Henry, who assembled the Toledo Blade’s package, has been impressed by the large number of climate series coming from small and medium-sized papers. But many, he worries, are a “carryover” from 2007 and readers may see fewer of them in coming years. “I was one of three judges for the projects category of the Society of Environmental Journalist’s award contest this year,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Of sixty-some entries we judged, probably two-thirds were either directly about climate or a major climate issue, like the nation’s reliance on coal and/or China’s emerging use of coal. A bunch of papers, magazines, et al, pegged their projects to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 reports, which was no surprise. At least it didn’t fizzle out after Gore and the IPCC took home their awards.”
Hopefully, they won’t fizzle out all. And I’m sure there are more local climate series out there that I’ve missed. I would love to hear about all of them (preferably with links) in the comments section, so please chime in.
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I don't recall if it was part of a series, but a year-old piece by Sacramento Bee reporter Tom Knudson on the exploitation of Canada's tar sands, Grabbing for oil", was excellent -
e.g.
"In northeast Alberta,...the race for a stand-in fuel is taking a U-turn, one in which fleets of dinosaur-sized trucks and shovels larger than two-car garages are tearing apart a rich mosaic of woods and wetlands to extract some of the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet – more than two-thirds of which is exported to the United States to be refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel."
Posted by Anna Haynes on Wed 3 Dec 2008 at 09:19 PM
Another outstanding climate series, published in December but with a follow-on in July, ran in the San Antonio Express-News. It earned reporter Anton Caputo the 2008 Risser Prize for western environmental reporting. You can read it here: http://knight.stanford.edu/risser/winners/2008/
Posted by Tim Wheeler on Thu 4 Dec 2008 at 11:27 AM
The Bee's also got Tom Knudson doing this series on global warming.
But it flies under the radar, needlessly, which is frustrating - the series isn't chronologically contiguous, it's occasional pieces over a long period of time, and there's no RSS feed for it, and Knudson doesnt alert the readers of his associated blog (http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/sierra_summit/ , which *does* have an RSS feed) when a new part comes out.
...and there's no response to emails suggesting that he do so. Perhaps they're not getting through?
Posted by Anna Haynes on Tue 9 Dec 2008 at 02:08 PM
We do recall the expansion of arctic pack ice by 30% last winter. This winter, is it any warmer? No. It ain't. The business of energy conservation is a matter of not fouling our nest the earth -- not a matter of hypotheses, anecdotes and speculation.
Posted by Thomas Murn on Mon 15 Dec 2008 at 09:43 PM