During the past five years, Web video has emerged as a battleground in climate communication. Journalists, comedians, artists, businesses, governments, climate contrarians and advocacy groups alike are competing to produce the medium’s slickest, funniest and most compelling messages. Take a look to see how some of those communicators are using Web video to influence public […]
Posted inClimate Science
‘Chill It’ and Cool Off, Researcher Advises Climate Scientists Agog Amidst Controversies
A voice of reason emerges in the ongoing and escalating “war rhetoric” over the past several months’ leaked e-mails, IPCC Himalayan glaciers blunder, screaming headlines, blustery blogs, and enflamed cable TV rhetoric. It’s the voice of communications academician Matthew Nisbet of American University, a veteran of climate change communication studies, urging responsible climate scientists, in […]
Posted inFeature Article
NOAA Launches Revamped Climate Change Website
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has revamped its website focusing on climate science. The aim is to make the site a one-stop portal for the agency’s climate data, studies, articles and other information.
Posted inFeature Article
JPL Unveils New Climate Website
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena recently unveiled Climate Kids, a website that targets students in fourth grade through sixth grade. The colorful site addresses basic topics about global climate change using simple illustrations, humor, interactive exercises, and language appropriate for the age group it targets.
Posted inClimate Science
Physicist, Hockey, Phony Pucks, Witch Hunt Make for Hard-Hitting Albuquerque Journal Column
An Albuquerque physicist is taking to his home-town daily newspaper to voice his own views on – and his angst with some media coverage of – climate change and its causes. Physicist Mark Boslough’s tight 757-word guest column in a recent issue of the Albuquerque Journal pulls no punches. His lead paragraph specifies that global […]
Posted inFeature Article, Oceans
A Down-Under Journalistic ‘Wipeout’ In Covering Risks to the Great Barrier Reef
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — Growing tensions between scientists and major news outlets in Australia center around scientists’ concerns over coverage of the potential effects of climate change on coral reefs. Many of the environmental scientists point to what they see as biased and misleading reporting, leaving them frustrated and wondering how they can best engage in […]
Posted inFeature Article, Policy & Politics
China’s Climate ‘Free Media’ In the International Spotlight
Along with the U.S. … China makes up the climate change ‘G2’ It’s a virtual truism that two countries matter above all others when it comes to avoiding the most severe impacts of anthropogenic climate change: the U.S. and China. That’s why so much was on the line when President Obama visited China last fall, […]
Posted inFeature Article
Researchers Track World Coverage of Climate Change in Newspapers
Researchers at the University of Colorado and at the University of Exeter, Oxford University, provide monthly tracking of major newspapers’ coverage of climate change/global warming spanning 20 countries on six continents.
Posted inClimate Science
What A Difference a Year Makes: ‘Cherish, Tweak, Scrap’ Options for IPCC?
Amid all the hand-wringing, legitimate and not-so, over shortcomings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of hacked e-mails, a blown Himalayan melting glaciers prediction, and sundry other issues, Nature magazine comes through with an intelligent and well thought-out exchange of views on a possible post-IPCC world.
Posted inFeature Article
Worldwatch Writer Sees Many in Media Failing in Coverage of Climate Science
An environmental advocate writing for the Worldwatch Institute’s “Eye on Earth” points to media coverage of the hacked e-mails as a test of journalists’ understanding of climate science. Most media do not get a passing grade from writer Ben Block.
Posted inClimate Science
HFCs: Case Study in Interconnections Of Ozone Depletion and Climate Change
Climate change associated with atmospheric warming and depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer are two separate but interrelated problems, intersecting in complex ways that challenge easy comprehension and also efforts to address them. Recent developments related to chemicals commonly known as HFCs illustrate the situation. Industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas […]
Posted inEnergy, Feature Article
IJNR’s Energy Country Institute: Supporting ‘Values of Good Journalism’
Shiprock, sans the brown haze that often envelopes it. Shiprock rises like a massive cathedral 1,800 feet above Navaho country in New Mexico. The best photographs capture the rock formation in reddish hues, set against a pristine blue sky. But the first time I saw Shiprock, which figures prominently in Navaho religion and mythology, it […]