College of William and Mary: Global Warming
Journalist tells stories of the upcoming environmental catastrophe - 03/30/06
As the effects of global climate change become ever more visible, whether in the melting polar ice caps or the intensifying tropical hurricanes, the issue remains a non-news story, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert told an overflow audience gathered in Andrews Hall for the final Mellon Environmental Series lecture of the semester in late March.
Kolbert, a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1999, has received the American Association for the Advancement of Science's magazine writing award for her series on global warming, "The Climate of Man." Her stories have also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Mother Jones, and "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" and "The Best American Political Writing" anthologies.
At William and Mary, she introduced her topic by flatly stating, "I'm not an expert on global warming. I'm not a physicist, a geologist, a meteorologist, a chemist, a biologist, or a climatologist. I'm not a scientist. But I do something that scientists don't do-I tell stories."
She spoke about the difficulties journalists face when trying to tell the story of global warming, explaining that journalism traditionally breaks down coverages into two categories: (1) news stories dealing with specific events at specific times and places, and (2) controversies in which both sides are given fairly equal coverage. "But global warming is not a news story, and it is not a controversy-even though it is often presented that way," Kolbert said.
One of these findings was that temperature change would be fully evident by the year 2000, Kolbert stated. With the five warmest years on record since the 1890s occurring (in order of ascending heat) in 2004, 2003, 2002, 1998, and 2005, the premonitions of these earlier scientists seem validated. And in 2003, the vast majority of the scientific community publicly announced that natural influences cannot explain the changes in temperature.
