Features


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.

Media
Arctic Series for Edmonton, Toronto Papers
By Christine Woodside | September 4, 2008

For 28 years, Canadian writer Ed Struzik has skied, dogsledded, snowmobiled, helicoptered, canoed, and ridden icebreakers as part of his writings about the Arctic. Since long before most journalists paid the northern territories much heed, Struzik has covered the change brewing in these empty lands as his beat.

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Media
By Bud Ward | August 7, 2008

Some of the beats most likely to provide the best platforms for newspaper coverage of climate change are doing worse than other news categories in the increasingly competitive newsroom - garnering less space as newspapers continue grappling with endemic economic woes.

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Media
By John Wihbey | July 17, 2008

War-related metaphors are now common in the rhetoric of climate change activism. We need a “Manhattan Project” for clean energy, a “Marshall Plan” for green action.

Or maybe, we need just plain war. Think of Al Gore’s first ad in his $300 million Alliance for Climate Protection TV campaign, which flashed images of the Normandy invasion. “We didn’t wait for someone else” to fight, it read.

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Media
By Sara Espinoza and Ann Posegate | July 15, 2008

“This was not a debate or argument, but a chance to ask questions.”

That’s how veteran WDIV-TV, Detroit, meteorologist Paul Gross summed-up a recent American Meteorological Society four-day Denver, Co., conference bringing TV weathercasters and climate scientists together for information sharing.

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Media
By Bill Dawson | June 12, 2008

On Air Photo

All three staff meteorologists at KLTV, the ABC affiliate broadcasting to the Tyler-Longview-Jacksonville area of Northeast Texas, joined forces last November to deliver an on-air rebuttal of the idea that humans are changing the earth’s climate.

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Media
June 12, 2008

ABC News is planning a two-hour special this coming September depicting how top scientists, economists, and historians see the world in the year 2100.

“Experts say that unless we act now, the ‘perfect storm’ of population growth, resource depletion, and climate change could destabilize the world with catastrophic results,” says ABC News’ Earth 2100 website (emphasis in original).

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Media
By Christine Woodside | May 27, 2008

Cap-and-trade policies entered the environmental reporting lexicon in the early 1990s, when the United States established them as a strategy for reducing acid rain emissions. Now cap-and-trade is part of the national dialogue again, this time as a proposed strategy to slow climate change.

For reporters experienced or not, writing about such an abstract policy - it sounds more like the stock market than anything else - makes it necessary to review what it means and what it tries to accomplish.

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Media
By John Wihbey | May 6, 2008

CAMBRIDGE, MA. - Media veterans experienced in covering war zones and science are finding the climate change beat as difficult and mentally taxing a reporting job as they have ever had.

That was an overarching theme from a panel of journalists gathered at Harvard University April 30 to discuss “Covering a Changing Climate.”

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International
By Christine Woodside | May 6, 2008

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.

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Media
By John Wihbey | April 17, 2008

The world’s green technology labs are bubbling with brave new ideas that aim to help invent our way out of climate change disaster. Spraying sulfur particles in the sky. Creating artificial trees. High-voltage batteries engineered by viruses. Tidal and geothermal plants. Generators in the jet stream to harness the wind.

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