The views expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and of individual Yale University alumni.
On June 27, The Independent in London ran a story that read “Exclusive: No Ice at the North Pole.”
The headline was off on two counts: there was nothing exclusive about the story, and it’s premature to say the North Pole is ice-free.
Andrew C. Revkin, in his DotEarth blog for The New York Times, reported as much when he posted a piece later in the day about what’s going on with Arctic sea ice, who’s tracking the changes and how the media are covering it.
A series of domestic and global developments are increasing the impact of climate change on the banking and financial industry and reporters covering those beats.
The changes are under way notwithstanding growing pressures from the sagging economy and real estate foreclosures.
The story of climate change is a story of water - how much of it falls from the sky and where, whether it falls as rain or snow, and how fast it melts and evaporates once it’s on the ground.
Sure, climate change now has a more prominent place on the media agenda. But that doesn’t mean news organizations will always pay prominent attention - or any attention, for that matter - to the global warming angle in a given story.
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)?
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.
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.