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The Struggle Over Local Media: An Interview With Eric Klinenberg (Part One)

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:31:09 +0000

By Henry Jenkins

Earlier this summer, I moderated a panel on "News, Nerds and Nabes': How Will Future Generations of Americans Learn About the Local" as part of a conference which the MIT Center for Future Civic Media hosted for the Knight Foundation. My panelists were Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University and author of Fighting for Air:The Battle to Control America's Media. Our topic of discussion was the crisis in American local media -- particularly the decline in local newspapers. In this exchange, I tried to take panelists through core assumptions about the value of local media, the current threats it confronts, and possible scenarios through which citizens could play a more active role in reshaping the flow of information in their communities.

Following from conversations we had at the conference, Klinenberg agreed to be interviewed for this blog. His book, Fighting for Air, emerged prior to the increased public visibility which has surrounded these issues and so it may not be fully on the radar of many invested in rethinking the infrastructure for civic media. I'd gotten to know Eric through our mutual participation in a series of conversations hosted by the Aspen Institute on media policy and was delighted to have the chance to share his perspective with the readers of this blog. In the conversation that follows, we not only discuss issues surrounding local media but also talk a little bit about the cultural politics of media reform.

You published Fighting For Air almost two years ago. How would you evaluate the state of local media now as opposed to then?

Let's start counter-intuitively, with some good news: There's actually strong demand for local news and information. We all know that paying subscribers of print newspapers are an endangered species, that fewer of us watch local news on TV, and that, except for a few public stations, local news and music on the radio died in the 1990s. But local content is flourishing online. For instance, no matter where you're reading this, odds are that the overall readership for your local paper is higher than it has been in years. The problem is that fewer of us are willing to pay for journalism, and now, as a consequence, stories that you may want or need to know are beginning to disappear.

Some have faith that the supply of local reporters who do primary journalism will be replenished by new players in the emerging media eco-system. Today they can point to any number of innovative local news websites, from Crosscut to Voice of San Diego, which offer a glimpse of the world after newspapers. Others go further, arguing that the next generation of news outlets will be better than the one that is now dying off. After all, how many of us were satisfied with our local news options before the current media crisis?

I'm not persuaded. At the very least, it would be hard to argue that bloggers and citizen journalists have already replaced the beat reporters who, not long ago, were the best watchdogs we had at the Statehouse, City Hall, the school system, the local business scene, and the like. And what a time to lose them! The federal government is spending trillions of dollars on an economic bailout and stimulus package, and much of this money will go directly to states, municipalities, or the private sector. Does anyone trust them to police themselves, especially now that so few reporters are covering them?

I agree with David Simon (creator of The Wire), who recently told Congress that there's never been a better time to be a corrupt politician.

Right now, the focus is on the closing or threatened closing of a number of local newspapers around the country. Yet, Fighting for Air situates this decline in local newspapers in a larger context where the consolidation of media ownership has also impacted local radio and television. To what extent is the current concern about newspapers linked to that larger set of trends?

Directly. First of all, key elements of the journalism crisis pre-date the broader economic crisis. Take the loss of reporters. The layoffs started when big chains - Gannett is the classic example - began buying up papers throughout the country, driving out their smaller competitors (sometimes by violating antitrust law, as Fighting for Air reports), and then slashing their own editorial staffs to raise revenue. As monopolies, newspapers were fantastically lucrative, earning annual profit margins of 20, 30, or 40 percent, while the typical Fortune 500 company was getting a margin of 5 or 6 percent. The most entrepreneurial companies - Gannett, Tribune, and Knight Ridder, to name a few - went on feeding frenzies. They borrowed heavily to finance acquisitions of new papers, television stations, and all kinds of entertainment enterprises. They wanted to become giants, but to do so they had to load up with enormous debts.

As we now know, many of the properties they acquired turned out to be losers. Today newspapers have plenty of competitors for revenue. They've lost most of their classifieds. Their advertisers are cutting back, or posting ads online at a fraction of the price they used to pay to be in print. Their audience is refusing to subscribe if they can get content for free. The local TV stations they purchased are also in trouble. And the industry's technological fantasy, that they could merge print, TV, and Internet reporters into efficient and more profitable multimedia operations, just hasn't panned out.

The challenges of transforming newspaper companies for the digital age are formidable. The current economic climate is brutal, especially because the most reliable sources of newspaper ad dollars - car dealers, real estate developers, and department stores, to name a few - are all on life support. But what's driving newspaper companies over the edge is that they cannot just deal with these crises. They also have to service their crippling debts, and some just can't pull it off.

Look at what's happened to the great newspaper chains: Knight Ridder is out of business. Tribune is bankrupt. Gannett may well follow. Even the New York Times is teetering. When we autopsy these great corporations, the rise of the Internet or the recession may well look like the primary causes of death. Less visible, but equally lethal, is the self-inflicted damage done by their own executives. They weren't satisfied to run newspapers. They wanted to run conglomerates. And now we are all paying the price.

Throughout your book, you keep returning to the question of how local communities respond to disasters -- from storms to chemical leaks. Can you use that problem as an example to walk through some scenarios for how local communities may receive information in the future?

Disasters have always shaped U.S. media policy. Miscommunication on the airwaves after the Titanic went down helped to inspire the nation's first broadcast regulations, and (as the opening of Fighting for Air reports a dramatic failure of communication after a toxic spill in Minot, North Dakota triggered the most important development in recent media policy history: the emergence of millions of media activists, who collectively helped block a radical de-regulatory push from President Bush's appointees on the FCC.

Since the Cold War, the core public service responsibility of American broadcasters has involved issuing alerts during emergencies (who doesn't remember those radio announcements saying, "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. It is only a test"?), and then reporting on the aftermath. But that system has broken down, in part because of technological failures, and in part because digital voice tracking systems have replaced so many of the live human beings who once worked as radio reporters and DJs. Given our tempestuous climate, today all of us should know where we would turn for information if disaster strikes. But if the power goes out and your Internet service shuts down, what are you going to do?

In theory, mobile communications technologies are ideal for circulating emergency alerts (with, say, a reverse 911 program) and urgent news items. In practice, however, they haven't worked because our communications infrastructure is so shoddy. If you were in New Orleans during Katrina or New York City on 9/11, you were much better served by a battery operated radio than by a cell phone. There are many lessons from these events, and one of them is that "securing the homeland" (as our federal officials like to say) is going to require a far greater investment in building an information infrastructure than we are currently making.

Eric Klinenberg is Professor of Sociology at New York University. His first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, won six scholarly and literary prizes (as well as a Favorite Book section from the Chicago Tribune). A theatrical adaptation of Heat Wave premiered in Chicago in 2008, and a feature documentary based on the book is currently in production.

Klinenberg's second book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media, was called "politically passionate and intellectually serious," (Columbia Journalism Review). Since its publication, he has testified before the Federal Communications Commission and briefed the U.S. Congress on his findings.

Klinenberg is currently working on two new projects. One, a study of the problem of urban security, examines the rise of disaster expertise, the range of policy responses to emerging concerns about urban risk and vulnerability, and the challenge of cultivating a culture of preparedness. The other project is a multi-year study of the extraordinary rise in living alone. He reported on parts of this research in a recent story for NPR's This American Life, and is now working on a book, Alone in America, which will be published by The Penguin Press.

In addition to his books and scholarly articles, Klinenberg runs the NYU Urban Studies seminar, and writes for popular publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Slate.

Related stories in the Worldchanging archives:

Discussion Piece: Why We Need a National Endowment for Journalism

The Final Word on the Death of Newspapers?

This piece originally appeared in Henry Jenkin's blog, Confessions of an Aca-fan.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 12:31 PM)

FilmAid: Informing and Entertaining Refugees through the Power of Film

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:06:38 +0000

Nominated by the Worldchanging team

Nonprofit, humanitarian aid organization FilmAid travels to refugee camps around the world to provide entertainment and essential education through film. Millions of people live in refugee camps, and many of them are illiterate. FilmAid can educate thousands at a time by featuring films about hygiene, reproductive health, and the prevention of cholera and malaria. Last year, FilmAid brought their big screen to more than 250,000 people living in camps in Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Eritrea, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In addition to showing films to refugee populations, the organization also gives them access to equipment to make their own films. Through their Refugee Filmmaking Program, FilmAid helps people create short films depicting their lives, and their communities' concerns and issues.

Watch their introductory film here.

This piece is part of Worldchanging's Attention Philanthropy campaign. All week long, the Worldchanging Network will be delivering "attention grants" to worthy projects, individuals, resources and more. You can learn more about these gifts of notice and find other entries by clicking here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 8:06 AM)

FilmAid: Informing and Entertaining Refugees through the Power of Film

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:06:38 +0000

Nominated by the Worldchanging team

Watch their introductory film here.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 8:06 AM)

The Uptake: Collaborative Online Citizen Journalism

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:30:46 +0000

Nominated by Sarah Kuck

As newspaper giants continue to go under, many news readers and creators continue to speculate on what will take their place. One answer: citizen journalism. A conglomeration of bloggers and freelancers has emerged to fill the void by writing, recording and producing their own news.

Some are even organizing. One such group is collaborative news site The Uptake, which wants you to think about whether the news "will be done to you or by you?" Creator Chuck Olsen has made the site a space where video-focused, citizen journalists can gather to post the latest news stories and commentary. So far, the site has journalists in California, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas and Washington, D.C.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 9:30 AM)

The Uptake: Collaborative Online Citizen Journalism

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:30:46 +0000

Nominated by Sarah Kuck

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 9:30 AM)

The Research Channel: Offering In-Depth Access to Leading Institutions

Hassan Masum — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Every WorldChanging reader is familiar with TEDTalks. The longer lectures at the Research Channel are an excellent complement. With over 3500 lectures from leading research institutions on everything from low-cost diagnostics to new space technologies, it's a nice way to go in-depth during the summer.

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(Posted by Hassan Masum in Media at 8:20 AM)

Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars: Now a Radio Series

Hassan Masum — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:20:46 +0000

The security dimensions of climate change provide the backdrop for Dyer's Climate Wars, an unflinching look at potential geopolitical consequences of rising seas and falling water and food supplies. The core text is interspersed with scenarios from the future about tensions evolving into conflicts. Reads near-apocalyptically in places, but gets realpolitik-oriented readers to take the climate issue seriously.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has done a radio series based on the book, available online.

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(Posted by Hassan Masum in Media at 7:20 AM)

Chris Csikszentmihayli and a Complex Vision of Citizen Media

Ethan Zuckerman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:15:14 +0000

Chris Csikszentmihayli opens the morning’s session at MIT’s Knight News Challenge conference with an overview of his view of the world - “It’s my view from MIT - MIT wouldn’t endorse it, they’ve been quite specific about that,” he quips, a reference to the university’s unfortunate decision not to grant him tenure. Chris is now focusing on managing the Center for Future Civic Media, and outlines one of the most exciting projects, ExtrAct. The project calls attention to the process of natural gas extraction via fracturing, a process that exposes millions of rural Americans to incredibly toxic chemicals. ExtrAct tries not just to document the practices of fracturing, but to help rural, poor, highly disconnected people organize, get media attention and fight some of the harmful effects of these practices.

What do we, as a society want, Chris wonders. A free and just society. Journalism, openness and transparency and democracy have all emerged as means to that end. Technology, leveraged correctly, can sometimes be a means to that end. Sometimes technology is the enemy of a free and just society. Alan Kay famously said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Some scholars have suggested that tools control what we can do. Yochai Benkler proposes that it’s not just about the tools, but about how we use them. Bruno Latour suggests that “technology is society made durable.”

Last night’s talk, Chris summarizes, was the “rending of garments” about the death of the daily newspaper. He points out that newspapers put another group out of work, “people so dedicated to their work that they took oaths of celibacy.” (He resists the inevitable geek puns.) The press put the monks out of work. But technology isn’t evenly distributed - head to a city in the developing world and you’ll find scribes, often organized around the post office so they can help illiterate people write letters. (I’ve seen scribes in cybercafes in Kigali…) The Media Lab, Chris tells us, makes its money from fear, taking funds from sponsors who are slowly going out of business, like the recording industry. The implication, I think, is that documenting these changes - and demonstrating their inevitability - is a useful service for helping corporations accept and cope with this change.

To frame the ideas of user innovation and open source software, Chris shows us how “diff” and patching works - the ability to compare two files on a computer system and send the changes between the two. This is the fundamental idea behind the improvability of open source software, and underlies versioning systems like Subversion and Mercurial.

User-driven innovation, as described by Eric Von Hippel, involves motives other than making a profit - users who improve products often just want a specific functionality available to the world. They don’t need to sell it, just to have it be usable. Open source projects are political spaces - they’re like community organizing projects. They need to be optimized to allow lightweight participation and contribution. He shows the structure of Linux versus Mozilla - as Mozilla moved from a commercial product into a community one, the structure had to change so that people could add code without having to learn about thousands of dependencies.

What tools allow uprisings to take place? Chris is interested in SMS and its role in organizing protests in places like the Philippines. “Governments would love it if these tools weren’t around” - that’s why they shut down SMS during elections. But other tools end up being useful, even if they’re less obvious. Planespotting websites allowed researchers to break the CIA torture flights story - the data was never intended to study torture, but it proved useful for another, critical purpose. This leads Chris to emphasize the importance of laws and practices that ensure an open and free press in a digital age. This might mean supporting Open Street Maps instead of Google Maps, so the maps are reusable and reproducible. It might mean supporting edge figures like Richard Stallman - who Chris analogizes to Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, killed in the early 1800s for his support in print for abolition.

Chris closes his talk with remarks on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote not just political philosphy but “bodice-ripper novels”. These novels allowed individuals to “live in the skin of others”, experience the empathy that comes from living for a while as a servant or a noble. The daily paper, he believes, can give a sense of community empathy, the ability to live another’s experience through storytelling. That’s something we need to preserve and cultivate as we move into a digital future.

This article originally appeared in Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My heart's in Accra.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/misplacedparadox.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 12:15 PM)

Local Perspectives At Beyond Broadcast 2009

Ethan Zuckerman — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:23:42 +0000

The opening panel discussion at BeyondBroadcast is titled "Local Perspectives" and it invites citizen media innovators from around the world to show off their work. Unfortunately for the schedule, the panel includes six terrific speakers, roughly twice as many as could fit in the allotted time.

Myoungjoon Kim of MediaAct in Korea, a community media center, tries to explain the unique features of the Korean media climate. Korea has a level of bandwidth that makes the US look pretty pathetic. Actvist media emerged at the same time as Korea reformed along neoliberal lines. Media was deregulated, and there was a recognition that community media couldn't just include traditional broadcast media, but needed media education, community radio, and community centers that allowed people to create media. The work his organization does offers more than 200 courses to more tha 5000 members who work to create media in a South Korean context. He tells us that for his work to succeed, he'll need broad alliances, need for reforms in policy structure and increased infrastructure to teach media.

Lova Rakotomalala, Global Voices correspondent for Madagascar, talks about the relationship between citizen media and the political crisis in his come country. 2009 has been extremely trying for Malagasy - the two cyclones that have left thousands homeless have barely made the news. Instead, the little international attention that focuses on Madagascar has focused on a political crisis - public protests which have led to a military takeover. Not only has there been little reporting on the crisis - media companies have been providing divisive propoganda, not helpful reporting.

This situation has led Malagasy to fear democracy - less than 24% of the popular now express enthusiasm for democratic government. There's widespread resentment towards the international community for perceived meddling in Malagasy affairs. And it's clear that Madagascar needs a comprehensive agricultural policy.

Lova was one of the founders of FOKO Madagascar - founded in the wake of TED Africa in Arusha by Harinjaka, a prominent Malagasy blogger, the goal of the project was to help Madagascar become more digitally literate and present, and to send the message that Madagascar is "open for business". Lova quotes Mike Tyson - "Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the mouth." As the crisis spread in Madagascar, Foko began documenting protests in the street, trying to fill the gap in international reporting.

Citizen media in Madagascar includes not just the FOKO bloggers on the ground, but a network of 55 bloggers living in five countries. They use blogs, Flickr, twitter and SMS to communicate, and their perspectives are aggregated on Rising Voices and Global Voices. By working with Ushahidi and Frontline SMS, the project is able to involve a much broader group than just the 160,000 internet users in Madagascar - it reaches 2.2 million mobile phone users. This work has led to international attention, including stories on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. This is great, but there's still only news coming from Antananarivo in mainstream media, while Foko reports from five different cities.

While the internet reaches very few Malagasy, it's critical for the diaspora, and for the public perception of Madagascar. The current government wants international recognition and has proven willing to intimidate journalists and bloggers - there's a desperate need for a structure to protect these reporters. But we're also seeing evidence that social media helps organize social movements, like the movement to free Razily, which ultimately succeeded in releasing the young man who led Madagascar's "Tiananmen moment."

Juana Ponce De Leon of the New York Community Media Alliance talks about finding ways to amplify voices that must be heard. Her organization represents 350 weekly and bimonthly populations, representing 90 communities and 50 languages. The organization began as a set of programs for the New York independent press association, but took on special importance in the wake of 9/11, helping bring voices and stories from the Muslim world into the press during a tense and stressful time.

NYCMA doesn't focus on original reporting - their work is primarily about translation. "It's a forum for people who make this media" to bring coverage of communities to a wider audience. While the website doesn't get overwhelming traffic - about 20,000 visits a week - it's read heavily by NY city and state government agencies.

Ponce De Leon explains that the economic slump has hit her members hard. Little businesses that support community media are having financial problems, and they're sometimes unable to support local media. There's a shift from print to internet, but it's much slower than in mainstream media. Roughly 39% of the organizations she works with have strong, interactive websites. Some are moving directly to internet radio, which is likely to serve as a hub to facilitate connections for diaspora communities.

In the near future, the main focus is on the 2010 census. New York has at least 150 languages represented in the school system - it's extremely worrisome that the census is being conducted only in seven languages.

Daudi Were, legendary Kenyan blogger, starts his talk with a story about Kenyan prisons. Every ten years or so, Kenya's prisons explode in violence. Each time, the minister of home affairs is dispatched to the prison to write a study on what's going on. Daudi tells us that, decades ago, a prisoner tried to hand the minister a letter - he turned away, not acknowledging it, and the prisoner was later beaten. Fast forward to today, Daudi tells us, when some of the ministers had been in prison in the 1980s. They can ignore what's going on in the prisons, but video ends up being released and news gets out - newsrooms get mobile phone footage of wardens beating prisoners to death.

Digital tools, he tells us, are bringing people into conversations even when people are reluctant to address the issues at hand. Democracy is government by discussion, and Daudi tells us, it's based around the idea that the other person has something to say that's worth listening to. Decisionmaking by discussion is very African - if you marry a woman, you may end up spending a long day negotiating her dowry. You could probably complete the debate in ten minutes, but the discussion takes forever because you're avoiding conflict. That's what decisionmaking structures like Indabas are about - we have discussions until we can work through most conflicts.

Blogs today create a new space for discussion. "Blogging is probably the most African thing you can do online today. I'm pretty confident that if my grandmother had the internet, she would have been a blogger."

It's not content that's king, Daudi tells us - it's content and community. This is one of the strenghts of Global Voices, he argues - bloggers discover that there's a community that has their back. This is also a strongly African idea - "Ubuntu means "You are, therefore I am'". Identity and existence is a function of community.

The rise of new media in Africa is exciting, but it can be very scary. It's fun to watch the Kenyan government put exam results online and have servers taken down from the load of proud grandparents in Canada logging online to read them. But when Kibaki declared himself the winner of the 2007 elections and began naming ministers, Daudi tells us, the new ministers' farms were burning before Kibaki finished reading the statement. Violence can spread as well as opinion, information and news. The lesson, Daudi tells us, is that people want to be relevant and want to be heard - if we can't find ways to let them speak, they'll burn things instead.

Antonio Cruz introduces himself as being from the country of the country of Manny Pacquiao. If you don't know who that is, you're not a boxing fan, but you've got something in common with most of the folks in the USC audience. The Phillippines are an enormous country, the 15th most populous, and it's a country that's has a huge diaspora and a population scattered over thousands of islands. It should come as no surprise that the country has embraced the mobile phone, with 70 of 90 million residents owning phones.

TXTPower, the organization that Cruz helped to found, helps organize citizens and consumers via mobile phones. Huge demonstrations helped topple the previous government and bring President Gloria Arroyo to power… and a clever ringtone campaign almost toppled her. And major consumer movements are organizing against mobile phone tarrifs and taxes.

TXTPower's methods are pretty funny. To protest a special SMS tax - which would affect the 2 billion SMS sent in the country per day - TXTPower circulated the Speaker of the House's personal mobile phone number. The thousands of messages received caught attention from the most important local newspaper. In the wake of a fiscal scandal about vote rigging, an audio clip of the President (allegedly) asking a colleague whether an election had been correctly fixed became a hit political ringtone, and TXTPower's server was taken down by the interest.

TXTPower turns eight years old this August, and "we're confident of winning more battles." One of the co-founders (Mong Palatino, the Southeast Asia editor for Global Voices) was just elected to parliament. And new campaigns focus on the costs of mobile phone service, on training people to learn how to get more out of their phones, and on a political campaign to ensure that Arroyo doesn't turn into "an eternal leade" - actions on are being coordinated on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other social media.

Read more about social media in our archive:

Draft Paper on Cell Phones and Activism

Conference on Cell Phones and Civic Engagement

OSI: Social Media in Closed Societies

Unpacking the Twitter Revolution in Moldova

This piece originally appeared in My Heart's In Accra.

Photo credit: Flickr/cazimiro, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 3:23 PM)

TED Embraces Social Translation

Ethan Zuckerman — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:46:35 +0000

My friends at TED have launched an exciting new project today, the TED Open Translation Project. It's a powerful system to allow the "social translation" of their video content. This tool demonstrates the state of the art in social translation on the web today, and I think there are a lot of lessons in the tool and thinking behind it for anyone who hopes to make the polyglot internet more comprehensible, and for anyone thinking about online cooperation.

I'm aware that most people think of translation as roughly as interesting as developing Linux device drivers - necessary, but far from sexy. My hope is to convince you that translation is one of the keys in helping the internet reach it's potential and to get you at least a tenth as excited about this new tool and approach as I am.

For the past couple of years, TED has shared an amazing set of videos, talks delivered at the TED conferences in California, the UK, and Tanzania. These talks are some of the most fascinating and thought-provoking video content available on the web - many smart people have discovered TED talks and promptly lost a week or more gorging themselves on intellectual candy.

(A personal top five, for those who've not taken a deep dive into the videos that are available. I'm not going to argue that these are the "best" talks given at TED, but they are the ones that have had the most influence on me and my work:

- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian minister of finance, on the debate on trade and aid in Africa, framed in deeply personal terms, as she talks about her family's struggles during the Biafran war.

- Swedish doctor and scientist Hans Rosling uses statistics and visualization to rethink international development over the course of decades and centuries.

- Majora Carter on the importance of environmental issues to urban communities, and the connection between community development and the green movement.

- Oxford development economist Paul Collier explains his brilliant book, "The Bottom Billion" in eighteen minutes.

- Nigerian author Chris Abani on humanity, cruelty, compassion and storytelling. I'm not sure I've ever seen a talk swing between humor and brutality as rapidly and powerfully as Chris does in this talk. When he finished giving it live, I left the theatre because I didn't want to hear anything else that day.)

For the past couple of years, these talks have been available to anyone with a good internet connection and the time to download them -- but they're only helpful to people who speak English, the language the talks were delivered in. TED, and specifically June Cohen, the director of TED Media, recognized that there's huge international demand for TED's content around the world - take a look at TedToChina, a fan site that offers summaries of TED talks in Chinese.

Translation is supposed to be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Professional translators routinely charge between $0.20 and $0.40 per word - translating this blogposts into one other language would cost over $500 at market rates. The cost of machine translation has fallen from cheap to free, with powerful systems incorporated into Google and other search engines.. but the results are far from perfect, and tend to miss the nuance of complex texts. Very few of us choose to read blogs - even on topics we enjoy and follow - via machine translation because the experience is so awkward.

But maybe translation doesn't need to be so difficult and expensive. Maybe it's something that interested, talented people will do for free, if given the right opportunities and incentives. That idea inspired the Global Voices community to launch Lingua, our project to translate Global Voices content into over twenty languages. In 2006, we discovered that Portnoy Zheng, an amazing Taiwanese blogger, was translating Global Voices stories into Chinese, and inviting other translators to help with his efforts.

We were thrilled, and started pointing Chinese-speaking readers to Portnoy's efforts. Other groups, starting with the Francophones, proposed that volunteer translation of Global Voices content into other languages become an official feature of our community, and beginning in 2007, we've integrated volunteer translations into our site - under many of the headlines on the main site, you'll see "zh", "fr", "mg" or another two-letter language code. Click on that code, and you'll find yourself on a translation of that post.

There's a growing movement to make "social translation" - translation of online information by users around the world, motivated more by community recognition and appreciation than by money - a mainstream approach to making the web more accessible to all readers. The movement has been led by the open source software community, and projects like Dwayne Bailey's pootle toolkit, a set of tools that make it easier to localize open-source software. (Dwayne launched translate.org.za, a project that makes key software available in South Africa's eleven official languages.) Inspiring projects in the space include WorldWide Lexicon, an open platform to allow cooperative translation of any website; Meedan, an online community that uses social translation as well as machine translation to build dialog between Arabic and English speakers, and dotsub, a powerful video subtitling and translation tool that invites anyone to become a subtitler or translator.

Cohen and her team looked closely at the tools and teams building the social translation movement and built a new community that learned from the successes and failures of other projects in the space. TED's tool is based on dotsub, with some very powerful new features added, and their model for recruiting, recognizing and rewarding translators is inspired in part by some of the work we've done at Global Voices. For visitors to the site, this means that you can browse videos by language, selecting one of the 32 talks available with Spanish subtitles, or the sole talk available in Kyrgyz.

Select a talk in one of its translated forms, and you'll get a subtitled video, a translated title and description of the talk. Featured in this description are the two people responsible for translating the talk, the lead translator and the reviewer - like Global Voices, TED is inviting translators to join the community, pairing new translators with trusted reviewers to evaluate the work and to offer any changes or suggestions. Another link on the page leads to an "interactive transcript" - this allows a viewer to select a point in the talk and fast-forward to see the slides and images that accompany the speaker's words.

Not only is this a fantastically cool way to navigate these talks, it leads to my favorite undocumented feature of the system, which Cohen calls "the Rosetta Stone". Pick a transcript of a talk in a language you speak. Then select subtitles in a language you don't speak. You can watch the talk in three languages - the English of the speaker's words, the Spanish of the transcript and the Turkish of the subtitles. (I suspect my wife, who speaks English and Hebrew well, and is learning Arabic, will addicted to this feature in the near future.)

(This ability to view the same text in many languages may turn out to be one of the most important aspects of the project in the long run. As TED translates hundreds of talks, they're creating "parallel corpora", the raw material for machine translation systems. This might be too small to build really strong Turkish to Vietnamese translation technology, but the idea of pulling corpora from tools like dot.sub is something that machine translation folks should be taking a close look at.)

The system is launching with 375 translations, representing 42 languages. Some extremely popular talks, like Al Gore's talk on climate change, are available in over twenty languages - others are available just in English and one other language. What's remarkable to me is how many of the talks were translated by volunteers - 200 of the first 300 translation posted, and June tells me that 450 volunteer translations are in the queue and will launch soon. She calculates that if TED had to pay for those translations, the 650 underway would have cost roughly $500,000. While that sum might be something sponsors, like Nokia, which is the lead sponsor for the translation project, might have been able to cover, June estimates the cost of translating all TED talks into 40 languages at over $13 million dollars. To achieve what TED really wants to accomplish - all talks in 300 languages - is over $100 million. It's simply not possible to take on a task of that size without trying a social translation approach.

Why are people queueing up to translate TED talks for free? The system June and TED have launched leverages some of the lessons we've learned about social translation:

- Translation can be fun, if the content's enjoyable. There aren't a lot of people lining up to translate UN internal memos for free (according to some estimates, transcripts of UN meetings can cost as much as $8000 an hour to produce, leading to an organization translation budget of $100 million per year.) But TED talks are fascinating to a wide audience, and some people are excited about investing the time to translate them.

- Choice matters. On Global Voices, we don't attempt to translate every story into every language - we let translators choose what stories they're interested in. We don't get a complete edition of our content, but we wouldn't have such great participation if we assigned specific stories to translators. My guess is that TED is seeing a similar phenomenon, and that translators will initially gravitate to a small set of highly popular talks, then start translating talks that meet their personal interests over time.

- Translators need recognition. On the TED site, translators are some of the most prominently featured people on the page - click through on the translator or reviewer's name, and you get a page featuring her photo, her work and recognizing her contributions. On Global Voices, we try to feature authors and translators equally - that model doesn't make as much sense for TED, where the speakers are often celebrities, but it's clear that TED is taking the translator's role very seriously and honoring the contributions.

- Community matters. Our translators have the same sort of internal communications systems that our authors do - they divide up tasks, consult each other for assistance and support, and generally function as a tight community. My guess is that language communities are going to emerge on TED in much the same way, and that the translator/review mechanism is going to be critically important for building support, friendships and communities.

- Not all rewards are (directly) financial. GV rewards its most productive translators with travel funding to help them attend our annual meetings. I wouldn't be surprised to see TED try something similar if they're able to secure the funding. And we've found that translators use their GV experience as evidence that they are competent professional translators and gain more professional translation work from their association with us - again, I'd expect to see something similar with TED. My guess is that prominent translators in the TED community will also become "go-to" guys and gals for TEDsters who are looking for contacts in Turkey or Poland.

I'm really excited about TED's project for two reasons. One is that it's great to see an organization I respect and admire adopting and improving on a strategy we've embraced at Global Voices. June and I had coffee in NYC a couple of weeks ago, and when she told me that the translations produced by volunteers were frequently better than those produced by professional translation agencies, I was so happy I gave her a high-five. It makes perfect sense to me - translators motivated by pride, community support and interest might well do a better job than those just collecting a paycheck.

I'm also thrilled because TED operates on a very large stage, and their embrace of social translation sends a message to organizations and projects around the world who are considering whether and how they tackle issues of language. Because translation is historically difficult and expensive, most organizations have simply avoided it, except when absolutely necessary.

The internet is huge, growing, and being built by people who speak hundreds of different languages. There are editions of Wikipedia in over 200 languages, and some scholars estimate that there's as much user content created in Chinese as there is in English. Unless we find scaleable, inexpensive ways to translate, we're each going to face an internet that's grows everyday, where we find less of the content understandable. Until we figure out better solutions to translation, we're fooling ourselves into believing we're more cosmopolitan and connected than we actually are.

Social translation isn't the only solution, and it won't solve the problem by itself. But it's a great first step, and TED deserves real congratulations in building this great tool and bringing this strategy to global prominence... and for it's commitment to the values of connection and bridging that underly their commitment to making this information available around the world.

See Alex Steffen's TED Talk here.

This piece originally appeared in My Heart's In Accra.

Photo credit: flickr/jurvetson, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 4:46 PM)

Worldchanging Review: Planet Forward

Sarah Kuck — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:35:51 +0000

Only a handful of mainstream media sources are producing quality environmental journalism these days. But the Public Broadcasting Service still is -- and is proving it with a new web and TV project called Planet Forward.

The show doesn’t feature charismatic megafauna, breathtaking images of ecosystems, green products or home repair, but instead focuses on the dialogue between the local people, organization leaders and government officials on planet-focused topics, like renewable energy and alternative transportation.

Award-winning journalist Frank Sesno hosts the new show, which features the thoughts and ideas of expert panelists, newsworthy guests and audience members, who are encouraged to submit commentary online. The particular episode I saw (which will premiere on Wednesday, April 15) featured L. Hunter Lovins, Shai Agassi and James Connaughton as panelists. Together they reviewed a handful of clips related to America’s energy and transportation futures. The panel discussed everything from nuclear to solar, biomass to wind, oil to electric.

The stories were well put together and informative. Each of the panelists’ responses added to the story, each providing differing points of view, but doing so intelligently. For example, the panelists didn't fight about whether climate change was real, but instead spent time examining the options for alternatives. A TV news show that has more facts than hype, and that I felt more informed after listening to? Remarkable.

Sesno wraps up the show by interviewing Carol Browner, the assistant to the President for energy and climate change. They first discuss renewable energy implementation challenges at both the personal and technological level, and the difficulties with each. To end the show, they brought up four people from the audience who personally created clips to present to Browner, who they hope will take their stories back with her to the White House.

I have to be honest, I loved this show. It was informative without being alarmist or boring, one-sided or dry. I particularly like how they presented perspectives, questions and media creations from the public. Planet Forward talks to the right people, about the right things. And, if they stay on this track, they will undoubtedly play a necessary role in moving the debate from a place of "should we" to "how will we." I look forward to watching it on PBS.org. And if you have a TV, check it out Wednesday, April 15 at 8 p.m.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Media at 2:35 PM)

Journalism, Recession, and Climate Change

Clark Williams-Derry — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:21:27 +0000

USA Today is reporting that CO2 emissions are falling because of the global recession. I'm sure that's true. Yet I'm worried that the media is looking for evidence that folks who are concerned about climate change are somehow "rooting for recession." Check out the framing in this quote:

A recession-driven drop in emissions "is good for the environment," says Emilie Mazzacurati of Point Carbon, an energy research company. "In the long term, that's not how we want to reduce emissions."

Then, later in the article we get a fuller mention of Mazzacurati's real views.

Some experts fear lower emissions may make companies and governments less likely to spend money to cut carbon output. "There's a risk that it will push back needed investment into … cleaner production," Mazzacurati says.

Mazzacurati is clearly making the point that, over the long term, a recession could hurt the climate more than help it. The credit crunch and other forces could choke off funds for clean-energy investment. Just so, we've already seen that badly conceived stimulus projects could deepen our addiction to oil and fossil fuels.

Yet even so, the first quote that the writer pulls from what was undoubtedly a long and nuanced conversation about the risk of recession to the climate is a phrase -- not even a full sentence -- suggesting that the recession is good for the climate. Having been on the receiving end of this sort of thing, it seemed me as if the reporter was looking for a nugget to back up a preconceived story line.

Truthfully, I don't know the long-term relation between the global economic crisis and the climate. Climate change is a very long-term problem. Even if the economic crisis lasted for a decade, it still might not make much of a difference to the long-term trajectory of CO2 emissions. The important thing, then, is to make sure that we're developing the right policies, and deploying the right technologies, so that emissions will fall no matter what happens to the economy.

In a nutshell: I don't think anyone's rooting for economic pain. But you can be sure that some reporters to try to claim the opposite. So just be aware that this is mostly a manufactured story line, not the real sentiments of the broader public -- folks who are genuinely worried both about keeping their jobs and protecting the climate over the long haul.

this piece originally appeared on Sightline Daily

image credit: flickr/brutal, Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Clark Williams-Derry in Media at 11:21 AM)

Worldchanging Media Round Up

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:01:04 +0000

Whether it arrived in our inbox or our mailbox, some truly amazing media has shown up recently at Worldchanging Headquarters. And it's time once again to share what we've been receiving.

The tone of most of the books, films and magazines we've received in the past couple of months reflects the serious nature of our global problems. But each, in its own way, provides a sense of motivation to create change.

The Unnatural History of the Sea
Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers and travelers, Professor Callum Roberts takes readers around the world and through centuries to recount how our oceans went from bountiful to desolate. The future isn't entirely bleak as Callum also describes how we are already using marine reserves repopulate the seas.

Journey to Planet Earth: The State of the Planet's Oceans
This 55 minute look at the world's oceans is the next episode of the new PBS series Journey to Planet Earth. Matt Damon hosts and narrates this award-winning series.

Climate Change: Picturing the Science
We met up with photographer Joshua Wolfe, co-producer of this book, a few months ago to talk about another one of his projects, GHG Photos. Produced with Gavin Schmidt, Climate Change: Picturing the Science takes readers on a visually shocking journey of the landscapes changed almost beyond recognition by climate change. Wolfe told us that the mission behind Picturing the Science will be to help everyone clearly see, and hopefully understand, the effects of human-induced climate change.

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet
Edward Humes explores the lives the people he calls the New Rockefellers: the entrepreneurs, inventors and philosophers using lawsuits, charitable foundations, land trusts, mass protests, armies of schoolchildren and billions in corporate profits to push the world toward a new direction. Through this book and website of the same name, Humes tells the stories of the wealthy ones who are using their privileged positions to change things for the better.

Century of the City: No Time to Lose
This nearly 500 page book is the result of discussions that took place at The Rockefeller Foundation Global Urban Summit, a month-long colloquy that examined the challenges facing 21st century cities. Making its case in poignant pictures and well-written arguments from some of the world's most forward thinking urban planners, Century of the City states that we can use innovative urbanization ideas to combat sprawl, pollution and inequality to build a better world.

World Pulse
This captivating new magazine seeks to present global issues through the eyes of the world's women. The editors at World Pulse work to create a platform for the "unheard voices and innovative solutions of women worldwide." World Pulse also offers readers PulseWire, a collaborative newswire where women can connect with others and share their stories first hand.

Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming
Anthony D. Barnosky explores what global warming will mean for nature as we know it. As the temperature rises, "the species we love, the ecosystem services that sustain us, and the wild places where we seek solace" will all undergo dramatic changes. We must use this crisis as an opportunity to change things now before it's too late for what Barnosky calls nature's "defacto museums."

The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change (Earthscan Readers Series)
Although many are exploring how we will mitigate climate change, others are asking 'how will we adapt?' E. Lisa F. Schipper and Ian Burton edit this edition of the Earthscan Reader, which reviews adaptation theory, disaster risk, climate change policy, vulnerability, resilience and development.

Image credit: This Is a Wake Up Call/Flickr, CC License

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 6:01 PM)

Worldchanging Media Round Up

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:01:04 +0000

Whether it arrived in our inbox or our mailbox, some truly amazing media has shown up recently at Worldchanging Headquarters. And it's time once again to share what we've been receiving.

Image credit: This Is a Wake Up Call/Flickr, CC License

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 6:01 PM)

The only way a reporter ought to look at a climate skeptic is down.

Alex Steffen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:17:10 +0000

Having wasted 20 years here in the U.S. on a completely non-factual "debate" about whether fossil fuels were implicated in climate change, it's a bit shocking to see this story by Azadeh Ensha, where an industry-funded spokesperson is allowed to get away with the statement, "It is beyond dispute that any connection between meat production and global warming is a false one."

As science journalists have been discussing for a few years now, he said/she said journalism around climate change (where industry groups are allowed to lie without direct factual refutation in the same story) is bad journalism: it puts the journalist and his/her organization in the role of serving an industry PR message, rather than the truth.

Ensha punts on her responsibility to reality check the industry message, merely quoting another source saying "This is what the food industry always does ... obfuscate without ever looking at facts." By failing to provide those facts, she leads a casual reader to believe that this is an actual debate.

But the industry statement here is simply not true. It is a lie. There's quite well-established science refuting it. Cows cause climate change, to put it simply. We know that.

Ms. Ensha's story is precisely the kind of cheap-shot "controversy" story that's landed us in the mess we're in. In this stage of the climate crisis it should have been beneath the Times to publish it, but even more importantly, it should have been beneath a reporter as smart as Ms. Ensha to let herself be used this way by writing it.

In contrast, check out Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent New Yorker post Donating to the Deniers, a skillful revelation of the anti-science reality behind the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an industry front group that claims to want strong action on climate change, but who's member companies have been strong supporters of politicians and causes which deny the reality of climate change.

In this day and age, the only way a reporter ought to look at a climate skeptic is down. That's doubly true when the skeptic is getting paid by an industry involved in melting the ice caps.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 12:17 PM)

Tank Riot, Smart Cities and Long Now

Alex Steffen — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:51:54 +0000

As previously mentioned in my post about the LSE podcasts, I listen to a lot of online interviews, lectures and radio programs. While often I'll flit from podcaster to podcaster as I hear of shows that sound interesting, there are a few that have continued to prove worthwhile time and again.

Three of those are Tank Riot, a source of geeky goodness, with sharp, funny discussions of topical ideas coming from "tropical Madison Wisconsin"; Smart City Radio, Carol Coletta's brilliant program on the changing nature of cities; and the Long Now Seminars, simply the best discussions of long-term thinking to be found anywhere.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 11:51 AM)

Tank Riot, Smart Cities and Long Now

Alex Steffen — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:51:54 +0000

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 11:51 AM)

Living In The Age Of Stupid

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:37:18 +0000

By Sean Pool

London is underwater, New Orleans won't be rebuilt a third time, the arctic is ice free, and agriculture is failing, which leads to global food riots and ultimately the collapse of civilization... This is the premise of the new crowd-funded British independent film The Age of Stupid.

Set in 2055, the film portrays a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by the worst impacts of climate change, and looks back at the critical period between 2005 and 2015 to examine why we didn't save ourselves when we still had the chance.

In an opening sequence, the narrator (played by Oscar nominee Pete Postlethwaite) takes us through a montage of news reports describing visible impacts of climate change: A 101 degree day in London, 700 dead after record flooding in India, record breaking drought in Melbourne, desertification in China progressing at the rate of 3 miles per year, dozens of Antarctic ice shelves collapsing faster than anyone predicted, 18 million affected by flooding in parts of Africa, and a glacier in France having shrunk 150 meters since 1945.

The fact that the clips in this montage are all real-life news reports from 2007 and 2008 is chilling.

Indeed, although framed by a post-apocalyptic narrative set in the future, the bulk of the film is actually a documentary about the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing in 2009 -- and its not pretty.

That the impacts are depicted through the lens of real human stories makes the film's message all the more accessible and compelling. Here is a snapshot of some of the characters and their stories:

Alvin DuVernay is a career oil paleontologist from New Orleans who spent his life directing drill bits for Shell. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, he personally rescued 100 people in his boat, but lost his home and all his possessions.

I lost everything. Everything that I owned. Quite literally. Except for my boat. I mean everything from family heirlooms to the paper towels sitting on your kitchen counter. And everything in between. It goes on and on.

I mean what more of a wake up call do you need? At the very local level all the way through and including the top federal level I just don't see that awakening, that epiphany in the politicians' eyes. I don't see the sense of urgency. And I certainly don't see movement. A year or so later, after the event, and not a whole lot has changed.

Then there is the 80-year old French Alps mountain guide who, over the course of his 45-year career has seen the glacier that he loves shrink by 150 meters:

When I first saw all these mountains. The beauty. It was wonderful. It was truly love at first sight.
We created this problem. Always progress, progress, progress. Always demanding more and more from the planet.

And then there is the wind farm developer whose noble attempts to get a few wind turbines installed in a rural part of England are rebuffed by selfish grassroots resistance (the whirling of the blades might hypnotize people while they are driving...)

The fact that you can't go skiing anymore or that the glaciers are melting is not really the point. The point is that's a signal that basically the earth is destabilising and all the norms that have allowed life to exist as it has done are changing.

If we don't face up to our fears, I just feel we're abusing it, our environment which gives us so much. We're just rampantly, disrespectfully trashing it.

The film traces these real human stories to convey the impacts of climate change on a personal level, and is at times funny, scary and tender. What's amazing is that all of the material is real.

The fictional aspect of the film serves only as a narrative device until the very end, when a final sequence of news reports takes us from the year 2007 to 2055: 80,000 fatalities from a giant cyclone in Asia, water rationing in Holland, forest fires sweep across Spain, the decision is made not to rebuild New Orleans for a 3rd time, a drinking water crisis erupts in Pakistan, heat waves strike San Francisco, 35 million Chinese become climate refugees, skiing in the alps is over, 100 million are homeless in Bangladesh due to massive flooding, the European Union permanently closes its borders, the last Indonesian tree falls to make way for palm oil production, a 30-foot swell overcomes the Thames and floods London, New Zealand closes its borders to Australian refugees, 100 million refugees flee the middle east, half of all species become extinct, ecosystems collapse across the planet, the north sea boils, food riots become so severe that people begin to eat their own cats and dogs, nuclear war breaks out.

The stated goal of The Age of Stupid is to "turn 250 million viewers into climate activists," and it makes the case that we have to stabilize and begin to reduce global emissions by 2015 to avoid the catastrophic consequences it speculates about above.

Even if a bit over-the-top (come on, the North Sea boiling?) this hard-hitting final sequence is nonetheless powerful, and left me watching the credits role with a sense of urgency that even as a long-time climate activist I had not experienced before.

Postlethwaite's final monologue then really drives the message home:

We wouldn't be the first life form to wipe itself out. But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly. What does that say about us?
The question I've been asking is: why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance? Is the answer because on some level we weren't sure if we were worth saving?

The Age of Stupid is set to premiere in US theatres next month.

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 4:37 PM)

Living In The Age Of Stupid

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:37:18 +0000

By Sean Pool

The fact that the clips in this montage are all real-life news reports from 2007 and 2008 is chilling.

That the impacts are depicted through the lens of real human stories makes the film's message all the more accessible and compelling. Here is a snapshot of some of the characters and their stories:

I lost everything. Everything that I owned. Quite literally. Except for my boat. I mean everything from family heirlooms to the paper towels sitting on your kitchen counter. And everything in between. It goes on and on.

I mean what more of a wake up call do you need? At the very local level all the way through and including the top federal level I just don't see that awakening, that epiphany in the politicians' eyes. I don't see the sense of urgency. And I certainly don't see movement. A year or so later, after the event, and not a whole lot has changed.

Then there is the 80-year old French Alps mountain guide who, over the course of his 45-year career has seen the glacier that he loves shrink by 150 meters:

When I first saw all these mountains. The beauty. It was wonderful. It was truly love at first sight.
We created this problem. Always progress, progress, progress. Always demanding more and more from the planet.

The fact that you can't go skiing anymore or that the glaciers are melting is not really the point. The point is that's a signal that basically the earth is destabilising and all the norms that have allowed life to exist as it has done are changing.

If we don't face up to our fears, I just feel we're abusing it, our environment which gives us so much. We're just rampantly, disrespectfully trashing it.

The film traces these real human stories to convey the impacts of climate change on a personal level, and is at times funny, scary and tender. What's amazing is that all of the material is real.

Postlethwaite's final monologue then really drives the message home:

We wouldn't be the first life form to wipe itself out. But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly. What does that say about us?
The question I've been asking is: why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance? Is the answer because on some level we weren't sure if we were worth saving?

The Age of Stupid is set to premiere in US theatres next month.

This piece originally appeared in Climate Progress.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 4:37 PM)

U.S. Media Largely Ignores Latest Warning From Climate Scientists

Joe Romm — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:35:19 +0000

In the last two years, our scientific understanding of business-as-usual projections for global warming has changed dramatically (see "M.I.T. doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C" and "Hadley Center projects 5-7°C warming by 2100"). Yet, much of the U.S. public -- especially conservatives -- remain in the dark about just how dire the situation is (see "Gallup poll shows catastrophic failure of media, conservatives still easily duped by deniers").

Why? Because the U.S. media is largely ignoring the story. Case in point: Where was the coverage of the Copenhagen Climate Science Congress, attended by 2000 scientists, which concluded with this Key Message #1:

Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean acidification, and extreme climatic events. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.

What is the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectory? That would be A1F1 (the red dotted line in the figure below from figure SPM-3 of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Synthesis Report):

The A1F1 scenario takes us to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of 1000 ppm in 2100 -- otherwise known as the end of human civilization as we have known it. Actually it's worse than that. The 2001 IPCC report largely failed to model amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks. The 2007 IPCC report, which began to consider such feedbacks, warns that even averaging 11 GtC (billion metric tons of carbon) a year this century could take us to 1000 ppm (see "Nature publishes my climate analysis and solution"). The A1F1 scenario averages well above 15 GtC a year through 2100 as you can see from the figure on the left.

Energy Daily (subs. req'd) notes of the U.S. media non-coverage of Copenhagen:

Ironically -- given the Gallup finding that two in five Americans think the press is exaggerating climate change concerns -- only a few of the major U.S. news outlets published accounts of the Copenhagen gathering, which received heavy coverage by news outlets in Europe and Asia.

Great point -- though "ironically" isn't the right word. There is nothing ironic about this. It is cause and effect. The right word is "tragically."

Exceeding A1F1 probably means total planetary warming by 2100 compared to preindustrial levels of 5°C or more. I discuss the harsh impacts of such warming here.

West Coast Climate Equity notes:

Last time mean global temperatures reached 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above present levels, in the mid-Pliocene (3 million years ago), an event associated with CO2 levels of about 400 parts per million, polar regions were heated by near-8 degrees C and sea levels have risen by 25+/-12 meters relative to the present. This represents near-total melting of Greenland and west Antarctica ice sheets (Robinson et al., 2008: "Pliocene role in assessing future climate impacts" (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/ )
A rise of mean global temperatures above 4 or 5 degrees Celsius would shift the atmosphere to pre-glacial/interglacial conditions, which dominated the Earth from about 34 million years ago (end-Eocene) (Zachos et al., 2008) href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html

That means ultimate sea level rise of 250 feet, with the best current projection being 5 feet by 2100 (see "Startling new sea level rise research: "Most likely" 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100"), rising thereafter 10 to 20 inches a decade (or more) for centuries. Good luck adapting to that, next 50 generations.

Key Message #5 from the Congress is:

Key Message 5: Inaction is Inexcusable

There is no excuse for inaction. We already have many tools and approaches -- economic, technological, behavioural, management -- to deal effectively with the climate change challenge. But they must be vigorously and widely implemented to achieve the societal transformation required to decarbonise economies. A wide range of benefits will flow from a concerted effort to alter our energy economy now, including sustainable energy job growth, reductions in the health and economic costs of climate change, and the restoration of ecosystems and revitalisation of ecosystem services.

What is inexcusable is US media coverage and the blinkered conservative strategy of scientific denial -- what can only be described as a murder-suicide pact with the human race (see: " Hill conservatives reject all 3 climate strategies and embrace Rush Limbaugh -- what does that radicalism mean for Obama, progressives, and humanity?").

This piece originally appeared in the blog, Climate Progress.

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(Posted by Joe Romm in Media at 4:35 PM)