10/03/2020

Reporter’s Toolbox: New Resources Help Improve Climate Coverage

Society of Environmental Journalists - Susan Joy Hassol

Jeremy Hoffman, chief scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, shows journalists sea surface temperature data at an October 2019 climate workshop hosted by Climate Matters in the Newsroom, the Science Museum of Virginia and three Virginia universities. Photo: Courtesy Science Museum of Virginia.
Susan Joy Hassol
Susan Joy Hassol is the director of Climate Communication and has led the training of 400 journalists on climate issues.
She was the writer of the first three U.S. National Climate Assessments and an HBO documentary, “Too Hot Not To Handle.”
Susan has testified before the U.S. Senate, and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Climate change, once considered a problem for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present. Its impacts are affecting us here and now.
Americans are increasingly concerned and want to hear more about it in their news. A Yale and George Mason University survey reveals that 69 percent of Americans are worried about global warming, a dramatic 16 percent increase over the past five years.
But while they are increasingly concerned about it, two-thirds of Americans say they only hear about it in the media once a month or less.
Equally problematic to the paucity of climate reporting is how most climate stories are framed — as a political, scientific or environmental issue, rather than as a threat to our health, safety, security, food, water, energy and more.
Nor is there much coverage of solutions — of what people are doing about climate change. There is also a general failure among network television and local news outlets to connect extreme weather events to human-caused climate change, according to analyses by Media Matters for America and Public Citizen.
While heatwaves, wildfires and hurricanes receive a great deal of coverage, very little of that coverage makes the linkages to climate change clear.

 Climate reporting picks up steam
But a new day is dawning in climate journalism.
TV networks and newspapers are establishing more regular coverage and some are building their climate teams. An initiative led by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation called Covering Climate Now includes hundreds of media outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of more than a billion people.
As climate reporting is picking up steam, excellent new resources are available to journalists who are tackling the greatest story of our time.
 As climate reporting is picking up steam, excellent new resources are available to journalists who are tackling the greatest story of our time. 
Climate Matters in the Newsroom, supported by the National Science Foundation, for instance, provides free, weekly, localized climate reporting resources in English and Spanish, delivered directly to your inbox. These include broadcast-ready graphics and story ideas you can make your own by adding local context.
You can also search the media library of past story packages and graphics by topics and keywords for your media market and sign up to receive them weekly.
The Climate Matters in the Newsroom team also offers workshops for journalists at professional society meetings — including at Society of Environmental Journalists’ conferences in 2018 and 2019 — as well as with university partners in the Southeast United States. The workshops feature experts in climate science and solutions as well as journalists doing exemplary local climate reporting.

Avoid scientific jargon
A popular session in these workshops involves language tips for those covering climate, based on my three decades of experience in this arena.
David Boraks of WFAE in Charlotte, N.C., at center, talks with fellow journalists as they practice using new resources to tell local climate stories at a September 2019 climate reporting workshop. Photo: Courtesy Climate Matters
For example, I remind journalists to avoid adopting scientists’ jargon in their reporting. For instance, don’t say “anthropogenic,” say “human-caused.” Avoid “spatial” and “temporal;” instead use “space” and “time.”
I also stress that some words mean different things to scientists than they do to the public. For example, “aerosol” means “spray can” to the public, while scientists use it to refer to tiny atmospheric particles. Scientists use the term “enhance” to mean “increase,” while to the public, it means to improve (so the “enhanced greenhouse effect” sounds like a good thing).
And when scientists describe a vicious cycle in the climate system, whereby warming causes more warming, they use the term “positive feedback,” which to the public sounds like a good thing, as does anything associated with the word “positive.”
For more on the language of climate change, see my TEDx talk, articles in Eos and Physics Today, and my piece on communicating the linkages between extreme weather events called (Un)Natural Disasters, in the World Meteorological Organization Bulletin.

Connect the dots
Another great new resource helps journalists connect the dots between extreme weather events and climate change. These “Quick Facts for Any Story,” created by Climate Communication and SciLine, summarize the latest science on the linkages between climate change and heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires, and torrential rain and flooding.
Each “Quick Facts” begins with a top-line message that can be used in any story to make a scientifically supported connection between extreme weather events and global warming. Each also includes a list of key facts on the linkages with references to peer-reviewed studies, pitfalls to avoid and experts you can contact for quotes.
More of these are coming soon. And SciLine connects journalists with credible, articulate scientific experts on any topic, on deadline, for free.
Reporters are also commonly faced with oft-repeated myths about climate change, and Skeptical Science is a great resource for debunking them. The website provides both basic and intermediate rebuttals to all the most common talking points of those who reject the science of global warming.
And finally, my Climate Communication website offers a highly selective collection of resources including other websites, articles, reports and videos. Some of my favorites include Energy Innovation, Project Drawdown, Climate Interactive and the Yale Climate Opinion Maps.
Journalists have a great opportunity to report creatively on climate change. The public is particularly hungry to hear more about solutions to the climate crisis, including the policies and technologies that work to reduce climate-warming emissions and draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Reporters can find timely and accessible information at the resources above to enhance their ability to tell personal, local climate stories that matter to their audiences.

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Morrison Government Cuts Funds To Australian-German Energy Transition Hub

RenewEconomy - 



The Morrison government will strip funding from an Australian-German research collaboration charged with mapping a pathway for the countries to transition to a zero emissions energy system.

The unexpected move undermines recent announcements from the Morrison government that it will focus on the development of a ‘technology roadmap’ as an alternative to increasing national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, cutting funding to research that would inform what such a roadmap could look like.

As reported by the Guardian, the Morrison government will renege on the commitment to fund the research, originally instigated by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, ceasing government funding of the collaboration two years early.

The Energy Transition Hub was launched by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and Angela Merkel in 2017, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, and was supposed to run until 2022. The axing of funding is expected to deprive the research collaboration of approximately $2 million in funding.

The federal government was to provide $4 million over a five-year period, contributing to the $20 million overall budget of the Hub.

To date, the Hub has published a range of research papers exploring the impact of different policy mechanisms on the electricity sector, provided substantial submissions to the design of the National Energy Guarantee and supported the development of the popular OpenNEM platform, that provides an accessible portal for real-time data from the National Electricity Market.

The funding cut follows a speech by federal energy minister Angus Taylor during which the he outlined further details of the government’s proposed ‘technology roadmap’ for new energy technologies.

Taylor used the speech to detail how the Morrison government would shift its focus to emerging technologies, saying that support for new technologies like hydrogen fuels and carbon capture and storage were more important than providing additional support for already commercially viable technologies like wind and solar generation.

But a week later, the Morrison government has undermined its own messaging by cutting funding that sought to directly answer the question of which types of technologies and how regulatory systems should be reformed to support a transition to a new low emissions energy system.

The reasons for the funding cuts remain uncertain, but a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said that there was the potential for the funds to be redirected to other collaborations between Australia and Germany in clean energy technology development.

“The objectives of the Australian-German Energy Transition Hub were to strengthen Australia’s bilateral relationship with Germany and to better coordinate investments in research into energy transition,” a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.

“Funding was sourced from DFAT’s bilateral program for cooperation with Germany. Remaining funding will be reallocated to support our strategic priorities with Germany and other European partners more effectively, including potential collaboration with Germany on hydrogen.”

The Energy Transition Hub is a collaboration between Australian universities The University of Melbourne and The Australian National University, and German research institutions that included the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Münster University’s Centre of Applied Economic Research, and the Mercator Research Institute of Global Commons and Climate Change.

The Hub had also established a number of collaborative partnerships with other research institutions and universities in both Australia and Germany, including the University of Technology Sydney, RMIT University, Murdoch University, Monash University and the University of Tasmania.

The Hub focused on four areas key to a transition to a low carbon economy, including the design of energy market reforms and regulations, the technical challenges of transitioning to a high-renewables electricity supply, the deployment of negative emissions technologies and identifying export opportunities.

The most recent published work by the Energy Transition Hub examined how Australia could co-operate with Indonesia on the regional development of new renewable energy projects and how the Australian economy could benefit by capturing some of this emerging market.

Germany is significantly more progressed in the transition to renewables and reducing emissions across its economy compared to Australia. By 2019, Germany’s electricity grid was supplied by more than 40 per cent from renewable energy sources, predominantly from wind and solar projects.

Germany had also cut its national greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30 per cent since 1990, albeit short of its goal of reducing emissions by 40 per cent by 2020.

By comparison, Australia was expected to reach 27 per cent renewable electricity in 2020 and has succeeded in reducing its national emissions by just 12 per cent from 1990 levels.

Australian greenhouse gas emissions have flatlined under successive Coalition governments, and are just 1 per cent below 2013 levels when the Abbott government was first elected.

The chair of the research hub is Australian economist professor Ross Garnaut, with the Hub’s co-directors being Associate Professor Malte Meinshausen of the University of Melbourne and professor Frank Jotzo of the Australian National University.

The directors of the Energy Transition Hub are currently reviewing the next steps for the collaboration and will provide further comment when a way forward is known.

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Knitters Chronicle Climate Change One Stitch At A Time

New York Times - Laura M. Holson

Volunteers use different colors of yarn to make “temperature scarves” that serve as fashionable records of a warming world.
Rolls of yarn at the Yarnery in Saint Paul, Minn. Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times
In January 2017, days after President Trump moved into the White House, Justin Connelly was at his home in Anacortes, Wash., bemoaning the fate of scientists.
In speeches, the president called global warning a hoax. He vowed to disband the Environmental Protection Agency and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Worse, Mr. Connelly feared the Trump administration would purge climate information from government databases.
He wondered: Would scientists resort to using chisels and stone to preserve their findings? Or, perhaps, stitch them into tapestries?
Mr. Connelly’s friend, Emily McNeill, worked in a knitting store. The two decided (along with Mr. Connelly’s then wife, Marissa) to assemble a kit of colored yarns that knitters could use to create scarves that documented local temperature changes all year.
They would access data reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which knitters would represent in colors from sunny yellow to fiery red and icy blue. Mr. Connelly and his colleagues called the endeavor the Tempestry Project and, since then, they have sold more than 1,500 kits worldwide.
“We didn’t want this data lost forever,” he said.
Temperature scarves, as they are commonly called, have more than fashion appeal. Laura Guertin, a professor of earth science at Penn State Brandywine in Media, Pa., uses hers as a teaching aid in the classroom. Last year, Erika Zambello, who works for Audubon Florida, a conservation group, began organizing volunteers to record temperature changes at U.S. National Parks.
People knitting temperature scarves and other items at The Yarnery. Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times
So far, scarves have been knitted on behalf of 30 national parks, she said, including Glacier Bay and the Grand Canyon. More are on the way. Even Larry Fink, the chief executive of the investment firm BlackRock, recently wore a temperature scarf at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to call attention to the climate crisis.
“It’s a way to start a conversation about climate change that is different,” Ms. Zambello said. “Charts and graphs are fine, but they appeal to an analytic mind-set. This way you can talk about what the colors mean.”
No one can pinpoint exactly when the first temperature scarf emerged but many knitters point to the popularity of the “sky scarf” in the early 2010s.
Lea Redmond, a conceptual artist from Oakland, Calif., began knitting scarves in 2011 that reflected the weather. She did not intend it as a political statement on global warming but a reminder to appreciate nature. “It was about falling in love with the world you live in,” she said. “And if you love it, you will take care of it.”
Knitters stitch one row per day, matching the color to the daily temperature calculated by NOAA.
Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times		 A reference card matches yarn colors with temperatures.
Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times
Scientists, though, had other ideas. Quilts and blankets that track rainfall, air pollution and temperature have been around for awhile.
Ed Hawkins, a British climate scientist, came up with “warming stripes” in 2018, a series of lines of red, orange, white and blue, which he printed on ties, leggings and flip-flops as a visual reminder of long-term warming trends. In 2017, Dr. Guertin was inspired to crochet temperature tapestries to share with her students after seeing a quilt on Twitter.
She brought her tapestries to a class she teaches for nonscience majors. “It was a new way of looking at climate data,” she said.
Her students seemed to relate. One student recalled playing baseball outside in winter. Dr. Guertin said the student’s memory was triggered by the unusually warm colors in the February portion of the tapestry. “I don’t even have to say anything,” she said. “They just understand.”
Dr. Guertin now crochets baby blankets for friends, chronicling the daily temperature of a newborn’s first three months. “They show them to their friends and talk about it,” she said. “I’m turning them into science educators and they don’t even know it.”
The scarves can have different patterns, colors and textures. But there are a few basic concepts. Knitters knit one row per day, matching the color to the daily temperature calculated by NOAA. Some of them use beads to depict rain. Others add a strand of silver yarn for snow.
Scott Rohr is an owner of The Yarnery in St. Paul, Minn. He is concerned about the market for American wool, which, he said, is affected by climate change related to issues of water consumption and land use. The Yarnery offers kits for knitters, with prices ranging from $55 to $125. So far, it has sold about 400, he said.
Ms. Zambello was given a Tempestry kit in 2018. “It excited me in a way no other thing had in the craft space,” she said. “I immediately wanted to set up a Tempestry for the national park system, to show what we knew was changing.”
Whenever a scarf is finished, it is taken to a park and photographed there. Then they are posted on a website Ms. Zambello maintains. She said she hoped to turn the project into a book, with the proceeds donated to preserving national parks. “I want to work together to tell a bigger story,” she said.
Mr. Connelly said there was another byproduct to knitting a warming world that can’t be measured: calm.
“Clearly climate change is a concern and part of the zeitgeist of anxieties today,” he said. “Knitting is a comforting and meditative way to channel all those anxieties.”

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