The admirable Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media provides this week, for the edification of reporters and the general public – by the Toledo Blade‘s political and enviro columnist Tom Henry – a revealing article about an assignment. Despite the hard times in the business, his bosses called him in one day and asked how he’d like to go to Greenland. Out came, in October, a four part series on climate change on that big Danish-Inuit island and its ramifications for Ohio.

The series is now hidden behind a pay-to-play archive wall. The Tracker, having missed  it when it was fresh, this morning pungled up $2.95 to read the first part (and is asking if there’s a way to get the whole thing released for this site’s faithful readers to see).

*UPDATE: Whole series available here.

The first one is long, meaty, full of information on how the people of Greenland are coping with a suddenly warmer place that is even getting green, and moves along briskly. As he explains for the Yale Forum, Henry is concerned that so few members of the general public are convinced of climate change as an immediate, urgent, and gigantic problem. His angle was to get past its reality and tackle the next phase of response: adaptation to what is now inevitable. But his behind-the-scene article at the Yale Forum site is an excellent, inside-the-newsroom piece in itself.

For a taste of Henry’s usual output, here’s a recent column he wrote on the IPPC, Kiribati, the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit, and their pertinence to the Great Lakes region of the US.

-CP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under About Journalism, Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.