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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged global warming

1. 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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2. 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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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. 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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8. 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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9. 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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10. December 14, 2011 02:45 PM

    Inside COP17

    Why UN climate summits like the one in Durban are challenging, but worth covering

    By James Fahn

    DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA—It’s not easy to be a climate reporter. You have to understand the science of climate change, as well as the politics and the economics. You need to cover energy policy, forest issues, agriculture, oceans, and industry. You have to follow both global and local politics. You need to be able to communicate with both scientists and laymen....

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11. November 6, 2012 11:00 AM

    Lemmings like us

    Businessweek’s climate-change broadside is powerful, but ignores the allure of waterfront property

    By Curtis Brainard

    Hurricane Sandy finally got the media talking about climate change last week, but Bloomberg Businessweek spoke the loudest with a bold, red cover that featured a picture of a flooded New York City street and the words, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” in big, black letters above it. As the cyclone spun up the eastern seaboard, I warned against making overstatements...

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12. August 6, 2012 12:00 PM

    Muller’s media circus

    Did the press fall for a climate-change publicity stunt?

    By Curtis Brainard

    UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller was all over the media last week talking about his “total turnaround” from global-warming skeptic to adherent of the longstanding scientific consensus that the planet is heating up. The question is: Did he deserve the attention? The frenzy started with an op-ed published in The New York Times, in which Muller explained why he now...

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13. April 2, 2012 11:00 AM

    Q&A: The NYT’s Justin Gillis

    The recent Oakes Award winner talks about how to keep climate on the front page

    By Curtis Brainard

    At the end of March, Columbia University awarded the 2011 Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism to New York Times reporter Justin Gillis for his ongoing multimedia series, Temperature Rising, examining the fundamental tenets of manmade climate change. Articles in the series, most of which appear on the front page, provide in-depth, back-to-basics assessments of global warming’s effects on glaciers,...

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14. October 30, 2012 04:15 PM

    Sandy’s climate context

    Why generalizing about extreme weather helps no one

    By Curtis Brainard

    It should come as no surprise that as Hurricane Sandy spiraled up the eastern seaboard, a variety of media outlets sought to explain the so-called super storm’s relationship to climate change. A few did well, but generalizations about extreme weather continue to mar this type of coverage. Take Rebecca Leber’s attempt to bash the press for ignoring climate change at...

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15. July 12, 2012 12:56 PM

    The heatwave debate

    How the science of probability affects science coverage

    By Hazel Sheffield

    We can all agree that the weather has been unseasonably warm this summer. But fewer people, including media types, agree on whether the high temperatures are a natural occurrence or a consequence of global warming. Conservative commentator George Will said on ABC's Sunday morning talk show This Week that it's easy to explain the recent heat. "One word: summer," he...

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16. October 18, 2012 11:00 AM

    The vilification of electric vehicles

    Media botch full explanation of the latest research

    By Curtis Brainard

    When comparing electric vehicles (EVs) to gas-powered vehicles, most studies have focused on the electricity or fuel consumed while driving, and where those fuels come from. But a European study, published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology on October 4, provided a full lifecycle analysis that took into account not only the so-called “use phase,” but also the “production” (manufacturing)...

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17. February 8, 2012 12:00 PM

    What Drives Public Opinion About Climate Change?

    Politicians, economy more influential than media coverage, study says

    By Curtis Brainard

    The media influence public opinion about climate change, but not as much as national politicians and the state of the economy do, according to a new analysis of eight years of polling data. Over time, activists have pointed their fingers in many directions while trying to explain society’s failure to address the threat of climate change. Scientists, policymakers, captains of...

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