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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Guardian launches Fred Pearce greenwash column

Back in June I interviewed Fred Pearce for a book chapter (to be published next year). My first question was if coverage of climate change had slowed. No, he said, and his employers (magazines such as New Scientist) were looking for more stories from him. He also said that the Guardian was increasing its pool [...]

Hockey Stick: the first climate change metaphor

In his Public Understanding of Science 2000 article ‘Knowledge, Ignorance and Popular Culture’, University of Toronto Professor Sheldon Ungar suggests the reason that public understanding and concern could coalesce around the ozone hole, where it has failed to do so for climate change, was in part due to two things: first, that the ozone hole [...]

‘I can’t believe The Sun’s gone so far…’

Yesterday I looked at the 40% decline in coverage of climate change in the UK national press between May 2007 and May 2008 due, most probably, to coverage of the credit crunch. While that was disappointing, today I’m taking a closer look at some of the specific coverage of climate change in May 2008, starting [...]