Edublogger Awards 2009

My Nominations for The 2009 Edublog Awards are:
Best individual blog: Phil Young, Mediations
Best student blog: Josh Halliday.com

Climate of coverage: Lord Turner’s report

The beginning of this week saw the press respond (or not) to Lord Adair Turner’s new report on reducing our UK carbon emissions as part of his role as chair of the government’s Committee on Climate Change. Taking a snapshot (or synchronic, to use the technical term) analysis of the coverage of the report [...]

Newcastle’s Chronicle, Daily Mail are green winners

The Press Gazette have announced the winners of their inaugural Environmental Journalism awards, and illustrated in one move what a strange and contradictory thing such events can be. First of all, what the judges got right before what they got totally wrong.
Most importantly, the special commendation for Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle and it’s Go Green [...]

James Hansen in Parliament today

James Hansen, NASA scientist, is in Westminster today to give evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee on the impact of current science on climate policy. It’s being billed by new group Climate Safety as “one humdinger of a debate” between, in the red corner, Hansen and researcher Tim Helweg-Larsen of the Public Interest Research Centre, [...]

Forum: climate change and violence

Last Friday I attended the first of seven ‘climate change and violence’ 1-day workshops attended by a network of academics, campaigners, government and faith groups (and others) interested in looking at climate change in a holistic manner, rather than from segregated disciplines or policy positions. The network is called Crisis Forum, set up and [...]

Pachauri’s blog and President Obama

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has launched his own blog.
It’s a curious thing for someone already so well known, well positioned, to do (hence the exclamation marks from Wattsupwiththat). It is also not that sophisticated as a portfolio site.
Perhaps the process of leading the IPCC through tortuous negotiations [...]

Climate change likened to ‘Y2k scam’

One of the most arresting case studies in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News, about the ‘churnalism’ of poor reporting/stories that is sweeping through the journalism industry as the result of its commercialisation, is about Y2K - the millennium bug.
Davies successfully shows how a ‘non-story’ fed itself, both politically and in the press, until [...]

Climate change bill passed (in the night)

Well I think I spoke too soon. There was very little coverage of the Climate Change Bill passing its commons stages. Perhaps this was due to the Brand-effect, or that most journalists are still deployed onto credit crunching topics. Prince Charles did make it into the papers yesterday talking about the ‘climate crunch’.
But so far [...]

Climate Change UK: vote today in parliament, 4pm

Elliot Morley was on Radio 4 this morning discussing his amendment to the climate change bill, going through parliament. His amendment willl, if accepted, include aviation and shipping in the bill, as well as the 80% target by 2050 which was recommended in Lord Turner’s report.
There will no doubt be a great deal of coverage [...]

Engaging across blogging divides on climate

Last week, an anthropology PhD student in New Zealand wrote a summary and response to a paper I gave at the Association for Journalism Education annual conference, in September this year. I though her commentary was a thoughtful piece with a fair set of conclusions: that bloggers self-select their networks based on beliefs. And that [...]