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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Broccoli is a professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., where he works on climate modeling. Before returning to his alma mater, he spent 21 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, GFDL, in Princeton, N.J. He is also the editor of the Journal of Climate, and he has been a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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The planet feels hotter now, and certainly more at risk. The world is smaller for the death of Stanford University climatologist Stephen H. Schneider. And certainly a whole lot less intelligent and decent.

Schneider was one-of-a-kind, “the real thing,” as they say. No one is irreplaceable, it’s true, but there is at this point no telling which scientist (or likely which scientists) it will take to fill the science and communications voids he leaves behind.

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That workshop had three key conclusions: stop throwing cook-stoves at the problem; target diesel; and be very careful about comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide. The first part of this article examined the limits of targeting cook-stoves as a bid to slow climate change. Part II looks at the case for phasing out diesel emissions, and urges a more cautious approach to comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide.

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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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Does an overly simplified perspective on black carbon, one of the most important contributors to climate change, risk society’s missing an important opportunity for managing climate warming? The first of a two-part series on black carbon helps pave the way for a better understanding of this critical issue.

A recent black carbon workshop co-organized by the author under the aegis of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute brought together scientists, policymakers, and development experts to discuss black carbon and how to control it.

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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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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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