Max Boykoff’s climate change and media coverage work was referenced in a Columbia Journalism Review article:

Climate change press’ pseudo boom
The Daily Climate reports a 30-percent spike in global warming coverage during 2013; social scientists disagree that the figure signals a rebound

by Alexis Sobel Fitts

Last week The Daily Climate released the its annual review of climate change coverage—a tally of major stories, by publication and topic, that the news service aggregated for readers over the course of 2013. The Daily Climate’s aggregation gives its readers “a broad sampling” of the day’s stories on climate change (as in, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive tracking), so the rundown isn’t meant to be statistically significant.

Still, the differences in the numbers year-by-year offer a broad overview of coverage and interesting subject and publication breakdowns. Though the last few years have seen diminishing coverage of global warming in the press, according to the Daily Climate’s Douglas Fischer, 2013 saw a jump in coverage of about 30 percent. In 2013 the Daily Climate’s staff aggregated about 24,000 news articles, which, while not 2007’s high of almost 29,000 stories, is a big jump from the 18,546 pieces the site posted in 2012.

Beyond the uptick in overall coverage, the figures showed, surprisingly, that most publications were increasing coverage of climate change and more journalists are covering the subject (8,825 to be exact, a 23-percent jump from 2012.) In fact, The New York Times, whose coverage dropped 10 percent in 2013 after dismantling its green desk was the only major publisher to have coverage drop:

Most major outlets gave climate and energy issues far more ink in 2013 than 2012: Bloomberg News was up 133 percent, the Globe and Mail doubled its reporting, USA Today boosted its effort 48 percent and stories in the Wall Street Journal, Sydney Morning Herald and the Financial Post each were up 40 percent, according to The Daily Climate’s archives.

Though it would be tempting to interpret these numbers, like several news organizations have, as signaling a rejuvenation of climate change reporting, the numbers don’t mesh with the work of social scientists. At the University of Colorado, Max Boykoff, who since 2000 has tracked climate coverage in the top five newspapers in the United States—The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post—found a drop in coverage in 2013. And Robert Brulle, a social scientist at Drexel University who monitors climate coverage on television news, said his preliminary data (measuring through the end of November 2013) found 30 stories, just a single story more than in 2012, which Brulle said was “statistically just a write off.”  Read more …

Max Boykoff’s media and climate change research highlighted in Daily Climate article

Climate coverage soars in 2013, spurred by energy, weather
by Douglas Fischer

Niche journalism

A growing universe of niche and mostly online publications such as Inside Climate also fueled the overall rise in climate coverage, media experts and the Daily Climate’s database suggest.

“Our work infiltrated in ways we never dreamed of,” Sassoon said. “I can’t say that our work has had a big influence on the uptick in the raw number of climate stories. But it is pretty evident to us that we’ve changed the quality and the substance of the national discourse.”

But that metric – how or whether the uptick in coverage has changed public opinion on climate change – is far more difficult to assess.

“When you look at public opinion data, it’s still the nightly news, believe it or not. That’s still the single biggest driver,” said Robert Brulle, a social scientist at Drexel University who monitors climate coverage and has spent time plumbing the depths of the Daily Climate’s archives.

Brulle’s tracking of TV news shows climate coverage was stable last year, with nightly news at ABC, NBC and CBS airing 30 stories, compared to 29 in 2012.

Nightly news’ impact

Brulle also works with media watchers at the University of Colorado who track climate change coverage in major news newspapers worldwide. That team’s data show a decline in coverage among the top five newspapers in the United States.

But those trackers, unlike The Daily Climate’s aggregation, count a story only if the words “global warming” or “climate change” appear.

“So a story all about the politics of Keystone, or Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) and his struggles with the White House, aren’t going to show up in our search,” Brulle said.

Those stories would be picked up by the Daily Climate’s team of part-time researchers, who scour the web twice daily. Read more …

CSTPR Alum Joel Gratz in The New York Times

In Pursuit of Powder? Tips for Finding It
by Cindy Hirschfeld

It’s every skier’s dream: to arrive at a resort just after a good storm, take one of the first lift rides up and ply delightfully fresh, powdery tracks. The reality, though, is that most of us can’t drop everything to chase storms. We have to plan a ski trip in advance. That means the odds of finding good snow, let alone a powder day (often defined as six or more inches of new snow), requires some strategizing.

The simplest trick (other than forking over a lot of money for a snowcat or heli-skiing trip, and even that’s no guarantee) is to pick a resort known for receiving prodigious amounts of snow.

But start talking to meteorologists and others who track snowfall, and it turns out it’s not so simple. The vagaries of mountain weather mean that snow conditions in a couple of months are nearly impossible to predict accurately.

“I really hate planning trips too far in the future, because you never know what’s going to happen,” said Joel Gratz, a Boulder, Colo.-based meteorologist and co-founder of the opensnow.com website, which specializes in ski-targeted forecasting. “Hope isn’t in my vocabulary.” Read more …

Roger Pielke, Jr. was quoted in The Oklahoman News on tornadoes and climate change.

Strong tornadoes not linked to climate change, experts say
At a U.S. House of Representatives hearing, researchers said there is no evidence linking severe weather events to climate change, despite frequent claims to the contrary.

by Chris Casteel

No evidence exists that climate change has led to more tornadoes or stronger ones, experts said Wednesday at a House hearing exploring the links between global warming and severe weather events.

“Tornadoes in the United States have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since 1950,” said Roger Pielke Jr., the director of the Center of Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado.

“And based on research we’ve done, there’s some evidence in fact that they’ve actually declined — the strongest tornadoes.”

Pielke was one of three researchers from U.S. universities who testified before a House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee about severe weather and climate change. The Republican-controlled subcommittee sought to debunk oft-cited claims that climate change has contributed to severe droughts and storms in recent years.

Two of the witnesses, Pielke and University of Alabama researcher John Christy, have been criticized by some environmentalists for their views on climate change. Both dismissed any link between climate change and hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes and floods. Read more …