential importance of climate “.

“It is very easy to come up with a superficial model,” he said, adding that this controversial area requires better science and more investigation of basic biology before reaching any firm conclusions about climate effects on malaria.

He pointed out that the Nature study predicts a background expansion and intensification of malaria, which needs to be taken into account when designing approaches to the disease.

“Drug and insecticide resistance could make future interventions less effective,” he added, and so even small effects of climate have to be seen in that context.

He said that the malaria map published in Nature shows that in some areas malaria has in fact increased with global warming, in spite of overall decline over the last century. The map shows such areas in Latin America, South and South-East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.