I grew up just a few miles away from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I figured I’d go somewhere far away for college, so when I was young, I paid little attention to UNC. Then, when I was in high school, my family and I moved to Yankeeland, the outskirts of Boston, where the winters were cold, dark and relentless. In my first week of at my new school school, a couple of my classmates asked me if I’d been “allowed” to learn about the Civil War at my high school in North Carolina. Had I been taught to call it “The War of Northern Aggression”?*

All of this is a long way of saying that I did go to UNC, and I loved it, enough to return for a master’s degree in journalism. And now I’m profiled on the university’s website. Read it.

*The answer is no, we called it the Civil War. In fact, the month I left North Carolina, my history class had been reading Howard Zinn.

Environmentalists argue that removing Appalachian mountaintops to mine coal is a disaster. For many who live in that hardscrabble area, it seems an economic necessity. Sara Peach and her student team from the University of North Carolina captured that basic division, and its many nuances, in a well-constructed series of interviews and images presented in a style that’s dispassionate and non-judgmental and, largely because of that, makes clear how wrenching this issue is.

Eeek!

I had the chance to interview climate scientist Tony Broccoli at a workshop for meteorologists and climatologists last May. He provided important insights for both scientists and journalists on how to engage lay audiences in this complex, politicized topic. Watch the video, then click over to the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media for more of the interview.

Our segment starts at the 5:20 mark.

Two stories about coal that I produced with a team of reporters last summer have won first place in the Society of Environmental Journalists 2010 Awards for Reporting on the Environment for the category “Outstanding Student Reporting.”

For decades, coal has powered hip-replacement surgeries, microwaves, research labs, amusement parks and other essentials of American modern life. The two stories examine how this coal-fired electricity is produced in rural communities in Ohio and West Virginia. The first, “Mining the Mountains,” explores growing controversies in Appalachian communities where mountaintop-removal coal mining is common. “Debating Coal’s Future” tells the story of an Ohio community divided by a proposal to build a new coal-fired power plant.

Congratulations to my colleagues Chris Carmichael, Monica Ulmanu and Jenn Hueting, who made up the rest of the team that produced these stories.

MIAMI – When it comes to communicating climate change, meteorologists are on the front lines.

“Television weathercasters may be the most prominent science communicators in our society,” said John Morales, chief meteorologist at NBC 6 in Miami. “The one scientist that everybody can relate to is the broadcast meteorologist on television.”

…

A recent survey of television weathercasters conducted by George Mason University found that nearly two-thirds of meteorologists believe that scientists still disagree about whether climate change is occurring (see related Yale Forum story here).

The rest.

If you’re angry about the oil spill in the Gulf, you may feel inspired to punish the company by boycotting BP gas stations.

But will the boycott work?

Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones suggests that it might not:

After all, fuel from other gas stations that don’t bear the BP logo may well be coming from BP wholesalers and refineries, meaning I could be buying BP oil at another station without realizing it. And most of the BP-branded stations are owned by independent franchisees, since the company doesn’t actually own many of the 13,000 retail stations bearing its logo these days (BP announced in 2007 that it plans to sell off the 700 it still owned). That means I’m most likely hurting a small-time business person rather than the oil giant most likely. And it’s not like my decision to deny BP a relatively tiny sum of money puts a noticeable dent in its deep pockets anyway. More importantly, it’s not like there’s any oil company out there that doesn’t have something deplorable on its record.

Meanwhile, Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies describes a BP boycott he helped organize as a college student:

We were righteous. We were determined. [We] even got a meeting with higher-ups at BP America’s corporate offices, where we boldly declared that unless BP changed their ways, our members — a few thousand students around the country — weren’t going to buy their gas anymore.

I can only imagine now what the BP suits were thinking: “A few college tree-huggers (who probably all ride bikes anyway) won’t buy our gas? We’re sooo scared.” If “whatever” had been popular lingo back then, they might have said it.

Needless to say, we didn’t win any major concessions from BP. Our hearts were in the right place, but we misjudged the power dynamics at hand: Our band of student environmentalists didn’t have the power to influence BP through a boycott.

That lesson about power is at the heart of debate about a BP boycott today: It’s fine to boycott BP for moral reasons, but will it really cause BP to change?

Both Sheppard and Kromm speculate that bad publicity, which could cause BP’s stock prices to continue falling, could ultimately prove worse for the company than a consumer boycott. Here’s Kromm:

One place BP clearly is feeling pain is in its stock prices, which were down 16% by the close of business last Thursday. Since Deepwater Horizon exploded, BP has lost half of its market value — a staggering $95 billion.

Which points to the final way boycotts can influence a company: Bad publicity, which can spook investors. BP shareholders are fleeing due to lost dividends and the growing costs of the spill, but also thanks to the perception that BP’s a “damaged brand,” something a boycott helps fuel.

In the context of the “damaged brand,” I’ve been fascinated by the rise of viral Web videos about BP’s response to the spill. The most popular, “BP spills coffee,” has been viewed more than 3.7 million times. (The official BP YouTube channel can claim only a paltry 500,000.)

The makers of the videos have hit upon what Jon Stewart already knows: Apocalyptic news and commentary is more digestible when it’s hilarious. Satirical BP videos have the potential to control the public’s perception of the company, and consequently, to keep investors worried.

Bonus BP videos are after the fold.

Further reading: On Twitter’s BPGlobalPR

“One or two individuals can use Freedom of Information Act requests to essentially bring the enterprise of climate science to a standstill, simply because they don’t like what you’re doing and what results you obtain,” he said. “In my opinion, that is not in the public interest.”

Santer, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, made his impromptu comments at a May 15 Miami workshop for climate scientists and meteorologists.

He said that climate skeptics can flood a scientist with requests for access to his or her data, methodology and e-mails. That scientist may then have to spend much of his or her time responding to the requests rather than conducting research. Using this tool, a few people can shut down research with which they disagree, Santer said.

Watch the unedited video of his remarks here. (Apologies for the sound quality at the beginning. It improves dramatically after the first 10 seconds.)

Further reading:

Climate scientists shut out skeptics by turning down data requests

Close encounters of the absurd kind (scroll down to “Climate Auditing – Close Encounters with Mr. Steven McIntyre”)

Full disclosure: I was in Miami as a paid videographer for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, which organized the workshop at which Santer spoke. I plan to write a longer story about this issue for the Yale Forum soon.

I just had a new article published at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media on how the best digital storytellers are covering climate change online. Here’s a taste.

A 3-D spinning globe on the new website TakePart tells a compelling story about the tremendous impacts of climate change.

The graphic is part of an online feature explaining climate science. The globe, the centerpiece of the feature, can be spun with a click of your mouse. Moving the slider below whirls you through the years 1950-2050, as glaciers vanish, ice caps dwindle and portions of the Amazon turn to dust.

…

The most important feature of the globe, said Doug Fitzsimmons, who led the TakePart team that created it, is to show that all is not lost. A second slider allows you to control the amount of carbon dioxide emitted: Notch emissions toward the best-case scenario and the pace of global change slows.

“The real goal of it is to show through some of the sliders – turning it into an interactive piece – that if we start working on this problem, we can actually help make things better,” Fitzsimmons said. “But if we don’t do things differently, we’re in for a pretty rocky period.”

A More Compelling Experience … ‘You Lean Into It’

Graphics such as the TakePart globe demonstrate the power of what Joe Weiss calls “lean-into” online experiences. Weiss is a multi-media expert best known for developing Soundslides, a tool used to combine images and sound. He said that in contrast to passive experiences such as watching television, interactive online media encourage audiences to participate.

“You lean into it. You engage,” he said.

The rest.