|
|
Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was that our recent strange weather [...]
The word ‘famine’ may be a familiar one, but it is not thrown around lightly by the people who decide when there is one. The fact that most of us today probably associate the term with the 1984 crisis in Ethiopia is testament to its exceedingly careful dispensation; to use it too often would dilute [...]
An eight-part series that appeared in the Economist has won this year’s prestigious Grantham Prize for environmental reporting. Journalist James Astill reported the 14,000 word story in the forests of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Uganda, assessing the state of the world’s tropical forests and what’s being done to protect them. The prize’s jurors credit the [...]
It’s not likely that a book called Harry Potter and the Mountaintop Removal Project would have much appeal to middle-schoolers. And have fun trying to get the pre-K crowd interested in Clifford the Big Red Strip-Mine Operator. The good news is you’re never likely to see such literary nasties. The bad news is that Scholastic, [...]
Coincidences abound—just after posting an item on Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s focus on climate change and renewable energy as a national security issues, I run across a new multimedia project from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism that explores: climate change and national security. Called “Global Warning,” the website is the product of three months of investigations [...]
This week* marks exactly one year since “Climategate” broke into the headlines, revealing, if nothing else, that at least some mainstream climate scientists were pretty fed up with what they saw as political attacks on the legitimate science they were trying to do. But for critics of conventional climate research, it was much more: the [...]
Sometimes a President can’t catch a break—a lesson the current, beleaguered resident of the Oval Office keeps learning. The latest bit of bad news came from a commission the President himself appointed back in the spring to study the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama announced the creation of the study [...]
I’m at the B4E Summit in Mexico City, where the early message from the panelists is that last year’s Copenhagen climate summit led to the “end of carbon fundamentalism,” in the words of Rachel Kyte of the International Finance Corporation. That means that the decades-old Rio dream that the world could look at the science [...]
The media is not in a good way right now. Advertising has fallen off a cliff, taking revenue with it, and even if the economy recovers, it’s far from clear that those funds will ever flow to mainstream news organizations at the level they once did as the media landscape grows more crowded. Magazines and [...]
