Many of the environmental scientists point to what they see as biased and misleading reporting, leaving them frustrated and wondering how they can best engage in a public debate that seems to have left them behind.

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It’s a virtual truism that two countries matter above all others when it comes to avoiding the most severe impacts of anthropogenic climate change: the U.S. and China.

That’s why so much was on the line when President Obama visited China last fall, and why speculation up to, during, and since Copenhagen focused so much on what the “G2″ might or might not agree to.

But understanding in the U.S. of how climate change plays out in China and Chinese media is sparse.

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Industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas produced through human activity and blamed for global warming, started long before the widespread use of refrigerant chemicals later discovered to be depleting stratospheric ozone.

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Shiprock rises like a massive cathedral 1,800 feet above Navaho country in New Mexico. The best photographs capture the rock formation in reddish hues, set against a pristine blue sky.

But the first time I saw Shiprock, which figures prominently in Navaho religion and mythology, it was mostly lost in a brown haze.

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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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Independent TV news station KUSI in San Diego aired a story challenging current scientific understanding of climate science and offering “breaking news” of government wrongdoing based on work of Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E.M. Smith, a computer programmer.

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The British tabloid The Daily Mail recently misrepresented the work of a prominent German climate scientist, Mojib Latif, to suggest that “The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years.”

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The concept of sea level rise for much of the public may suggest an image of the world’s oceans as something like a bathtub, with melting glaciers as the faucet.

“The media have this idea in mind that sea level due to climate change is a uniform, global thing,” says Glenn Milne, a geophysicist at the University of Ottawa and lead author for a recent review in the journal Nature Geoscience on the causes of sea level change.

“That’s the Waterworld kind of misconception, ” he says, “and in reality it’s going to be very different than that.”

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As she stares out her window, she’s dismayed: No rush to install new insulation, or solar panels, or double-paned windows.

“There are tax credits for installing and rebuilding your home in an energy-efficient way. The government is pouring billions into this,” Feanny said. “None of my neighbors knows anything about it.”

It’s a bitter irony for Feanny. She lives in Atlanta, home of CNN, where for nearly a decade she had worked on the network’s science and environment unit. That news unit was trimmed back for years and then unceremoniously dumped a little over a year ago, in what is the most prominent example of a science and environmental reporting team getting tossed aside as the traditional news industry sails stormy seas.

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