Heads Up!

Hey journalism students! This sounds like a great way to make your work make you some extra cash:

WIN $500 in Student Writing Contest!
This contest is open to CU Students only and is free to enter. You have nothing to lose! The best part? You may have already written something to submit! We accept papers and projects from classes! $500 prizes for first place in each category. Entries are due by 5 pm on Monday, March 19. Get the complete rules and more information here.

And, if you're up for some nitty gritty environmental justice/climate change talk:

2/23 @ 3:30-4:30pm "Making the Case for Climate Justice" (Gugg. 205)
Maxine Burkett, University of Colorado, School of Law
For almost two decades, the environmental justice movement has been committed to the pressing issues facing low-income and/or communities of color that suffer a disproportionate share of environmental risks. The effects of climate change, which are also predicted to unevenly impact communities of color both in the U.S. and internationally, will compound these conditions. In "Making the Case for Climate Justice" Professor Burkett considers the theoretical and practical implications of climate change, climate policy and litigation on poor and of-color communities in the U.S. and argues for a new environmental justice effort wholly concerned with fashioning preventive and adaptive measures for these communities.

Adieu to glacier skiing in the Alps?Seth Masia remembers the Haute Route

By Seth Masia

In 1461, the scapegrace Francois Villon wrote a hauntingly wistful short poem about the fate of beautiful, beloved women, and it ended with the wonderful line, Ou sont les neiges d'antan? Where are the bygone snows?

For me, they're melting from the glaciers of the Alps. I want to get back soon, with my 16-year-old daughter. By the time she has children of her own old enough to ski those glaciers, they may be neiges d'antan.

Before global climate change began to discernibly diminish Europe's remaining glaciers, in the spring of 1983 I set out to ski the Haute Route, the classic tour from Chamonix, in France, across the top of the Alps to Zermatt and Saas-Fee, in Switzerland.

Glacier skiing on the Haute Route between Chamonix and Zermatt (Photo/wikipedia.org)

Mountain guides often say they can haul any strong recreational skier along the 60-mile Haute Route, but it is serious mountaineering terrain. One day requires 6,000 feet of climbing, and there are several nasty steep couloirs to negotiate. Avalanche is a persistent danger. But most of the mileage follows glaciers, vast and small, and the chief danger is that one may disappear forever into a crevasse.

I invited my buddy Stan Tener along, then (and now) a professional ski patroller at Snowmass, a member of their avalanche control team, and a good climber. Stan had never been to Europe, so he didn't know what he was getting into. We hooked up with photographer Del Mulkey. Del, 20 years our senior, was a former University of Montana ski racer who lived in the South of France and knew a lot more about travel in the Alps than we did. He had already skied the Haute Route a couple of times, and had also skied high into the Himalaya.

At Chamonix, the forecast called for clear weather for at least the next two days. Late in the afternoon we dragged our 35-pound packs onto the Argentière tram and rode up 9,000 vertical feet, high into a clear Alpine evening. We skied 2,200 vertical feet of moguls down to the first of our many glaciers, and skinned up for the short ascent to the fortress-like Argentière refuge.

Well before dawn on April 26, we traversed over to the foot of Chardonnet Glacier. There, we put on our new crampons, tied the skis to the packs, and began the steep 2,500-foot climb to the top of the world. Del climbed like a camel, plodding steadily upward without stopping for rest or water. He ate breakfast on the march, consuming a big chunk of the raw bacon the French call lard. At sunrise we reached the 10,900 foot Col de Choidon and gazed across the top of Europe, the early morning light picking out hundreds of snowy peaks arrayed to the horizons.

Over the next four days we climbed and descended steep couloirs, crossed cols, traversed steep icy avalanche-carrying sideslopes -- and followed glaciers. The glaciers made highways in the sky, long gradual langlauf ascents where we could climb at two miles an hour, and easy cruising descents when we could cover five or six miles in 40 minutes, finishing up with a cold beer in a village inn. We stayed each night in a snug refuge built on some aerie at the head of a glacier, and usually overlooking two or three more. As we ate our high-calorie dinners – goulaschsuppe, fried eggs with beans and potatoes, and fruit cocktail in kirsch – I loved to watch the sun set and see the brilliant white of the glacier surface turn deep blue and then black, while the overhanging rock faces shone with golden alpenglow. And I loved to be out on the trail in the early morning dark, to greet the dawn from the ridgeline and watch the light change again, in reverse.

Mont Blanc's icy massif dominates the French side of the Haute Route (Photo/wikipedia.org)

We covered about 60 miles across Swiss glaciers, closely paralleling the Italian border, and had no close calls with crevasses – though Stan often screamed at me to stay out from under avalanche chutes. We met climbers and skiers from Austria, France, Switzerland and Holland. We argued in good spirits about our choice of route and equipment – Del used fat randonée skis, Stan and I were on skinny "norpine" skis with leather telemark boots.

On the fifth day the weather turned nasty. Unable to see the crevasses in the white-out blizzard, we bailed out to the resort town of Arolla, ten miles short of Zermatt.

The adventure changed our lives. Stunned by the immensity of the Alps, Stan went back to Chamonix a year later as an exchange patroller. He worked through the winter at the Grands Montets, and came home speaking fluent locker-room French. He still patrols, and knocks down avalanches, at Snowmass. And I abandoned the dark canyons of New York. I moved to Truckee and hired on to teach skiing at Squaw Valley, where I could find reliable backcountry skiing into July.

Del died in Paris in December of 2003, full of age and wisdom, red wine and lard.

The Swiss government now reports that their average glacier is retreating at about 50 meters per year. Thanks to global warming, this rate is accelerating, and few glaciers, anywhere in the world, are expected to survive this century. Some of the smaller, steeper glaciers – the Arolla glacier contains only about a third of a cubic kilometer of ice – won't outlive me. One annual report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences says that by 2025, alpine glaciers will retreat to about 45 percent of their 1885 extent. Small icefields make up 25 percent of the total glacial volume – and these will all be gone. The Italian resort of Val Senales had to close its summer operation this August because its glacier simply vanished.

I want to ski what's left, with my kid, while we still can.

Copyright 2005 by Seth Masia
2269 Mariposa Ave
Boulder CO 80302
303.594.1657
975 words/FNAS rights

CU scientist says journalists doing better job covering climate change

By Wendy Worrall Redal

In the Spring 2006 issue of SEJournal, published by the Society of Environmental Journalists, Paul Thacker interviews New York Times climate reporter Andrew Revkin to find out how he thinks the media has covered climate change and what advice for future stories he has to offer. In a similar vein, CEJ News/Views posed those questions to University of Colorado climate scientist Jim White. Here's our story:

One of the great credos of journalism is to seek balance in a story, to cover "both sides." But reporters' dogged tendency to do so on the issue of a human role in global warming has had a detrimental impact on the public's understanding of the subject, say many scientists who criticize media coverage of climate change.

They claim that in this case, giving equal weight to the opposition – the few remaining skeptics with questionable credibility – skews the accuracy of the story by ignoring the broad scientific consensus around a human link.

Fortunately, however, news coverage is improving, said Jim White, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the role of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, and the causes of abrupt climate change. His research has taken him on many trips to Antarctica and Greenland where he collects ice cores that show climate evolution over time. By melting the samples, scientists are able to analyze the atmospheric gas composition that can cause climate to shift.

CU Professor Jim White in his Boulder office (Photo/ Wendy Worrall Redal)

White, who directed CU's Environmental Studies Program until 2005, regards the role of journalism as crucial in helping to foster effective national policy about climate change. He has been actively involved on the CU campus in furthering dialogue between scientists and journalists aimed at creating better public understanding of the issue.

In just the last year White said he has noticed a significant shift in media coverage of the subject.

"The reporting is better because I don't see the 'other side' anymore."

Making an analogy with another topic once vehemently contested in the media, White said, "We've reached the 'cigarettes cause cancer' point; we don't call the tobacco companies for quotes anymore."

White also identified a second major shift that is getting media attention.

"There have been real cracks in the walls of the climate naysaying community" as skeptics are being converted by mounting evidence in the past five years, White said. Trying to further a defense against global warming is becoming an increasingly lonely mission, and journalists are recognizing that.

"As a scientist, it's laughable," said White. "How can you defend against reality?"

One reality that has captured journalists' attention is sea-level rise. White said he has seen a notable increase in coverage of the subject in the past six months, especially with regard to Antarctica's melting ice sheets.

"It's finally one of those things the press is covering and people are beginning to recognize it's a big problem."

The last time the Earth was as warm as predictions indicate it will be 50 years from now was 140,000 years ago, said White. At that time, the sea level was three meters higher than it is now, putting Baton Rouge on the coast and making Orlando a port city.

White also said Hurricane Katrina has been a major influence on the press's new focus. While it's impossible to say conclusively that global warming is to blame for Katrina's strength, White said, the storm was nonetheless a huge catalyst for a growing press interest in warming and rising seas and their effects.

"I've come to appreciate the power of these seminal events," White said. "These are galvanizing events that focus people's attention on the problems."

He also recognizes that the public is better able to grasp something concrete than the uncertainty inherent in the science around climate change. Especially with regard to predicting what may lay ahead, White said, "It's very difficult to portray the needed nuances in future climate." Yet it is a crucial task for journalists.

"The word 'global warming' has been a very effective rallying tool," said White, "but warming isn't the biggest concern, not by far." At issue are likely to be "changes in rainfall patterns and whether we can grow enough food," as well as what he calls "the two big ugly issues in the future": sea-level rise and abrupt climate change.

"The public does not recognize the non-linear element in climate change. They can't comprehend the possibility of a 10-15 degree centigrade change in their lifetime." Yet evidence of non-linear climate alteration is starting to appear.

White is seeing it in his own realm of study. "The glacier [research] community is now recognizing that these big ice sheets like Antarctica and Greenland have very non-linear behavior."

Warming temperatures are melting Antarctica's ice shelves, spawning massive icebergs (Photo/Josh Landis, National Science Foundation)

"To expect climate to behave in steady, predictable ways is nuts," White said. "That doesn't mean we lack predictability -- preferred states -- but the jet stream can change, and it does…the climate comfort zone is going to be invaded."

How can journalists convey an understanding of that concept to the public? White isn't averse to using elements that people can grasp and relate to, like vanishing sea ice and what that means for polar bear habitat and survival.
"Scientists miss that, " White said. "Many of my colleagues complain that it's all about polar bears -- it is all about polar bears, it's all about seals. You use the ammunition you have."

"The media has an extremely important role over the next two decades in helping to get a clear message to the public. That's beginning to happen."

Ultimately, said White, "We need a partnership between media, scientists and political leaders to deal with sustainability" of the global environment.

"Climate is only one issue that will challenge us. We have to deal with water, pollution, overpopulation, nutrients that will sustain us…" While potential crises "sound far off in the future," according to White, the rate and scale of human environmental impact is "exponential." And people don't get that, which is what worries him.

At the heart of the matter is the ethical concern for future generations, White said, which is lacking.

Threatened polar bears have become a powerful symbol of the consequences of global warming (Photo/Dan Crosbie, Environment Canada)

"We're like a 10-year-old with our foot on the gas pedal, but we can't see over the steering wheel. You just hope you don't hit a tree."

In order "to go into the future with foresight and knowledge, not haphazardly," said White, it's going to take a concerted joint effort, one in which journalists play a key part.

"We need a partnership between those of us who study the problems, between those who take the message to the public, and policymakers who have to make decisions," he said.

White said the press must "keep a long-term role in investigating," to be a "gadfly…to make sure scientists and politicians are not trying to pull the wool over our eyes." At the same time, White challenges his scientist colleagues to understand better "the world of the media, what journalists are up against." He lauds programs like CU's Center for Environmental Journalism, which is dedicated to improving reporting on environmental science and fostering better communication between scientists and the press.

Only with such a focus can society begin to define solutions for a sustainable future, said White. "The time frame between when we realize we have a problem and when we need to find a solution" has been collapsed, he contends, and it's up to journalists to help get that word out.

"The press has an obligation to recognize that we are in a very important transition in the human occupation of the planet," said White. "We can't consider ourselves passive riders on Spaceship Earth. We're not passengers, we're drivers…We need to decide soon where we're going to go."

Climate Change Could Push Colorado Skiing Downhill

Crawford wrote this story for Tom Yulsman's Science Writing course (JOUR 5812) and it ran in Freeskier Magazine.

By Patrick Crawford

Every spring, when winter loosens its grip on the base of Arapahoe Basin ski area, the parking lot of North America's highest ski area turns into what locals call "the beach." Skiers and boarders still arrive at the ski area early, only instead of jockeying for first chair, they fight for a front-row parking spot at the beach.

By mid-day, an oddball collection of diehard skiers and boarders, frequently clad in shorts and baring their pale winter chests to the spring sun, are a few drinks deep into a massive tailgate party at 10,780 feet. Late in the season, more of the day is reserved for drinking, grilling burgers and playing Frisbee than for skiing. Depending on the year, the scene at the beach gets rolling sometime in mid-April and lasts through the Fourth of July.

Beaching it at A-Basin (Photo/Unknown)

While "the beach" is one of Colorado's great spring traditions, nothing scares the ski industry more than the thought that global warming could make the beach more typical of President's Day than Memorial Day.

With a business that survives on the few degrees of difference between rain and snow, some scientists estimate that Colorado's $2.5 billion-per-year ski industry may be facing a meltdown by the end of the century. But ski areas won't concede defeat. Instead, the state's resort operators are using their unique position as business leaders who sell a healthy environment to fight climate change on multiple fronts.

"In the ski industry, we see this as a global issue," says Melanie Mills, Executive Vice-President of Public Policy for Colorado Ski Country USA. "What we can do is to educate, advocate and implement. In other words, educate the public about the issue, advocate at the legislative level, and implement changes at our own resorts."

For the public, discussions about a few degrees of warming on a global scale may seem esoteric, but for skiers and a massive state industry that survives on Colorado's legendary "champagne powder," climate change is a life and death issue.

Every year evidence that the Earth is experiencing human-caused warming grows. According to a 2001 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-sponsored assessment of the state of climate science, the global average temperature has increased about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century. The bad news for Colorado's ski industry is that the warming has not been uniform, and the Rocky Mountains have seen a higher-than-average temperature increase.

In September, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, a regional environmental group concerned with climate change, released a report that analyzed temperature and snowpack records in five major river basins of the western United States. It found that the upper Colorado River basin, which encompasses much of Colorado's high country, has seen an increase of 2.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the long-term average.

Given current trends, most climate scientists say warming is likely to intensify. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have been on the rise for a century, and with industrialized nations struggling to control their emissions while developing nations burn ever-larger amounts of fossil fuels, the levels of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are likely continue to rise along with temperatures through the end of this century, according to the IPCC.

Now scientists are working to understand what that means to people on a local and regional level. A 2004 study by a team of scientists using a climate model developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., estimates that the Colorado River basin will warm by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2070. The study's authors called this a "best-case scenario," and other models have produced higher estimates. For example, the Canadian Global Coupled Model pegs the increase in the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin region at 5.9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050. Models like these are used because they successfully predicted observed historical climate changes when scientists ran tests on past scenarios.

One thing all models agree upon is continued warming in the Western U.S., which would cause a shortened snow season.

"Looking forward about 70 years into the future, the runoff will occur about a month earlier, with more rain at the beginning and the end of the winter," says Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author for the United Nations' upcoming 2007 IPCC report.

However, scientists insist that long-term climate modeling is complex, and uncertainties increase as models become more localized. Climate models can account for major geographical features like the Rocky Mountains, but not the specific topography of an individual ski area, for example. And, all estimates of future warming work off assumptions about the amount of carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere. Tweaking the assumptions about the level of greenhouse gas emissions changes the predictions.

"I think there is less change coming our way than some other people would say," says NCAR researcher Klaus Wolf. "I remain skeptical that the models have a good handle on regional-scale climate change scenarios."

And as far as snowpack is concerned, Wolf says Colorado's elevation works in its favor because the state's high-elevation mountains are so cold. "I'm convinced that we are less vulnerable here at the higher elevations than places that are lower, such as the Pacific Northwest or even the Sierra."

While scientists at climate research centers around the globe continue to improve their ability to make long-term predictions about climate and how weather patterns might change over the next century, the snowsports industry feels that it cannot just wait to see what happens.

Skiing's glamorous image belies the fact that the ski resort operator in some ways has more in common with the Kansas wheat farmer than the New York hotelier. That's because ski areas are massively expensive resort operations fully at the mercy of weather.

"People who own and operate ski resorts do it because they ski," says Molly Cuffe, Director of Communications for Colorado Ski Country USA, the trade organization of Colorado's mountain resorts.

"They love the mountains, they love the mountain environment, and they know that their guests do as well. They know that they're selling the environment, so climate change is something that's very important to the ski industry. "

Keeping Colorado's ski slopes white is integral to the state's winter economy, which climate change may put in jeopardy (Photo/Copper Mountain Ski Resort)

According to Geraldine Link, Director of Public Policy for the National Ski Areas association, the ski industry is somewhat limited in what it can do to adapt to a warmer climate. "There are two things we can do, both of which we're already doing. One is to develop the resorts into year-round destinations by building our summer capabilities. The other is to maximize our snowmaking capabilities."

Unfortunately for Colorado's ski industry, in addition to producing a shorter snow season, warmer temperatures would also make it more difficult for ski areas to compensate for reduced natural snowfall by blowing the manmade kind.

"It's much more economical to make snow when it's cold out," says Auden Schendler, Director of Environmental Affairs at the Aspen Skiing Company. "A degree or so of temperature difference can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs in efficiency,"

Aspen Skiing Company has also added another consideration for the four mountains under its ownership: download lift capacity. In the early and late season, when the snowline is higher on the mountain, many ski areas use their lifts to shuttle skiers up and down from the base area to the snow. If snow stops falling at the base area of resorts, Schendler says, "we may be skiing the tops of the mountains, like we do in early and late season."

But most who make a living off skiing or snowboarding know that downhill lift capacity and snowmaking are just band-aids on a potentially massive problem. Major climate changes could cripple the sport, so many in the business feel that the most important work for the ski industry is to use its sway to affect national and regional environmental policy.

"The ski industry is an interesting, sexy business," Schendler says. "We have a significant amount of lobbying power, and we should be using that."

Colorado's ski industry was a major player in the state's 2004 passage of Amendment 37, which mandates that Colorado public utilities produce a percentage of the state's energy from renewable sources. On the national level, 70 ski areas have put their weight behind the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which, if passed, would force the United States to limit industrial greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010.

Many resorts, especially Schendler's Aspen Skiing Company, have been major innovators in developing environmentally friendly building practices. Aspen aims to have the new base village planned at its Snowmass ski area earn green-building certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. Currently, there are only two buildings in Colorado that meet the strict criteria, one of which is owned by Aspen. Schendler also helped institute a unique system that uses heavy spring runoff to create hydroelectricity.

As global warming raises temperatures in the Rockies, epic powder days like this one may become rare (Photo/Dave Lehl, Vail Resorts)

All of this may signal the beginning of a potentially powerful alliance of what would once have been strange bedfellows: ski areas and environmentalists. That would hardly have seemed possible even a few years ago, when relations between the Colorado resort industry and environmentalists reached a nadir after the radical environmentalist group Earth Liberation Front claimed responsibility for burning down Vail's Two Elks Lodge. Many far less extreme environmental groups have battled ski area expansions in Colorado in the courtroom.

Today the ski industry has teamed with the National Resources Defense Council on its "Keep Winter Cool" climate change educational program, and the NRDC has assuaged environmentalists about the ski industry in several instances.

"If you look at difference between the relationship between the ski industry and the environmental community 10 years ago and now, it's a sea change," Schendler says. "Part of that is this climate issue. We've found common ground."

But as much as the snowsports industry is doing to promote its own survival, even ski area employees like Schendler know that in a major climate change scenario, the loss of snowsports recreation would hardly be the worst consequence.

"The discussion that the ski industry is threatened by 2050, it's almost silly," he says. "It's like saying, 'you know, if there's a nuclear war, our milk is going to spoil.' The implications of climate change are so profound for society." Compared to problems for agriculture, potentially more intense hurricanes and other possible impacts from climate change, "the ski industry is one little blip. It's important that people say that societally, we're not going to be worrying about skiing. We're going to have a lot bigger problems to talk about."

Christianity Getting Greener

By Erika Engelhaupt

To some, the phrase "Christian environmentalist" may sound like an oxymoron.

But Christians are not of one political mind on the environment, and a growing movement called "creation care" is greening Christianity, even in socially conservative evangelical circles. In particular, the climate change debate is exposing ideological divides among Christian groups that traditionally have been lumped together as the "Christian right."

While some evangelical leaders face off in battles over endorsing U.S. action on global warming, others believe the mainstream of conservative Christianity is experiencing an environmental awakening.

"The ice is breaking in the center of the community on this issue," said the Rev. Jim Ball, an evangelical pastor at the forefront of the global warming debate. Ball spoke at a panel discussion on creation care at the 2005 Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Austin.

Ball is an ordained Baptist minister and a leader in a movement he calls "creation care," a faith-based brand of environmentalism that stresses the responsibility of humans to be good stewards of God's creation. Ball founded the Evangelical Environmental Network, a Christian non-profit organization that publishes Creation Care magazine and campaigns for environmental causes, most famously in the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign, in which Ball drove a hybrid Toyota Prius across the Bible Belt, spreading the word about clean vehicles from church pulpits and Christian radio stations along the way.

The Rev. Jim Ball, a leading green evangelical, promotes "creation care" among churches (Photo/ Kara Ball, Evangelical Environmental Network).

In February, Ball led a group of conservative Christian leaders to create the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a campaign calling on government to enact legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

A statement from the group implored that "Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem." The statement was signed by 86 evangelical leaders, including 39 college presidents, and first appeared Feb. 9 in a full-page New York Times advertisement. Signatories included Todd Bassett, national commander of The Salvation Army, and Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor who authored the best-selling "The Purpose-Driven Life," as well as several prominent African-American pastors.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative ran this full-page ad in the New York Times (Image/ Evangelical Climate Initiative).

Recognizing that "the consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poor the hardest," the statement urged evangelicals to "engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity's responsibility to address it."

The statement was part of a tug-of-war between church leaders trying to lay claim to the role of mouthpiece for the evangelical community. Ball worked for months crafting a statement opposing global warming with the large and politically powerful National Association of Evangelicals. The group seemed poised to take a strong stance: in 2004, they had crafted an environmental statement claiming a "sacred responsibility to steward the Earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part."

But the NAE finally abandoned the statement on climate change in January after a small group of influential leaders wrote a letter criticizing the effort, citing disagreements among Christians over the "cause, severity, and solutions to the global warming issue." Among them were Focus on the Family head James Dobson, and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. In response to the rebuff, Ball organized the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Climate change is only one environmental concern of Christians among many. Because the poor are often hit hardest by environmental problems like climate change and air pollution, justice issues play heavily into Christian environmental ethics. Evangelical progressives cite a biblical mandate from Jesus to care for the poor and oppressed, and the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign against gas-guzzling SUVs made it clear that some Christians think Biblical values can inform consumer decisions that may affect others.

Best-selling Christian author Jim Wallis challenges Christians to examine their social decisions closely in a moral and biblical context. In his book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, Wallis argues that the political right has been allowed to hijack faith and moral values, defining moral values narrowly and focusing on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Wallis, who describes himself as a "19th-century evangelical" in the tradition of a spiritually based emphasis on social justice, is the founder of the Sojourners Community, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, D.C.

"I would say that if our gospel isn't good news to poor people, it isn't an evangelical gospel. That's what I believe. I think that's right in the heart of the true evangelical tradition," Wallis told PBS in 2003 on a program called "The Jesus Factor" which examined the growing political influence of evangelicals in American politics.

Broadly defined, evangelical Christians believe in a personal conversion to a relationship with Jesus Christ, the Bible as the authoritative word of God, and the importance of spreading their faith. That leaves plenty of room for a diversity of opinions on the environment, and even on social issues.

Some evangelicals agree with Wallis' premise of protecting the poor but disagree about the best way to do it. Greenhouse gas-cutting measures that might increase energy prices could hurt the poor disproportionately, argues Calvin Beisner, a professor at Knox Theological Seminary and organizer of an opposition group to the Evangelical Climate Initiative called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance.

Grassroots action at the local level is the breeding ground for the kind of new Christian movement—or return to traditional Christian values, which Wallis would claim—that evangelicals like Wallis and Ball preach.

Denver-based Eco-Justice Ministries is an ecumenical agency that helps churches in Colorado and across the country get involved in creation care and social justice issues. Its founder, the Rev. Peter Sawtell, an ordained minister in the more liberal United Church of Christ denomination, runs the ministry with a board of directors, teaching clergy how to develop social and environmental ethics in their home congregations.

"We seek the well-being of all humanity on a thriving Earth," Sawtell said.

The group provides educational materials for adults and children and asks partner churches to form leadership teams to coordinate church projects. Materials are available to any church, conservative or liberal.

Last November, Eco-Justice Ministries co-sponsored a conference in Denver with the National Council of Churches where about 70 participants, mostly from Colorado, gathered to learn about regional environmental issues and how to bring environmental concerns into their home churches through preaching, Sunday school lessons and group activities.

At the conference, Sawtell emphasized that "the church is not meant to be a branch of the Sierra Club," but rather that his ministry is concerned with how Christians should live within their faith.

Around Boulder, both progressive and conservative churches are putting creation care into practice. Cornerstone Church pastor Gene Binder who describes his church as "conservative evangelical Christian," says church members are interested in caring for the environment. A more liberal congregation, Community United Church of Christ, has formed an Earth Action Team that helps the church recycle and hopes to eventually get the church powered solely by renewable solar energy.

The Rev. Martie McMane described her hopes for the creation care movement, starting with her congregation at Boulder's First Congregational Church of the United Church of Christ.

"Our church is small and can only do so much for the environment. But think of it like ripples going out; if each person does something, it carries forth," she said.

CU Professor Emeritus Champions 'Eco-Justice'

By Wendy Worrall Redal

When Jack Twombly retired in 1990 from his 54-year career as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, he didn't give up teaching. Now a vital 84, Twombly's educational mission is helping Christians better understand the need for stewardship of the environment, or, as it is frequently called in church circles, "creation care."

At the heart of creation care is the concept of "eco-justice," Twombly explained, a situation "where society and ecology both win." The notion embraces the insight that "justice to human beings is inseparable from right relationships with and within the natural order," said Twombly, citing the Rev. William Gibson's book Eco-Justice: The Unfinished Journey.

The biggest challenge to that mission, he said, is that people do not have enough information, an impetus for making more ethical decisions. He seeks to rectify that among churchgoers in his denomination and beyond. Churches took part in the first Earth Day observance in 1970, he said, when "people really began to wake up" about the environment. He hopes the contemporary creation-care movement will have a similar effect.

Twombly, who received a bachelor's degree from CU in 1944 and a PhD in 1959, has been a member of First Presbyterian Church in Boulder for half a century. He currently serves as a liaison for creation-care issues to 44 churches in a regional division of the Presbyterian Church USA, a 19,000-square mile area that encompasses northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska. There are about 60 such appointed "Stewardship of Creation Enablers" nationally, part of the larger Presbyterians for Restoring Creation.

CU Professor Emeritus Jack Twombly (Photo/ Wendy Redal)

In his position, Twombly assists congregations in gaining the knowledge and skills to sustain a "long-term, spiritually vital commitment to God's Creation." That may involve giving workshops, hosting an information table on a Sunday morning, or, in keeping with his own expertise in energy issues, counseling churches on how to save resources and money by converting to compact fluorescent lighting and other means of enhancing energy efficiency. Twombly has also helped sponsor an annual "Bike to Church Day" at First Presbyterian in Boulder, where those who cycle or walk to the Sunday service enjoy a free breakfast to honor their efforts.

Twombly credits retired minister and climber John Wade for inspiring him to get involved in the position back in 1997. He had read about Wade, then the 77-year-old chair of the Sierra Club's Rocky Mountain Chapter, in Sierra magazine. The article outlined Wade's vision for sparking an Earth stewardship movement in the Presbyterian Church through the creation of a network of grassroots positions like the one Twombly now holds.

Twombly's task has not been an easy one, though. While most people say they support environmental protection, they don't have enough facts to push them into behaving differently, he said. Part of the problem, Twombly thinks, is that the U.S. is "only a couple of generations away from the frontier economy." A belief prevails, especially among older people, that "there's always more out there, that resources are infinite." Challenging that perspective is central to Twombly's educational mission.

One of the biggest hurdles is encouraging people to take time to educate themselves, he said. He has found it hard to get individuals to commit even 15 minutes a week to read from an array of accessible publications he would like to suggest. Even when he is successful in persuading parishioners to learn more about environmental problems, "when they do, they find it overwhelming. A lot of people are living in denial," he said, with the attitude that "if we ignore it, it will go away."

He worries that his message may come across as too negative, but he doesn't want to dilute the realities he expects the next generations will face. "You're not a doom-and-gloomer if you study the facts and report them."

It is young people who know the most about environmental problems, Twombly said. When he spoke to a group of CU freshmen in the Honors Program a few years ago, "they were very aware. They're the ones with the biggest stake in it…By 2050, when they're approaching retirement, they're going to be living in a very miserable world" if current trends continue, he said.

Twombly is heartened that environmental consciousness, especially among Christians, is growing.

"We're making progress. But it's not nearly fast enough." Particularly about climate change, "people need a sense of urgency," he said. Global warming is "easily" the most pressing environmental issue Twombly wants to get church members concerned about.

"If this issue is not solved," he said, "all these other issues become somewhat irrelevant."

Jack Twombly with hiking partner Bonaire (Photo/ Wendy Redal)

As a scientist, he is worried about the possibility of abrupt climatic shifts. "Very few things in nature are linear. You approximate it with linear mathematics because that's the best you can do." But he wonders if we may already have moved beyond that linear process with polar ice-sheet melting, a "self-sustaining phenomenon" in which melting ice creates a larger dark ocean surface which in turn speeds up further ice-sheet melting.

It's frustrating to Twombly when people's eyes glaze over at such discussions. He sees in part a "willful ignorance of science," compounded by the Bush Administration's "distortion of reputable science," which troubles him. When he first started in his position with the Presbytery, "I thought if I had impeccable data and presented it well, it would bring people over, rationally…but I've found that you have to get people emotionally and passionately involved."

Twombly thus believes it is crucial how issues are framed. He cites the latest issue of Eco-Justice Notes, a publication of ecumenical Denver-based Eco-Justice Ministries, which observes that people are more likely to respond to pictures of a starving polar bear perched on an ice floe, marooned by ice that has fragmented too early, than to scientific studies. "That gets to people more than a curve on a graph of CO2 and temperature."

It's also critical to take on the economic argument, according to Twombly, who said his professional background in electrical engineering has taught him a few things about energy efficiency. "If we could just get past this mantra that doing anything about global warming would ruin our economy – that's tragically not true."

While he recognizes that a public response is happening, "it's got to happen faster. There's got to be a tipping point where most people get involved."

Far from being daunted, however, he works indefatigably for even small gains.

"There's no choice but to be hopeful," said Twombly, who has 16 grandchildren. "As a retired professor, I have a lot of faith that if people would just become informed, it would make a difference…They have good hearts."

Jack Twombly will be attending the National Council of Churches Eco-Justice Conference in New Orleans June 1-4, 2006.

Glick Chases Climate Story from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean

By Emily Cooper

Not everyone gets the chance to write for an internationally acclaimed magazine such as National Geographic. Even fewer people have that magazine asking them to do a story, especially when it's the first one they've ever written for the publication. And within that narrow subset of people, only a handful can say they got to chase their story to places as diverse as Alaska, Louisiana and Bermuda.

Dan Glick, a Ted Scripps Fellow in 2000-2001, is one of that handful.

In the September 2004 issue of National Geographic, Glick's story is the first in a three-part package entitled "Global Warning." He said the editors contacted him early on about writing the story because of stories he'd done on climate change in the past, including for Newsweek. In deciding where in the world to set his story, he said he tried to choose locations that had some concrete data, and places where changes are already happening.

"The overriding question was 'How is the earth changing, and how do researchers and scientists know that it's changing?'" he said.

The issue, which National Geographic editor-in-chief Bill Allen admitted in his "Letter from the Editor" would alienate some readers, marks a step forward for reporting on climate change, which most scientists have been insisting on for years, but many Americans still think is nothing more than a theory.

"That's where the state of the science is," Glick said, matter-of-factly, in a recent interview. "You'll also notice that we didn't go and find the two or three outlier skeptics."

Former Ted Scripps Fellow and freelance writer, Dan Glick

What he found instead was an Inupiat whaling captain, a Cajun levee district head, and some scientists on a boat near Bermuda, all of whom told Glick the same thing: the climate is changing, and it will impact lives in a very real way.

On a spit of open tundra jutting out where the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas come together in northernmost Alaska sits the town of Barrow. It's "sort of a ramshackle sort of place," Glick said. But it's also a scientific and cultural outpost, and it was there that Glick met an Inupiat elder who told him how whaling, a subsistence activity for the Inupiat, has changed over his lifetime.

"I talk to you about things that I have seen," Glick recalls the man saying. He told Glick of the changes he and other hunters had observed in the ice itself, which is critical to their culture. Whalers, the man explained, have a harder time now because they can't trust traditional knowledge about ice conditions. To illustrate, the man told Glick a story about a group of whalers who got stranded on a chunk of ice—ice that betrayed them when it broke off from the mainland and floated into the ocean. The men were rescued by helicopter but the story remains, a testament to the changes wrought by global warming.

In Louisiana, Glick traveled to Bayou Lafourche, located southwest of New Orleans, where the land seems to be dissolving into the Gulf of Mexico. That impression isn't far off. Glick said it was in Bayou Lafourche that he "learned what sea level rise looks like in fast motion." It's also where he met Windell Curole, the head of the levee district, who has the improbable task of keeping that rising water under control.

Residents of southern Louisiana are learning the meaning of "subsidence"—quite literally the sinking of the earth on which they live. Subsidence is caused by sea level rise, sediments not being replenished in the Mississippi delta, and possibly also gas and oil drilling, which might be causing the ground to collapse. To battle subsidence, communities have constructed a complicated network of levees and dikes, which help control water during storm surges, with the goal of keeping water from the gulf out of the cities.

Curole is charged with deciding when people need to evacuate, when they can come back, and which gates get opened or closed to manage flooding. It's a problem that right now is pretty unique to southern Louisiana and other places that are built at or below sea level. But as sea levels rise as a result of glacial melt from climate change, the problem—and jobs like Curole's—will become a lot more common.

"He was somebody that had to deal with what was essentially going to be a lot of communities' future," Glick said.

But not all changes caused by climate change seem logical on the surface. Glick also spent a few days on a research vessel near Bermuda, talking to scientists who are measuring the temperature, salinity and other properties of the ocean water there. It's part of a larger, long-term study that's looking at how the ocean is changing as ice melts near the poles.

Glick said the biggest implication for the scientists' research is the impact all the new fresh water will have on a natural ocean cycle called thermohaline circulation. Basically, in the Atlantic Ocean warmer, saltier water moves north along the Gulf Stream and is replaced by cooler, fresher water from the Arctic. The process brings warm water and air to the north Atlantic, and helps keep Europe's climate temperate. Scientists are concerned that the influx of colder fresh water from the Arctic could disturb the circulation, effectively shutting down the Gulf Stream and actually leaving Europe colder for a while.

This might be a hard sell to some—that global warming could result in lower temperatures in some places—but Glick didn't seem to think it would be. "The earth's climatic systems are really complex," he said.

He added that in the past decade, scientists have done a lot more interdisciplinary research using data from sources as diverse as ancient ice cores, tree rings, lake sediments and stalactites. Each method has holes, he said, but all together the evidence is "very compelling" that climate change is real, and it's caused by humans.

"The convincing case is that what's happening now is anomalous," he said. "It's outside of the realm of any sort of normal pattern that can be explained without adding in these human influences."

Glick is a freelance journalist and author of two books, Powder Burn: Arson, Money and Mystery on Vail Mountain and Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth, which won the Colorado Book Award for best History/Biography in 2003.

Journalists Help Tackle Climate Change Conundrum

By Emily Cooper

In a sunny conference room, seated along two long tables scattered with papers, soda cans and reading glasses, the Senate Committee on Climate Change and a panel of global warming experts face off. Legislators chat, rustle papers and mill around as each panelist in turn raises his or her voice to be heard above the fray.

At one end of the room, a television cameraman records the proceedings. At the other end, three more journalists listen intently to the people at both tables.

The scene looks real enough at first, but then the subtle details sink in. Nalgene water bottles outnumber soda cans on the cluttered tables. The television camera is a handheld video camera. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., wears a heart-shaped badge with the words “Big Oil” written on it. And Inhofe is…a woman?

Sen. Inhofe (aka Rosner) listens to a colleague and waits patiently for lunch.

The mock congressional testimony on Feb. 26 was staged by members of the Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded fellowship program that throws together 13 University of Colorado students pursuing graduate degrees in the natural sciences, social sciences and journalism. The goal of the initiative is to help the fellows learn—and teach each other—about climate change science, policy and communication.

Alan Townsend, a biologist and CU professor who is one of the two directors of the initiative, said that although there are a number of climate change-related programs that combine the natural and social sciences, CU’s fellowship is the only one he has heard of that includes journalists as well.

He recalled how he and CCSI Co-Director Jim White, a geochemist and CU professor, first worked out the details of the grant application over beers at a Mexican restaurant. He said they decided they needed to expand their thinking beyond the natural sciences, incorporating social sciences and policy as well. Then the truly novel idea came.

“We remembered that there’s this really good Center for Environmental Journalism here, and that that’s really the conduit to the people,” Townsend said. “We weren’t sure at the time how we would incorporate it, but we just thought it would make a lot of sense to at least explore the possibility.”

Sen. Buck White of Montana (aka Townsend) questions a member of the panel about carbon sequestration.

Townsend and White approached CEJ Co-Director Tom Yulsman for help. When they submitted their grant application to the National Science Foundation in 1999, incorporating journalists had become part of the plan. NSF awarded them a five-year grant, enough to cover an initial planning year followed by two two-year fellowship cycles. The grant began in the fall of 2000; the fellows in the program now are the second group to participate.

For Hillary Rosner and Amanda Haag, the two journalists in the group, the climate initiative was an excellent fit. Rosner had been a journalist for almost 10 years, first on staff at the New York Post and The Village Voice, then later as a freelancer. Much of her writing had focused on the technology boom and the Internet, but she found herself wanting to write more about things that mattered to her—in particular, the environment.

“I wanted to go back to school really badly, to get a kind of base in environmental studies,” Rosner said, “but I just didn’t want to walk too far away from the rest of it [freelancing and journalism].”

The press corps (with Haag in the center) listens dispassionately to the procedings.

Haag came to the fellowship from the opposite direction. She had been working for several years as a biologist in California, and had even spent two field seasons doing research in Antarctica. But eventually she decided she wanted to get out of the lab and move towards writing, as a way to communicate about science to the general public.

She applied mostly to graduate programs that focused on science writing. CU’s program was a “long-shot” because it was a journalism program with an environment (not science) emphasis.

“At that time I was really struggling with the issue of totally walking away from science,” Haag said.

For both Haag and Rosner, the climate initiative helped tie their interests together.

But the fellowship is no small commitment. Fellows meet weekly for a three-hour class, which sometimes includes guest lectures by climate change experts. Townsend and White led the classes last year during the first semester, arranging speakers and giving lectures to help bring the fellows up to speed on the science and policy issues surrounding climate change.

Since then, the group has become more involved in the direction of the meetings. In addition to hosting three mock congressional hearings last spring, they also broke into groups to research the political, cultural and business backgrounds of the U.S., China, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, with the goal of figuring out how an international climate change policy might take all countries’ situations into account.

And unlike many university classes, the fellows’ work is more than just theoretical. This year they’ll be pulling together everything they’ve learned to complete their final project: a new curriculum for an undergraduate-level course on climate change. The course will take an interdisciplinary and global look at climate change, with the goal of encouraging students to draw their own conclusions about the problems and their solutions. Some fellows may even get to try their hand at teaching parts of the course, which is slated to be offered beginning next fall.

Haag acknowledged the issues around climate change are complex, and there are no easy answers.

“There’s not going to be some eureka moment when you’re like, ‘That’s it!’” she said.

But if the fellows’ experience is any indication, people from many different academic backgrounds can learn to work together.

“We thought this would be hard, and I think we’ve learned it’s harder than we thought,” Townsend, the co-director, said.

But it’s also encouraging.

“The basic idea can work,” he said. “People can start to learn across those boundaries and talk to each other effectively, and I think that’s starting to happen.”

Thanks to the hard work of the fellows and their faculty advisors, undergraduates at CU will soon have the chance do the same.

Ancient Ice May Be Key to Understanding Modern Climate Change

By Wendy Worrall Redal

When Ted Scripps Fellows come to Colorado to study, they don’t typically expect to be surrounded by polar ice in 40-below temperatures, even in January.

But such was the case when fellows visited the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo., on a program field trip. Here, though, the ice was locked inside thousands of thin silver cylinders in a freezer unit within the vast suburban complex that is the Denver Federal Center. Inside each cylinder are data that provide scientists with records of ancient climate patterns.

Scripps Fellows & CEJ staff shiver inside the ice freezer. (Photo/John Kotlowski)

The freezer is at the center of the National Ice Core Laboratory, a facility for storing, curating and studying ice cores recovered from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers of the world. The lab is jointly operated funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.

Its purpose is to get information about the climate history of the Earth, obtained by studying the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere over time. Through analyzing gases in air bubbles trapped in the layers of compressed ice, scientists can reconstruct past climate states of the Earth, including temperature changes over millennia.

The lab’s technical director, Todd Hinkley, explained that studying past climate fluctuations can help scientists better understand the factors that prompt such shifts and potentially help them predict future climate change.

Ice core samples are more thorough than other means of assessing climate history, including tree rings, coral and sediments from the ocean floor. The lab’s web site explains that “an ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years. This record can include temperature, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity and a variety of other climate indicators. It is the simultaneity of these properties recorded in the ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.”

Geoff Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, served as the fellows’ tour guide through the lab. Sporting a ponytail that reaches to the middle of his back and a long, wavy gray beard, Hargreaves looks like a modern-day biblical patriarch. The facial hair comes in handy, he acknowledged, when every bit of extra warmth is welcome for someone who spends as much time as he does in sub-zero temperatures.

National Ice Core Lab curator Geoff Hargreaves sports a rime-coated beard. (Photo/John Kotlowski)

Hargreaves helped fellows don heavy parkas for their foray into the freezer, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of cylinders containing the unique collection that Hargreaves oversees. Once inside, his beard hairs were quickly coated in white frost as he explained how the ice core samples made their way from the Earth’s most remote regions to the Lakewood warehouse.

Polar core samples are obtained from Antarctica and Greenland, drilled from deep sheets of ancient ice that has never melted. Greenland samples offer 1/4 million years of data, while Antarctic cores reveal at least 1/2 million years of information and the ability to extrapolate much farther back.

The oldest site is Vostok in Antarctica, where cores have been drilled to a depth of 3,623 meters, or 2 1/4 miles. Beneath the Vostok ice sheet lies a 1,000-meter-deep ancient lake the size of Lake Ontario, created when the weight of the ice above exerted pressure so strong that the friction melted the lowest layers.

The lab, which is the most comprehensive storage facility of its kind in the world, has more than 14,000 meters of ice available for scientists to examine. The cores, which are 3 to 5.2 inches in diameter, are obtained via a lengthy and expensive drilling process. Gas bubbles do not begin to form until the ice is 60 to 100 meters deep, and it can take three to four years to drill a very deep core at a cost of $20,000 per meter, according to Hargreaves. The deepest cores have been drilled to bedrock.

Antarctica’s severe climate allows drilling only during the southern summer from October through January. The last flight out is at the end of February, when the ice cores are loaded onto a ship bound northward.

Preserving them until they reach Colorado is an involved process. The cores are cut into 1-meter pieces, sealed in plastic bags labeled liberally with arrows to note the “up end,” put into silver tubes to reflect heat-inducing light, then placed into insulated shipping containers and stored under the snowpack until it’s time to transport them. The ice must remain at -15º C or colder once it is out of the ground or the gases within will begin to migrate.

The containers are flown aboard a ski-equipped LC130 airplane to McMurdo Station by a frigid pilot who must fly without heat in order to keep the ice cold enough. There, it is loaded into a freezer on board ship and brought to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it is moved onto freezer trucks and taken to the National Ice Core Lab in Lakewood. Each truck is accompanied by an empty truck that is kept cold, in order to transfer the ice in case of an accident or breakdown. Hargreaves explained that it’s cheaper to pay $2,000 for an extra truck than to lose a single meter of ice, which costs $3,000-$20,000 per meter to obtain.

Once the ice cores are safely ensconced in the lab’s freezer, they are available for scientists to study, either at the lab or another research site. Pieces of ice are sent out in vacuum-insulated boxes that keep the ice at -20º C for a week, in any ambient temperature.

Researchers may examine the ice in solid condition or melt it in order to do core gas analysis. In any case, they receive only a piece of the core sample, not the whole diameter, in order to leave a good portion of it as archive. An archive of the entire Vostok core is kept at the lab, Hargreaves said, since it is the coldest and safest repository in the world.

Paleoclimatologists such as Jim White, a University of Colorado geology professor and scientist with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, rely upon core samples from the National Ice Core Lab to further their knowledge of what causes climatic shifts. White spoke to the Ted Scripps Fellows about his research during a seminar leading up to the fellows’ visit to the lab.

White is particularly interested in rapid climate change. The evidence he has uncovered suggests that temperature fluctuations sometimes occur as abrupt spikes, rather than gradual trends.

White’s research team has studied ice samples from the Siple Dome core in Antarctica to deduce that air temperatures there rose up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades as the last ice age began to wane some 19,000 years ago, the largest and most abrupt warming spike ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

The timing of the warming correlates with an abrupt sea-level rise documented by researchers at Australian National University and with less dramatic warming increases seen in the Byrd and Vostok ice cores from Antarctica.

“The signal we see in the Siple Dome core is so strong, we can speculate it may have been the trigger area for the end of the glacial period,” White said. Because of its coastal location, Siple Dome would have been climatically sensitive to events like partial collapses of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would have caused seas to rise globally.

Understanding events like these can help climatologists get a better grasp on the matrix of forces that influence climate change, especially as they seek to discern the more recent role of human beings in global warming. The ancient ice samples stored at the national Ice Core Laboratory are providing some of the keys to unlock those complex mysteries.

Former Fellow Dan Grossman Traces Climate Change to the Ends of the Earth

By Emily Cooper

If you wanted to get to Antarctica’s Palmer Research Station, you would first need to travel to Punta Arenas, Chile. From there, a ship equipped to break through 3-foot thick ice would take you through Drake’s Passage, known for some of the choppiest waters on Earth. Along the way, you’d dodge icebergs and pass through narrow channels carved from rock and ice. You wouldn’t see any vegetation, but wildlife—seals, whales, and all kinds of sea birds—would likely be abundant. When you arrived at Palmer Station, you’d find a small outpost of five buildings, with space to house about 40 people in the summer. By the time you disembarked, you would have been aboard the ship for almost a week.

The trip to Antarctica is one that few people, and even fewer journalists, have made. But Dan Grossman, freelance science journalist and former Ted Scripps fellow, can count himself among that small number. In the past year, Grossman has reported on climate change from two places at almost opposite ends of the Earth—Antarctica and Greenland.

On his first approach to Antarctica, at the end of last year, Grossman said he was awed.

“[It was] stunningly beautiful—craggy mountains falling right to the sea, covered with snow.”

Anvers Island, where Palmer Station is located, sits offshore from the Antarctic Peninsula, which sticks up from the continent like a hitchhiker’s thumb. It’s about 1,700 miles from the South Pole, almost as far north as you can get and still be in Antarctica. And in January—mid-summer in the Southern Hemisphere—temperatures can climb into the 50s. Grossman says there were days that he wore short sleeves. Meanwhile his wife, living in Boston during a cold snap, battled frozen drainpipes and even a frozen dishwasher.

Grossman’s interest in climate change began over a decade ago, when he concluded that “climate change was the most important environmental topic.” In particular, Grossman was interested in paleoclimatology—the study of ancient climates—and both trips were intended to observe ice core research sites. Ice core research involves deep drilling into glacial ice in an attempt to learn what climates were like thousands of years ago. But the National Science Foundation, the governmental body that gives grants for journalists to visit Antarctica, rejected his application two years ago to study ice core drilling there.

Grossman planned to reapply last year, but the only ice core research Americans were doing in Antarctica at the time was on a moving transect of an ice sheet that was simply too difficult for him to reach. In the meantime, he’d read an article in the journal Science that piqued his interest in the impact of climate change on ecosystems. So when he came across the work of Bill Fraser, a researcher who has studied Adélie penguins for 30 years and believes they’re being impacted by global warming, Grossman realized it was a story that should be told. NSF liked Grossman’s new plan, and on Dec. 30, 2002, Grossman found himself aboard the R/V Laurence M. Gould, chugging toward Palmer Station.

Adélies are endemic to Antarctica, and their numbers around Palmer Research Station have declined sharply in recent years. Fraser suspects the decline is due to climate change. The birds are highly evolved for life in Antarctica, and as global warming has led to more snow and less ice, Fraser says the populations around Palmer Station have not adapted well to the new landscape.

Grossman says the Adélies still haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, noting that they could signal what will happen to many other species as climate change continues.

“[The Adélie story] still hasn’t been reported on” by anyone else, Grossman says. “I’m the only journalist who knows about it.”

Grossman’s trip gave him material for several stories about the Adélies. His profile of Fraser will appear in the December issue of Audubon. Two other stories about the penguins have been accepted by Scientific American and Radio Netherlands.

But Adélies weren’t Grossman’s only topic of research in Antarctica. During his five weeks there he met scientists studying penguins, giant petrels, sponges, and krill, a tiny crustacean that’s the base of the food chain in Antarctica’s icy waters. Grossman himself was the subject of interviews for WBUR, Boston’s National Public Radio affiliate, and The Boston Globe. He also collected interviews, photographs, and natural sound, and kept a journal for a multimedia website he created in collaboration with WBUR.

“[Antarctica was] one of the most fun experiences in my life,” Grossman says. The food was excellent, the people were interesting, and he got to attend weekly lectures and fun classes—including one that inspired him to tie-dye his pajamas. And, perhaps most important for a freelancer, the trip was relatively stress-free because NSF arranged the whole thing for him.

Journalist and antarctic explorer Dan Grossman shows off his cold weather gear and recording equipment.

Greenland, on the other hand, was “a completely different trip.” This time, Grossman wanted to make sure he got to see an ice core drilling site. His plan was to create another multimedia website for WBUR, but to do so he needed to broaden his focus. So he started looking around for other topics that interested him and would appeal to the station’s audience. A biological research base at Zackenberg station in northeast Greenland; a lemming research camp on Traill Island off the Greenland coast; and Tasiilaq, home of an Inuit hunter, rounded out his plans.

Unlike in Antarctica, Grossman had to make all of his own arrangements for the trip, which could hardly be called standard travel agent fare. He had to contact the researchers, set up interviews, and arrange flights to remote locations. In all, he made five or six stops to visit as many research sites—an itinerary that required at least 20 plane flights.

Language problems also made some arrangements difficult. The scientists Grossman wanted to visit hailed from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, France, and Germany. He says that even though English is the international scientific language, and everyone he dealt with spoke it to some degree, it was hard to figure out before he got there exactly what people were doing—not to mention who was in charge. And for their part, Grossman said not everyone could understand exactly why he was coming, or what he intended to do.

But once he arrived, in July of this year, Grossman says everyone he worked with was helpful. He speaks especially warmly of Benoit Sittler, a French scientist who has been studying lemming populations on Traill Island for the past 16 years. Sittler and his tiny staff of four lived in a camp that consisted of a few tents and one closet-like building that functioned as a mess hall. Yet they welcomed Grossman “like they were inviting me into their homes.”

“It felt amazingly open-hearted,” he says. “They were happy to have me there as a guest.”

Grossman also made it to NGRIP (Northern Greenland Ice Core Project) just as scientists prepared to pull up a 120,000-year-old ice core—the oldest ice specimen in the northern hemisphere. There Grossman experienced hospitality of a different sort, as the scientists, along with a group of journalists and other invited guests, celebrated the end of the seven-year project with champagne and caviar in the middle of the ice sheet.

At Zackenberg station, nestled in an arid valley at the foot of the Zackenberg Mountains, Grossman saw another long-term project in the works. The station was founded in 1995 on the belief that tracking the impact of climate change on an ecosystem requires at least 50 years of data. Although scientists there are hesitant to draw conclusions after only eight years, they are making some predictions based on climate change modeling. One researcher says the unique ecosystem of the northern Arctic region might be in jeopardy.

As in Antarctica, Grossman tracked the progress of his Greenland trip—as well as a side trip to Iceland—on WBUR’s multimedia website. He also sent some stories on the ice core project to the BBC and CBC. Since returning to the U.S., he’s continued to use what he’s learned to create more in-depth pieces about his trips. In addition to the stories about the Adélies mentioned above, a story about Zackenberg station will run on the German radio station Deutsche Welle.

Grossman says his experiences have altered the way he thinks about climate change in at least one important way: While his focus was once on ancient climates, he now considers the ecological impacts of climate change as well, and how significant those impacts are.

“A year and a half ago, I had never thought much about that,” he says. “It’s a new focus for me.”

For future reporting, Grossman plans to stay with his theme of human impact on ecosystems. He’s hesitant to say exactly where he plans to travel next—but he does offer a general direction.

“I’m looking at some reporting much closer to the equator,” he says.

Visit the websites tracking Grossman's adventures at www.wbur.org/special/antarctica and www.wbur.org/special/dispatches/greenland.