2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #37

Posted on 15 September 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, September 8, 2024 thru Sat, September 14, 2024.

Story of the week

From time to time we like to make our Story of the Week all about us— and this is one of those moments, except that “us” is more than only Skeptical Science.

This week we published our 16th Fact Brief of the year, Does manmade CO2 have any detectable fingerprint?  As with all Fact Briefs it’s a slightly different look than our usual output.

The “fact brief” format is a less typical communications mode for us but the main effort at Gigafact, our partner and precipitating instigator in creating these bite-sized cognitive correctants. In a fine example of finding an importantly needful job vacancy and filling it, Gigafact has zeroed in on a significant vacant communications niche and is filling it via a laser-focused method:

Gigafact helps local newsrooms who join the network to implement a new standardized fact-checking editorial methodology via software tools, training, support and startup funding. Each week the newsrooms publish several short, sober and informative “fact briefs” that respond to influential claims and correct the record. Gigafact then assists in the amplification and distribution of those fact briefs to maximize the opportunity for the public to encounter them. This helps the newsrooms discover new audiences and growth opportunities. See one Gigafact newsroom talk about their experience here.

In an era when scanty advertisement dollars and increasingly distant and uncaring ownership have decimated newsrooms Gigafact has found an efficient way to broadly increase the strength and immediate impact of journalism, eliminating redundant effort and affording reporters and editors ready access to reliable debunking of common misunderstandings. Fact Briefs circulated by Gigafact’s extensive and growing network are powerful effort multipliers. What could be hundreds of duplicative hours of work for journalists working scattered and alone becomes affordably shrunken and contained, already done and with results instantly accessible. 

As Gigafact’s collaborator our role is to tap into our body of work and assist with creating fact briefs on matters touching anthropogenic climate change. Climate confusion is not quite as venerable as moon landing conspiracy theories or confusion about what direction water circles drains in the Southern Hemisphere, but it’s still unfortunately the case that Skeptical Science has been up and running and dealing with tiresomely repetitious climate bunk for some 17 years. We’ve become reluctant experts and are not exactly happy with having to play the role we do— but we’re certainly delighted to share our misery so as to help others.

We’ve found creation of fact briefs to be an intriguing and even challenging activity. Gigafact fact briefs are intended for drop-in use in news journalism, compatible with easy placement in tight page real estate, quick to hand (and kindly to our attention spans). Each fact brief has a hard limit of 150 words— and that often makes conveying the nitty-gritty on knowledge frequently sitting on deeply complicated foundations quite tricky. Authoring fact briefs is a demanding exercise in finding economy while avoiding informational gaps or ambiguty. It’s safe to say we’re the better for honing these skills. Benefit is flowing in all directions as we work with Gigafact.

We announced this current run of fact briefs (we worked with Gigafact’s predecessor some time ago) back in early April. With the sharpened focus of the new fact brief format it’s taken us a while to comfortably come up to pace but with this 16th publication we feel we’re hitting our stride.

Although each brief is small in layout there’s a lot going on behind the scenery. Our own talented science communicator John Mason works with Gigafact editorial staffers Sue Bin Park and Austin Tannenbaum to sculpt comprehensively detailed explanations of human-caused climate change particularities down to teacup size. This needs a generous amount of coauthorial repartee, patience, and perhaps hardest of all a willingness to strip prose of all poetry. On the Skeptical Science side our esteemed Baerbel Winkler handles details of this program’s administration and scheduling.

Everybody in this crew deserves a hearty thanks. 

Here are this year’s previous Gigafact Fact Briefs, chosen and prioritized for treatment due to saliency in public discussion:

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before September 8

• Lessons From Superstorms Past, Covering Climate Now, CCNOW. “The media ignored the climate connection to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy; here’s how to do better next time”
• The Deteriorating Environment Is a Public Concern, but Americans Misunderstand Their Contribution to the Problem, Science, Inside Climate News, Katie Surma. “A global survey suggests 88 percent of people are worried about the state of nature, but such polling says nothing about where those issues sit among competing concerns, like immigration and the economy.”
• If Trump wins the election, this is what’s at stake, US News, The Guardian, Bill McKibben.
• Billionaire Kelcy Warren invests in pipelines — and Trump, Energy Wire, E&E News, Mike Soraghan. “The Energy Transfer boss’ political strategy can yield big returns.”
• Climate change and its impacts on the water cycle; how can it increase both droughts and heavy downpours?, Science Feedback, Editor: Darrik Burns.
• Project Bison fails. What’s next for the carbon removal megaproject?, Climate Wire, E&E Nrws, Corbin Hiar. “The Wyoming venture’s collapse raises questions about the fledgling direct air capture industry — and the Biden administration’s support of it.”
• This World War I Prisoner of War Solved the Mystery of the Ice Ages, Smithsonian Magazine, Rudy Molinek. Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovi? changed our understanding of Earth’s climate—and did a key part of his work while detained by Austro-Hungarian forces