science communication

The Ecological Society of America is having its 100th Anniversary Conference August 9-14 in Baltimore. The organizers of this year’s centennial meeting have challenged us to put together talks and symposia that celebrate 100 years of advancements in ecological research and peer into the future of 21st Century challenges. This has undoubtedly stimulated substantial interest in climate change as a hot topic.

This morning I’m sitting on my porch with my computer in my lap, sipping coffee from my Star Trek mug and enjoying the beautiful morning sky. I’m staring out over a temperate deciduous forest surrounding a beautiful lake, all beneath patches of clouds, the blue sky, and a faint moon descending over the horizon. What makes this even better is that I am near the middle of downtown Raleigh, NC surrounded by urban habitat and you can’t tell (at least not from this view).

 The biggest climate change news of 2015 has come from a rather unlikely source: The Vatican of Rome.

A decade ago, I would have NEVER have believed that I would write the following words, but here they are: I love working with 7^th graders! My twenty-something self would have further cringed at the idea of leading dozens of boisterous middle schoolers through quiet mountain landscapes. And yet, here I am, traipsing across alpine boulder fields with 60 of my closest 7^th grade friends.

The folks who did the renowned "Six Americas" study are back with more interesting data on opinions toward climate change and climate change adaptation. The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has recently published a paper that breaks down opinions about climate change in the United States down geographically, from the national all the way down to the county level. And since their focus is on communication they have also developed a nice website to graphically present their data.    

This post originally appeared on May 30, 2013 and is part of our throw-back series.

Communication theory was one of the most thought provoking classes in my graduate education. As we uncovered a new theory each week, it was like someone was pulling back the layers of everyday life and human interactions, and I could begin to understand some of the processes driving each one. As in any field, there are some theories that are much easier to see and apply than others. One that I have been thinking about a lot lately is Marshall McLuhan’s theory of Media Ecology.

This post originally appeared October 19, 2012 and is part of our throw-back series.

I wrote this post after attending the National Adaptation Forum in Denver, where over 500 academics, advocates and practitioners came together to talk about the state of climate adaptation in the US. One night the screened James Balog’s ‘Chasing Ice’ an inspiring piece of extreme adventure science porn. The film is presents a classic David and Golaiath narrative of a nature photographer with a masters in geomorphology on a quest to photographically document retreating glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere.

The third U.S. National Climate Assessment report, released in early May, provides a national synthesis of climate change and its effects that are already being felt across multiple sectors within the U.S., including coastal flooding and extreme heat in the Northeast, shrinking summer sea ice and thawing permafrost in Alaska, drought and associated increases in wildfires in the southwest, decreased water availability in the Southeast, constrained freshwater supplies in Hawai’i, and changes in streamflow timing in the Northwest.