It wasn’t so long ago that a number of leading climate scientists felt they needed a “rapid response mechanism” to forestall flawed climate reporting before it took off like a wildfire across the nation’s and world’s news sections. The result was realclimate.org, spearheaded largely by scientists Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt.

Times have changed sufficiently that reporters now have their own brand of rapid response mechanism, throwing cold water on blistering hot, and blisteringly flawed, climate change reporting before it gets much out of the starting gate.

The example du jour is a Thanksgiving week story by the politically well-connected and well-regarded (and Washington-influential) politico.com.

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Lyme disease, dubbed one of the “deadly dozen” by a recent Wildlife Conservation Society report, could skyrocket as global shifts in temperature and precipitation transform ecosystems.

From a public policy standpoint, the situation is compounded by the communications issues complicating it, bringing to mind the well-known quote from the late actor Strother Martin in the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke” — What we’ve got is failure to communicate.

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President Bush, well into what is widely seen as his lame-duck period, last month proposed his administration’s first concrete plans to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Policy makers and many in the news media appear to have largely written-off the proposal as too little, too late, in effect saying it would amount to further delay rather than serious action.

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Committed environmentalists likely remember the time, more than a decade ago, when they first became aware of John Tierney, now one of two influential bloggers at The New York Times‘ “Science Times” who opine on global warming and other environmental issues, and a provocative columnist for the section.

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It’s not the pitch itself that makes this newsworthy.

Nor are the “pitchees” here what deserves comment. Reporters get pitches all the time. Daily, hourly even.

Pitches are, after all, a reporter’s bread and butter, notwithstanding their complaints about getting so many of them. So keep them coming, they’ll acknowledge, and expect reporters to keep fussing about them … and to separate the voluminous chaff from the sparse wheat on their own.

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BALI, Indonesia, December 10, 2007 - “What comes next?”

It’s a question that has haunted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 13th Conference of Parties.

Will the Bali talks result in a new global framework for tackling climate change? Will they lead to new commitments for a third compliance period for the Kyoto Protocol? An extended Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)?

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Journalists reporting on the United Nations Bali negotiations and ongoing plans for addressing climate change need to appreciate that the term “tradable permits system” does not imply a one-size-fits-all single strategy.

Rather, numerous and diverse policy design considerations would go into shaping a tradable permits approach. Many of them involve considerable controversy - Who pays? Who benefits? What are the costs? And more.

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An emerging consensus among economists, environmental organizations, and policy makers holds that policy solutions to the climate change problem must incorporate economic mechanisms so that social costs of climate change damages are reflected in prices of carbon and other greenhouse gases.

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The climate change blog world has been abuzz about a pending study said by some to challenge a widely-cited 2004 analysis suggesting a strong scientific “consensus” on anthropogenic climate change.

But whether and where the much-ballyhooed analysis sees the light of day in a peer-reviewed form appears very much in doubt.

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