Russian adventures UNDER the North Pole
10:16 AM PDT, August 3, 2007
Russia continues to press its case for controlling fully half of the Arctic Ocean and what lies beneath -- right up to the North Pole. I posted a report on the submarine mission to the seabed under the Pole on The Times blog The Lede.
Writing on the climate challenge for a new audience...
6:44 PM PDT, May 27, 2007
I've written hundreds of articles on global warming for The New York Times and a book for younger readers on climate change and the Arctic. But I haven't focused on older folk, until now, with a feature story and narrated slideshow on the climate and energy challenge for AARP's magazine and web site.
The story is here and the slideshowhere. Pass them around. urls here: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/global_meltd own.html http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/global_meltd own_gallery.html PBS and Center for Investigative Reporting on Politics & Climate Science
6:43 AM PDT, April 25, 2007
PBS's Frontline show interviewed me at length for its program showing how Republicans and Democrats alike have dropped the ball on global warming. Worth a look. Heaps of additional content in this multimedia effort including Center for Investigative Reporting. Tough issue to compress into a short program, but good to see TV trying. It's all viewable online here.
Ulp, I'm in Mens Journal's Environmental Hall of Fame
6:43 AM PDT, April 20, 2007
Check out the May 2007 issue of Mens Journal for an unsual assortment of 15 "unsung heroes fighting to save our damn planet." Unfortunately, no online content. The featured guys range from Terry Tamminen, the architect of Governor Arnold's environmental platform, to Alan Rabinowitz, the defender of all manner of toothsome wild cats. And then there's this muckraking, pole-wandering journalist... : - )
You can see my latest articles at the new simplified url for my home page:www.nytimes.com/revkin First global warming impacts in Third World; who owes what to whom?
5:43 PM PDT, April 4, 2007
Been writing all this week on some sticky questions related to global warming -- particularly on the reality that the biggest vulnerabilities to climate and coastal hazards are in the world's poorest places, which for the most part have not yet added significantly to the atmosphere's burden of greenhouse gases, which scientists say are likely to exacerbate climate-related risks.
A lot of neat elements here. Particularly notable is my former colleague Bill Steven's prescient piece on winners & losers in a warming world (clickable in box at left of page) -- from way back in 1991. Still relevant right now. The "Anthrocene" era -- of a human-shaped Earth.
10:26 AM PST, February 7, 2007
It's useful to re-read one's own books once in awhile.
I was just going back through Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, which was published by Abbeville Press in 1992 and was the companion volume to the first museum exhibition on climate change, at the American Museum of Natural History. Given how much has both changed and remained the same about human-forced climate change, I wanted to review how I'd described things early on. The book holds up quite well, as it happens. Some things have certainly changed. Global-warming theory didn't include the notion of abrupt change back then before the Greenland ice cores' record of ancient climate was extracted. But now the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that such changes are "very unlikely" in the next 100 years in any case, so maybe less has changed than we think. One thing did catch my eye particularly. On page 55, I closed a chapter on the growing human influence on the atmosphere with a proposed name for this era of human-shaped Earth systems -- the "Anthrocene." I wrote: "We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene. After all, it is a geological age of our own making. The challenge now is to find a way to act that will make geologists of the future look upon this age as a remarkable time, a time in which a species began to take into account the long-term impact of its actions. The alternative will be to leave a legacy of irresponsibility and neglect that will manifest itself in the fossil record as just one more mass extinction -- like the record of bones and empty footprints left behind by the dinosaurs." Recently, a slightly different (and probably technically more appropriate) phrase, the "Anthropocene," has emerged, coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-winning atmospheric chemist, and Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen, P. J., and E. F. Stoermer. 2000. The "Anthropocene". Global Change Newsletter. 41: 12-13.). It has popped up in quite a few media accounts and books since then. I'd love to find out if anyone can track down any references to a proposed naming of this era along these lines (Anthrocene, Anthropocene, etc) before 1992. This is my beat for the rest of my career, and it'd be kind of fun to think I came up with an appropriate name for it all those years ago. Thanks! - Andy (please correspend via revkin@nytimes.com ) Big Climate Update
7:18 AM PST, February 2, 2007
It makes it worth staying up til midnight and getting up at 3 a.m. when we can produce this by 9 a.m.>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/science/earth/02 cnd-climate.html We're inviting reader comment and questions (see below)> http://questions.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/a-re ader-forum-on-climate-change People should weigh in, especially young people. It's their climate and coasts that are being shaped by decisions being made (or not made!) now. More Heat
3:06 PM PST, January 8, 2007
Carl Pope of the Sierra Club blogged on Huffington today on my story from 1/1/07 on the "new climate middle" -- a heap of climate experts calling for prompt meaningful action to limit long-term risks from warming instead of implying a dramatic fix would achieve short-term results. Here's what I said to him (although this is my full comment; Huffington limits responses to 350 words): I'm glad the headline (which I did not write nor get a chance to vet... normal) and lede caught your attention, and I'm glad you're encouraging folks to read on.
To some extent, I have to offer the same defense I used in responding to Dave Roberts on Huffington and Grist before.
While it may be old news to Carl and many Huffington readers that virtually all serious scientists agree that more CO2 will make the world warmer (thanks in part, hopefully, to my 20 years of coverage ), this does not mean most Americans have absorbed this point yet.
There are tens of millions of disengaged or doubtful or simply uninformed people out there, many of whom shy away from loud voices. For them, the public discourse is largely (and incorrectly) a big Fox-style debate.
My goal was to point out that *even* the normally-invisible middle in climate science sees human-forced warming as dangerous and requiring a prompt response.
Can't make the point more clearly than it was made here:
"Dr. Hulme and others avoid sounding alarmist, but offer scant comfort to anyone who doubts that humans are contributing to warming or believes the matter can be deferred."
Those voices in this story, and the many like them who didn't fit into it, cannot honestly be left out of the legitimate debate about how best to limit climate risks in a human-warmed world.
There is no debate on the basic science (more CO2 = warmer world = less ice = higher seas), but there are many differing views on how to respond. An entirely different group of experts, for example, insist that no one in the louder discourse (left or right) is adequately highlighting the grossly inadequate research effort these days on less-polluting energy options (particularly next-generation solar). Without breakthroughs, they say, it will be herculean even to blunt the rise in greenhouse emissions, let alone reverse it. More on that is in my 10/30/06 piece in our Energy Challenge series:
Onward, Andy R The Hot Seat
8:03 PM PST, January 1, 2007
I wrote today about the climate "middle" -- experts on global warming science & policy who don't see much value in the heated scary rhetoric these days trying to trigger meaningful societal engagement by linking human climate influence to recent weather extremes -- an exercise fraught with uncertainty.
Every person in the story sees human-triggered warming as a keystone environmental issue in this century, but they have widely divergent views on how to explain that to the average person and policymakers. Worth a read. Generating quite a few sparks. One veteran climate scientist sent out a mass email today saying I've done a "great disservice" by writing it and concluded "shame on you." Some more commentary on it is on Daily Kos here: And Roger Pielke Jr's Prometheus blog here (he's quoted in the story, mind you). Best wishes for 2007 and beyond, Andy R. Open water up top sooner than expected?...
1:51 PM PST, December 12, 2006, updated at 5:48 PM PST, December 18, 2006
Well, the latest modeling studies and observations of Arctic trends bode poorly for polar bears and well for investors and companies seeking shipping routes and energy prospects around the North Pole. I have a story in The Times on research projecting a possible 2040 arrival date for a summertime blue-water Arctic Ocean. Worth a look. Some neat links in the piece to animations generated by the model and more.
But, as always up north, it's complicated. Another new analysis, by Mike Winton of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, questions the idea of melting thresholds: www.gfdl.noaa.gov/%7Emw/docs/sici.pdf I hope you'll consider The North Pole Was Here as a holiday gift. It's the only book out there putting the scientists exploring global and Arctic climate change out front and letting the science speak for itself. A mere $10 and change on amazon.com! To hear more on my views on media & climate & politics, check out the NPR show On the Media, which interviewed me following up on the Senate hearing last week. Best wishes for the holidays!
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Bio
Since 1995, I've been a reporter for THE NEW YORK TIMES, covering environmental issues and, once in a sad while, calamities (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami). I'm also an author of books on the AMAZON, GLOBAL WARMING, and the NORTH POLE. In spare moments, I'm a performing songwriter and part of a fun retro-rootsy band called UNCLE WADE (www.myspace.com/unclewade).
I live in New York's Hudson River Valley with my wife (a middle-school science teacher) and two sons (8 and 15). My passions are family, music, and the truth. I write about music once in awhile. One story, on a tribute-band singer who replaced the lead singer of Judas Priest in 1997, was the basis for the movie ROCK STAR, starring Mark Wahlberg & Jennifer Aniston.
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