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Round-up on Gore NYT editorial

There was lots of coverage of Al Gore’s “The Climate for Change” editorial in the New York Times on Monday. Gore takes the opportunity of Obama’s victory to pin together as tightly as possible climate change with energy security. It’s argument for action summed up is this:

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

A couple of U.S. bloggers, notably Skeptics Global Warming, annotated the editorial with their own opinion as rebuttal.  For example, More »

Tags: America, comment, coverage, energy security, Gore, news, Obama, politics, scepticism, US

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 my beliefs were as rigid as any “climate sceptic”.

One thing Picking Up Sticks noted in the piece was the lack of engagement across the networks; “deniers” and “believers” rarely talk. This is a currently recognised theme online, and not just around climate change: take the U.S. election, for example. The TV producer Adam Curtis described blogging self-selection in an interview with The Register last year: More »

Tags: advertising, blogging, blogs, censorship, comment, denial, deniers, education, environmentalism, Guardian, industry, IPCC, Journalism, magazines, McIntyre, news, PHD, politics, psychology, reporting, research, rhetoric, scepticism, science, scientists, students, Sunderland, training

Selective nominating: Daily Mail the greenest of all?

The Press Gazette Environmental Press Awards shortlist was announced Monday, with some familiar and surprising names on the list.

Can-Do Attitude
Up for Environment Journalist of the Year is Fiona Harvey, at the Financial Times, who I spoke to earlier this year. I admire Fiona: she has been a recipient of awards before, and ploughs a lonely furrow for environment coverage at the FT. She was reasonably recalcitrant to begin with, and unsurprisingly, as she’s had some difficult time with interviewers. (I’m also a fan of Media Lens, however.)

One of her reasons for continued nominations in awards such as these is the approach she, and the FT, take to reporting on the environment, which is both consistent and positive. This is what Fiona said:

Positive coverage is very much an FT outlook. We’re very solutions focused—we won’t just present the problem. Our readership is generally in positions of power. They don’t like to be told there’s a problem without some way of dealing with it. So we like to think we’ve got a very can-do attitude, it’s not just ‘oh dear’ and that’s with all issues, not just the environment.

Choking on my toast
There isn’t a single paper, and certainly not the FT, that isn’t in some way hypocritical and/or contradictory in terms of its coverage of environment and climate change. Very often, for example, stories appearing in the same paper take totally different positions, whether written by the Political Editor or Environment Correspondent.

None more so than the Daily Mail, which is up for ‘campaign of the year’. I nearly choked on my toast. Why? More »

Tags: campaign, coverage, Daily Mail, economics, environment, environmentalism, green, kyoto, media, news, newspaper, newspapers, politics, press gazette, reporting, scepticism, tabloids, water

Climate change: how to balance freedoms

Thanks for all the comments so far. The post in reply, and new comments have moved on to the new post, over here.

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Earlier this week, one of the key sceptical blogs, Jennifer Marohasy, re-listed a collection of quotes to do with scepticism, denial and free expression. There are pegs on which denial–denial, and not scepticism–finds itself hooked. For example, picking up on inaccuracies in the politicized science. Interestingly, Mahorasy’s list came on the same day as a leaked email from the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has ’silenced its employees on climate change’. What’s going on in relation to climate change and freedom of expression, particularly online? More »

Tags: climate change, denialists, freedom of expression, global warming, scepticism