Most journalists these days would love to have the choice John Mecklin faced three years ago.

As editor-in-chief of High Country News, Mecklin was attending a workshop on covering climate change when he received word that Sara Miller McCune wanted to speak with him about launching a public policy magazine. McCune, founder and chair of the 45-year-old academic publishing house, Sage Publications, Inc., had been considering the idea for years.

The goal: to create intelligent and compelling journalism that reports on how academic research can be applied to solve some of the world’s greatest problems. “Smart Journalism. Real Solutions,” the 8×11-inch full color magazine says on its cover.

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Change is afoot in the number of international journalists in developing countries reporting on global climate change.

With a yearly budget of $1 million, the Earth Journalism Network, EJN, has become a leader among nonprofit organizations actively building networks of environmental journalists and communicators in the poorest of nations. In the past five years, the group has trained 1,000 journalists who have produced some 2,000 stories on the environment.

Media reporting on climate change has emerged as EJN’s main focus in the last two years.

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They were two very different front-page stories about global climate change.

One, in the Boston Globe, was a lifestyle piece about two long-time colleagues and friends — MIT climate scientists Kerry Emanuel and Richard Lindzen. Entitled “A Cooling Trend,” it was light on science and heavy on details about the severe toll that the increasingly toxic political environment surrounding climate change has taken on the personal and professional relationship between the two prominent researchers.

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Just 15 years ago, climate change was not widely adopted as part of the public school science curriculum. Today, you’ll find basic climate science covered in many — but not all — states.

Science ‘isn’t about sides or rhetoric…it’s about evidence.’

Recognizing that students today will become leaders of tomorrow and that science literacy will inform their decisions, organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and federal agencies such as NASA and NOAA, among others, have developed science literacy curriculum guidelines for climate change education from kindergarten through grade 12. While science educators are beginning to embrace the guidelines, concerns remain in the ways climate change is taught in public schools.

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A highly regarded national environmental radio network is among the latest casualties of journalism downsizing.

As of June 4th, “The Environment Report,” (TER) which not long ago had hopes of becoming a regular nationwide program, is being scaled back from a network heard on 123 stations to a program aired only on Michigan radio.

In pursuit of corporate underwriters to replace dwindling foundation support on which it had long depended, TER had tried to broaden its focus to be aired in major markets throughout the country.

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MIAMI – When it comes to communicating climate change, meteorologists are on the front lines.

“Television weathercasters may be the most prominent science communicators in our society,” said John Morales, chief meteorologist at NBC 6 in Miami. “The one scientist that everybody can relate to is the broadcast meteorologist on television.”

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Future historians may regard recent weeks as a momentary breathing spell in the political trajectory of the climate issue.

In the courts, preliminary rulings are awaited on a spate of legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous and deserve regulation under the Clean Air Act.

In Congress, meanwhile, senators crafting a climate-energy bill different from the cap-and-trade measure passed by the House delayed its unveiling until May 12 so they could regroup after Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina withdrew his support.

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The reverberations of the hacked e-mails fiasco - conveniently or otherwise characterized as “climategate” - continue to be felt deeply within the journalism and scientific communities.

In many ways, the episode that originated six months ago remains a pivotal moment for media coverage of climate change. The Yale Forum asked three people with deep involvement in, and different perspectives on,  the story to look back at how the media performed in the controversy’s initial stages, and to offer some lessons learned (see related posting).

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Health care insurers are woefully behind the curve when it comes to preparing for the risks that climate change poses to human health. Wine grapes, highly sensitive to extremes in temperature, may well foretell how continued warming will stress global agriculture. Most corporations, focused on a five- to seven-year time horizon, aren’t planning for how they’ll adapt to climate change in coming decades.

Where can you find these stories, presented in one place and generated by a new collaboration by national publications such as Slate, Wired, Mother Jones, The Atlantic and Grist?

The answer: The Climate Desk, a new collaborative journalism project launched on April 19.

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Tracy Davis vividly remembers her reaction when she got word nearly a year ago that The Ann Arbor News, where she worked for nine years, primarily covering the environment, was closing.

“I stood there with my mouth open for an hour.” With the closing of The News, the town of 114,667, home to The University of Michigan, became the largest market in the country to lose its only daily newspaper. It now has only an online newspaper. The online version goes to hard copy twice a week for delivery to subscribers.

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