See Editor’s Note Introducing this Feature

On the heels of the Copenhagen climate talks - whose scant accomplishments reveal that climate change science may be no match for international politics - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds itself in a scientific controversy of its own making.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report’s malformed paragraph on Himalayan glacier melt has prompted intense, and warranted, criticism of the IPCC review process. This criticism has come not only from climate science skeptics or contrarians. It’s generally clear that the ungrammatical, internally contradictory two sentences - which reproduce errors found in improperly cited sources - shouldn’t have made it into the first draft of the report, much less the final.

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No climate-related stories over the past few years have attracted the level of mainstream coverage as those involving personal e-mails of prominent climate scientists that were hacked from a mail server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (see Yale Forum article).

These e-mails provide plenty to criticize, but the most widely-publicized quotes often are taken out of context to falsely imply a conspiracy of sorts to hide declining temperatures and a lack of recent warming. A close reading of the e-mails in question reveals a more nuanced picture, with scientists struggling with how to explain uncertainties in complex systems in a world of 60-second sound-bytes and the certainty of blistering condemnations by those ideologically opposed to accepting scientific evidence of anthropogenic warming.

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American climate policy could use a bit of James Madison.

In a letter written in 1822, five years after leaving office, the fourth President of the United States cautioned that “A popular Government, without popular information … is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” A strong democracy, Madison argued, requires both knowledge and public opinion.

How has U.S. climate policy treated either? Not well.

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Journalist Eric Pooley’s January 2009 Shorenstein Center critique and analysis of press coverage of climate change policy issues has generated substantial attention and on-going “buzz” in climate journalism circles.

After publishing freelance writer John Wihbey’s February 17 article and analysis of Pooley’s “discussion paper,” The Yale Forum asked four respected university-affiliated environmental and science writers their views on Pooley’s analysis: Their comments and Eric Pooley’s own reaction to those comments follow.

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Veteran journalist Eric Pooley in January issued a powerful critique of the American press and its coverage of the 2008 cap-and-trade debate in the U.S. Senate. His central insight was that the “he said, she said” stenography that had once plagued coverage of climate science may be migrating into the climate change economics/policy debate.

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View larger image BBC ‘Newsnight’ website link to video

One of the proudest and most credible names in journalism, BBC, has found itself challenged on its questionable editing and splicing of President Obama’s science and climate change remarks during his inauguration on January 20.

The issue involves whether BBC’s self-described “montage” distorted the meaning of Obama’s references to elevating science and combating climate change by appearing to have him say something he never said.

At least not in so many words.

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Coverage of climate change in 2008 pales quantitatively when compared with previous years’ upward trends. Victim of the global financial crisis? Of news room “down sizing”? Of polar bears having become “old news”? Of short attention spans and perhaps “climate fatigue” on the part of editors and audiences? All this and more?

A quantitative and qualitative look at mainstream media coverage of “the story of the century.” And what a new year, a new administration in Washington, and a critical year-end international negotiation may mean for coverage in 2009.

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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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