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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged climate change

1. July 25, 2012 02:45 PM

   ‘I don’t bluff’

   Michael Mann’s lawyer says National Review must retract and apologize

   By Curtis Brainard

   Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann is demanding that National Review retract and apologize for a July 15 post that compared him to Jerry Sandusky, the convicted child molester and former Penn State assistant football coach. The post in question, by Mark Steyn, accused Mann of academic fraud, dredging up a discredited charge that emerged in 2009 following the leak...

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2. November 16, 2011 02:45 PM

   Frozen Planet Freezes Out Climate

   BBC’s polar series unwisely sets apart episode about global warming

   By Curtis Brainard

   The BBC is taking a mild pummeling for giving foreign television networks the option not to buy an episode about climate change when purchasing rights to air a nature and wildlife series about Earth’s polar regions. British viewers will see all seven episodes of Frozen Planet, but viewers in other countries, including the US, will see only six, The Telegraph...

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3. December 7, 2011 06:00 PM

   Frozen Planet’s Final Episode Will Air in US

   Discovery Channel reverses course following wave of criticism, but what will viewers get?

   By Curtis Brainard

   Discovery Channel reversed course on Tuesday when it announced that it would air all seven parts of a BBC series about Earth’s polar regions, including a final episode about climate change, which it originally said it would forgo. In mid-November, the BBC drew criticism for giving foreign television networks the option not to buy the final episode, “On Thin Ice,”...

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4. June 6, 2012 03:10 PM

   Salt Lake Tribune takes Grantham Prize

   $75,000 award goes to series about threatened forests for second year in a row

   By Curtis Brainard

   For the second year in a row “the world’s richest journalism prize” went to a series of articles about threatened forests. Last year, the The Economist’s James Astill took home the $75,000 Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment for “The World’s Lungs,” a broad survey of the plight of forests around the globe. This year, judges recognized...

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5. November 17, 2011 05:00 PM

   WSJ Marginalizes Muller

   Climate-change op-ed didn’t run in the paper’s US edition

   By Curtis Brainard

   Media Matters, a group dedicated to bird-dogging conservative spin in the press, made a good catch last week when it pointed out that The Wall Street Journal didn’t publish a wave-making op-ed that disavowed global-warming skepticism in its US edition. In late October, Dr. Richard A. Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley who is well known for...

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6. January 24, 2011 06:03 PM

   Add It Up

   Bad math mars coverage of penguin banding, climate change

   By Curtis Brainard

   In the last two weeks, reporters have repeated false numbers provided by a study and a report (and by their respective press releases) related to the banding of penguins and global warming’s impact on global food production (the ever-vigilant Knight Science Journalism Tracker covered both episodes). Most recently, an Argentina-based NGO, Universal Ecological Fund, released a report describing how climate...

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7. June 28, 2012 11:56 PM

   Audit Notes: Euro dissolution risk, Reuters tailed, Exxon and the press

   By Ryan Chittum

   Simon Johnson, who has warned loudly for years about the critical danger posed by too-big-to-fail banks, as well as their chokehold on the government and the economy, writes at Bloomberg View that the U.S. financial system isn't prepared to withstand a breakup of the euro: Very few people seem to have gotten their heads around dissolution risk. Here’s what it...

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8. August 10, 2012 01:24 AM

   Audit Notes: WSJ forgets climate change, Reuters results, Murdoch hides

   A story on the record heat wave omits global warming

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal writes 640 words on how last month was the hottest July on record—and fails to mention anything about man-made climate change. Here's its explanation for the record heat: Behind the record temperatures was a dome of high pressure over the center of the country, which combined with a powerful drought to create the scorching temperatures, said...

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9. November 1, 2012 01:00 PM

   Bad hippie!

   Is it wrong to ‘scold’ exaggerations about climate and weather?

   By Curtis Brainard

   David Roberts has a long essay over at Grist complaining about "scolds" (The New York Times’s Andrew Revkin, in particular) who criticize others for making too much of the link between climate change and extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy. Roberts’s commentary jumps off from a self-reflective post by Revkin about whether he is guilty of what one of his...

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10. August 21, 2012 03:00 PM

    Candidates clam up on climate

    Reporters call out Obama and Romney’s silence

    By Curtis Brainard

    Nary a word has been spoken about climate change on the presidential campaign trail, and it’s a silence that some journalists find deafening. In the last few weeks, a variety of reporters have called out the candidates for utterly ignoring the issue. The Associated Press’s Steven R. Hurst, for instance, reminded readers that just four months ago, Barack Obama told...

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11. June 1, 2012 06:50 AM

    CBS News hires M. Sanjayan

    Lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy to cover science, environment

    By Curtis Brainard

    Network news got a little better this month. CBS News announced in early May that it had hired M. Sanjayan, lead scientist at The Nature Conservancy, as its science and environmental contributor, filling a slot that’s been vacant for almost two and a half years. Sanjayan will cover a broad range of topics across multiple platforms and contribute to CBS...

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12. December 23, 2010 04:45 PM

    Climate Change 101

    Trio of articles re-cover some global warming basics

    By Curtis Brainard

    A little more than a year ago, there was a feeling among many editors and reporters that the climate-change story had, in a sense, progressed since the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) watershed Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Following the release of that report, coverage of climate science soared, with innumerable articles laying out the basics...

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13. January 10, 2011 01:16 PM

    Climate Conundrums

    Slack coverage, quality issues stir debate

    By Curtis Brainard

    2010 was “the year climate coverage ‘fell off the map,’” The Daily Climate, a website that tracks related news and media stories, reported last Wednesday. The assertion, based on a review of the site’s own database as well as others assembled by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle and the University of Colorado’s Maxwell Boykoff, is just one of a string of...

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14. January 4, 2012 04:45 PM

    Climate Coverage Crashes

    Downward spiral in English-language news media continued in 2011

    By Curtis Brainard

    Twelve months ago, The Daily Climate, a website that produces and tracks media stories about climate change, declared that 2010 was “the year climate coverage ‘fell off the map.’” The downward spiral continued in 2011, a more recent analysis by the site found. The number of articles, blog posts, editorials, and op-eds “declined roughly 20 percent from 2010's levels and...

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15. June 21, 2011 02:15 PM

    Climate Questions for the GOP

    What to ask candidates so clearly unconcerned?

    By Curtis Brainard

    During last week’s Republican presidential primary debate in New Hampshire, CNN’s John King, who served as moderator, asked questions about jobs and taxes, but not climate change. CJR reader and helpful heckler Jeff Huggins pointed out the omission in a recent comment. Indeed, the word “climate” never came up, but the candidates created their own opportunities to take pot shots...

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16. November 16, 2012 11:00 AM

    Climate roller coaster back on track

    With Obama talking global warming, media see ups and downs

    By Curtis Brainard

    At his first post-election press conference on Wednesday, President Obama talked about his current position on climate change in greater detail than he’s done in two years. News outlets’ attempts to interpret the meaning of his remarks produced bewilderingly disparate takes, however, whether that involved Obama’s personal commitment to addressing the issue: “Obama vows to take personal charge of climate...

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17. September 5, 2012 06:00 PM

    Conventions create climate coverage

    While ScienceDebate.org gets some answers

    By Curtis Brainard

    The presidential candidates are still treating it like a back-burner issue, but the Republican and Democratic national conventions incited a short round of climate-change coverage as reporters dug into the newly approved party platforms. The GOP went first, gathering in Tampa as Tropical Storm Isaac swirled by during the last week of August. The Republican platform highlighted “a fairly dramatic...

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18. October 23, 2012 11:00 AM

    Debunking the ‘war on coal,’ take two

    The AP gets it right the second time around

    By Curtis Brainard

    If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Such was The Associated Press’s approach this month to explaining the so-called ‘war on coal’ that conservative spin doctors have been peddling throughout the presidential campaign. An October 15 article by Donna Cassata failed miserably, recycling the narrative that environmental regulations under the Obama administration are the reason for recent turmoil...

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19. January 10, 2012 10:00 AM

    Down, But Not Out?

    A closer look at the quantity of climate coverage in 2011

    By Curtis Brainard

    Just how scarce was climate-change coverage in 2011? It’s hard to get a fix on the details, but the broad conclusion that it was even scarcer than in the year before seems to hold up. Last week, I wrote a post about an analysis by The Daily Climate—a website that produces and tracks news about climate change—which found that the...

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20. November 28, 2012 03:30 PM

    Dull news from Doha

    UN climate summit a ho-hum affair for the press

    By Curtis Brainard

    The United Nations climate-change summit that began in Doha, Qatar, on Monday has so far been a ho-hum affair for the press. Most American news outlets didn’t even bother to send a correspondent, reflecting a general decline in attendance at the annual meeting by North American and European journalists. Coverage may pick up as the two-week confab wears on, but...

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