National Science Foundation funds U. of Montana's rural environmental reporting initiative

University of Montana (Brooke Andrus)

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Montana’s School of Journalism $250,000 to improve the quality and quantity of environmental science news as it affects Montana's most rural communities. Martin Kidston of The Missoulian reports that this type of reporting is needed at a time when access to local news has decreased and when "the debates surrounding key environmental issues facing the West often take place in a vacuum, where choices are shaped by one’s political orientation and the opinions generated by the local rumor mill."

Alison Perkins, adjunct journalism instructor at UM, told Kidston that "the grant will help develop a model for reporting environmental science news, using student reporters who are studying environmental science and natural resource journalism at the graduate level as writers. 'I think there’s a climate that’s not really open to environmental stories because there’s the fear that they come from an advocacy position,' said Perkins."

The new program, dubbed Science Source, will be modeled after The Associated Press, working with editors in print, radio, online and television to identify and produce stories that fit the media’s specific needs and that reach the largest audience possible. (Read more)

Scientists' survey of last year concludes that Fox, Wall Street Journal misled on climate change

A new study contends that Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have greatly misled their audiences about climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that 93 percent of Fox broadcasts and "Wall Street Journal Editorial Report" TV programs about climate change from February through July, and 81 percent of Journal editorial pages from August 2011 through July 2012, were misleading.

The survey defined inaccurate information about climate change as citations that "questioned either the reality of climate change or the fact that recent climate change is largely due to human activities, or they advanced other arguments that dismissed established climate science."  Tim McDonnell of Mother Jones writes, "The climate change debate in America is still mired in bickering over whether the problem even exists or not." (Read more)

Scientists confirm human role in climate change, and become more forceful in challenging skeptics

Some of the weather extremes recently witnessed around the world have become far more likely because of human-induced global warming, researchers reported Tuesday.  Justin Gillis reports in The New York Times that a new study found "that global warming made the severe heat wave that afflicted Texas last year 20 times as likely as it would have been in the 1960s. The extremely warm temperatures in Britain last November were 62 times as likely because of global warming," the report found. The findings, writes Gillis, "especially the specific numbers attached to some extreme events, represent an increased effort by scientists to respond to a public clamor for information about what is happening to the earth’s climate. Studies seeking to discern any human influence on weather extremes have usually taken years, but in this case, researchers around the world managed to study six events from 2011 and publish the results in six months." The study was released along with a broader report on the state of the world’s climate. Both are to be published soon in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Gillis, The Times' environmental reporter, meanwhile, is among the targets of The American Tradition Institute (ATI), a conservative group that is using public records requests to publicize emails between reporters and climate scientists to suggest "collusion" between the media and environmental establishments, reports Greenwire (behind a pay wall, but a free trial can obtained by clicking here).

Scientists are beginning to argue more forcefully to the public that climate-change skeptics are ignoring well-established scientific facts. A dozen scientists at the University of Kentucky Wednesday what is known about the human role in climate change for readers of The Lexington Herald-Leader. The professors list what is recognized among scientists today: Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have increased steadily in the atmosphere since the mid-19th century; that increase is "well-correlated" with fossil-fuel consumption and changes in land use, and the gases trap increasingly more heat, so the surface, oceans and lower atmosphere are warming. (Herald-Leader photo by Charles Bertram)

"Multiple surveys of credentialed climate scientists show at least 96 to 98 percent agreement with these fundamentals," the scientists write, They note that the National Academy of Sciences has published a position statement affirming the fundamentals of human-induced climate change, as have over 100 other scientific societies, including the academies of all major democracies and the American Meteorological Society. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and many other federal departments and agencies have been studying climate change for years. An international, interdisciplinary collection of thousands of expert scientists has summarized the evidence for the central role of human activities in causing climate change, in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"As professors and publishing scientists, we are trained skeptics, and we look for credible evidence that refutes the fundamentals on climate change. However, it simply isn't there," the scientists write. "What about all the skeptical 'science' on the Internet? If those authors have the evidence to support what they say, they should submit a manuscript to a credible scientific journal, or present their ideas at a major scientific conference." (Read more)