Climate Change

by Mark Bowen,
Dutton, 336 pages, $25.95

Reviewed by Craig Pittman

On June 23, 1988, a scientist named Jim Hansen spent five minutes talking to a Senate committee. Hansen said he was 99 percent sure the Earth was getting warmer because of the greenhouse effect, and he predicted that 1988 would turn out to be one of the warmest years on record.

Althoughhe spoke inanIowa-bredmonotone, Hansen's testimony electrified the committee hearing.When he tried to leave,Hansen was surrounded by reporters.

By BILL KOVARIK

In 2006, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth dominated The New York Times best seller list. But in 2007, Glenn Beck's swaggering rebuttal, An Inconvenient Book, topped the same list with the idea that climate change is "the greatest scam in history."

While Beck's book has little chance of outselling Gore's book over the long run, the paradox illustrates a larger problem in the environmental publishing industry: serious science is a hard sell.

 By BUD  WARD

The hard truth of the matter is that few of the reporters most likely to read this column will be in a good position to ask the presidential election front runners or nominees penetrating questions about environmental policy.

Few of them may have the opportunity, even briefly along a rope line, to probe a candidate's familiarity with "cap and trade" versus carbon taxes, wetlands restoration versus coastal development, nuclear energy versus coal versus biofuels versus conservation.

    
      An Interview With Beth Daley of  The Boston Globe

   By BILL DAWSON

Beth Daley began her Journalistic career 19 year ago at the Newburyport Daily News in
northern Massachusetts.  In 1994, she joined The Boston Globe, where she has covered breaking news
and features and was the education reporter before moving to the environment beat in 2001.

By MARK NEUZIL

Editor's note: We are fortunate to be able to excerpt a small bit of The Environment and the Press: From Adventure Writing to Advocacy, by Mark Neuzil, that many SEJ members will find interesting, a history of environmental journalism and its roots. We have removed the footnotes from this section, taken from Chapter Two, "Journalism's Prophetic Voice." 

By PETER DYKSTRA

When Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species in May, the political trench warfare over global warming flared up anew. Environmental groups professed surprise that a reluctant Bush Administration acted at all. Global warming deniers said the decision was ludicrous. They cited a polar bear population — a five-fold increase since the 1970s, a doubling since the 1950s, a quadrupling since the 1960s.