Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
“Climate Challenge” taps motivated readers
Mike Fancher, Seattle Times
You can fight global warming, and we’re going to help you do it, with “The Seattle Times Climate Challenge.”
In fall 2005, The Times published “The truth about global warming,” by staff reporter Sandi Doughton. It concluded, “Every major scientific body to examine the evidence has come to the same conclusion: The planet is getting hotter; man is to blame; and it’s going to get worse.” That threshold story got the attention of a lot of readers, including Times reporter Alex Fryer. “That really got me thinking. What is the responsibility for the newspaper to take it further?” He didn’t cover the environment and was reacting more as a reader than as a journalist, but he saw the potential for the newspaper.
“What could The Times do? What could people do in their own lives if they wanted to? Wouldn’t it be even better if we all did it together?” he wondered.
In January 2006, Fryer started pitching an idea to editors, along the lines of “If everybody read the same book.” What if people tried to cut their individual greenhouse-gas emissions or “carbon footprint,” and they had a mechanism for sharing their experiences and learning from each other?
“Newspapers can do that better than anyone else,” he said.
Editors were skittish at first. If the newspaper successfully encouraged people to do something, would it really make a difference? Would this be inappropriate advocacy about an issue that was still being debated among the public, if largely settled among scientists?
Fryer was asked to do more research, and without his persistence we wouldn’t be launching the “Climate Challenge” today. He gathered information and talked with anyone in the newsroom willing to listen. We came to believe that individuals could make a difference regarding very large issues if enough of them changed their behavior. We got comfortable with the advocacy question by presenting the challenge less as a scold and more as an encouragement.
Our readers are very environmentally conscious, and they often ask what they can do personally to make a difference. So, we thought the “Climate Challenge” would be an engaging way to provide useful information that inspires readers to act, while also learning from each other. The Times would provide some tools and ideas, but reader motivation would take it from there.
(15 April 2007)
Climate Change Scenarios Scare, and Motivate, Kids
Darragh Johnson, Washington Post
The boy has drawn, in his third-grade class, a global warming timeline that is his equivalent of the mushroom cloud.
“That’s the Earth now,” the 9-year-old says, pointing to a dark shape at the bottom. “And then,” he says, tracing the progressively lighter stripes across the page, “it’s just starting to fade away.”
Alex Hendel of Arlington County is talking about the end of life on our beleaguered planet. Looking up to make sure his mother is following along, he taps the final stripe, which is so sparsely dotted it is almost invisible. “In 20 years,” he pronounces, “there’s no oxygen.” Then, to dramatize the point, he collapses, “dead,” to the floor.
For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today. Fears of an environmental crisis are defining their generation in ways that the Depression, World War II, Vietnam and the Cold War’s lingering “War Games” etched souls in the 20th century.
Parents say they’re searching for “productive” outlets for their 8-year-olds’ obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they’re seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.
(16 April 2007)
Step It Up Rallies Take Aim at U.S. Congress
Haider Rizvi, Inter Press Service
Environmentalists say they are running out of patience with what they see as the snail’s pace of climate change legislation moving through the U.S. Congress.The weekend saw thousands of people taking to the streets, parks and beaches in towns and cities across the United States, amidst calls for Congress to pass a law that would require 80 percent cuts in climate-changing carbon emissions by 2050. 0416 01
Saturday’s rallies and actions, held in all 50 states, were part of the nationwide “Step It Up 2007″ campaign by scores of grassroots organisations.
Organisers of the campaign who declared Apr. 14 as the “National Day of Climate Action” said they were pleased that people from all walks of life, including students, peace activists, and religious leaders, participated in more than 1,400 actions nationwide.
“This is a wake-up call to legislators,” said one of the campaign leaders, Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of several books and articles on climate change.
From the east coast to the western shores, demonstrators gathered at hundreds of iconic locations that are considered vulnerable to the devastating effects of global warming.
(16 April 2007)
Also posted at Common Dreams. Related coverage of the Step It Up rallies:
Washington Post
NY Times
Death in the rainforest:
fragile creatures give the world a new climate warning
Ian Sample, The Guardian
A protected rainforest in one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots has suffered an alarming collapse in amphibians and reptiles, suggesting such havens may fail to slow the creatures’ slide towards global extinction.
Conservationists working in a lowland forest reserve at La Selva in Costa Rica used biological records dating from 1970 to show that species of frogs, toads, lizards, snakes and salamanders have plummeted on average 75% in the past 35 years.
Dramatic falls in amphibian and reptile numbers elsewhere in the world have been blamed on habitat destruction and the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which has inflicted a devastating toll across central and South America. But scientists hoped many species would continue to thrive in dedicated reserves, where building, land-clearance and agricultural chemicals are banned.
The new findings suggest an unknown ecological effect is behind at least some of the sudden losses and have prompted scientists to call for urgent studies in other protected forest areas.
(17 April 2007)
Leafy, green and good
Greg McPherson, LA Times
A recent study is giving trees a bad rap in the battle against global warming.
—-
AS THE EARTH’S temperature rises from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so too does the rhetoric of scientists and politicians. The very complex questions surrounding the causes and consequences of climate change already have been oversimplified, cast in black and white. Dangerously, the same has started to happen with discussions of possible solutions.
Trees, it seems, have become the bad guys.
Recent news stories suggest that there is one true answer to of global warming – transforming the way we produce energy, reducing carbon dioxide emissions at the source. Planting trees to combat climate change isa distraction from this solution, an “indulgence,” “the morning-after pill for fossil fuel gluttons,” a “dangerous illusion.”
One basis for these assertions is an article in the current issue of New Scientist reporting the findings of researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Carnegie Institution. Their computer models indicated that the dark leaves of trees in northern latitudes may absorb so much heat from the sun that they actually contribute to global warming. But that study compared leaves’ heat absorption with that of tundra and snow-covered ground, not pavement-covered Los Angeles.
The news reports failed to capture that detail, or outline the role that city trees play in fighting global climate change and their potential to do even more.
GREG MCPHERSON is director of the U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Urban Forest Research at UC Davis.
(16 April 2007)
