Arguments
Announcement: New Guardian Blog by Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham
Posted on 24 April 2013 by dana1981
I'm very pleased (or chuffed, as they might say in the UK) to announce the launch of a new blog at The Guardian Environment. This blog is a collaboration between myself (Dana Nuccitelli) and John Abraham.
Back in December 2012, the Guardian announced that they would be establishing a page of environment blogs, following the successful example set by the Guardian Science Blogs. This of course was a tremendous opportunity, as The Guardian is one of the world's premier newspapers, already with among the best environment and climate reporting. As a result, they received over 800 applications and spent the next few months weeding through them to ultimately choose the top 1–2%. I was fortunate to make that cut, and they gave several of us a bit of a tryout (here's mine and John Abraham's and Graham Readfearn's, for example).
Having previously collaborated and with similar styles, John Abraham and I offered to team up. Our new blog is titled 'Climate Consensus – the 97%' (the inspiration for the name will be made clear in the near future). My first post, on the subject of an uncharacteristically poor climate article by Reuters, can be read here. Graham Readfearn also has a pending new blog which I believe will be called 'Planet Oz', and it sounds like there will be several other very interesting new blogs and bloggers on the page soon.
I hope that these new blogs will be successful and bring the Guardian significant traffic, especially in the wake of the New York Times dismantling its Environment desk and Green Blog, and very few environmental journalists remaining at major newspapers. With climate in particular becoming an ever-more critical subject, it's been discouraging to see climate reporting moving in the wrong direction, and I'm very happy to see the Guardian taking the opposite approach. Thus I would ask that everyone spread the word about these new blogs, to reward the Guardian for making environmental and climate reporting a top priority.
Note that I will also continue to write for and contribute to Skeptical Science, and I hope the two blogs will be complementary. My intention is to write in simpler language at the Climate Consensus – the 97% for a more general audience, and continue to write more technical posts for the climate savvy readers at Skeptical Science.
Congrats Dana.
I have the 'Global Warming' category on my Google News main page and your new blog was the top article displayed there this morning. That, along with the active comments thread, suggest that you are already getting quite a bit of traffic.
Nice work Dana and John. The climate trolls at the Guardian are all over it - which is a sure sign that the message has been received loud and clear!
Congratulations Dana. But don't rest on your laurels, I want to see a blog post expressing global warming in units of kitten sneezes (read the Guardian comment thread for context).
Dana
Congrats. I am domiciled in the UK and the Guardian is probably the best UK broadsheet and definetly the best on climate change. It is the only paper I regularly buy.
Keep up the great work here at SKS.
What is scary in the UK that the Guardian for example has a circulation figure of about 240k papers daily whereas the Mail has about 1.9M - c 8x the circulation.
We face an uphill struggle I'm afraid. To me the Mail panders to right wing predjudice and ceartainly is "Skeptic".
StB
Good work
Congrats indeed on a gig at the Graun! That's impressive!
And riling up the CiF trolls is a sure sign you're on the right track...
Well done, Dana. Keep up the good work.
... and I'm delighted that the denier swarm has not succeeded in derailing the conversation over there! The few who push the denier agenda have been sent packing with sensible, logical argument. Good to see.
Excellent - as a UK resident and a Guardian reader myself I'm thrilled with your appointment.
A considered and intellegent response to the UKIP document <a href="http://ukip.org/media/policies/energy.pdf" target="_blank">Keeping the Lights On</a> woulkd be of great interest to readers.
UKIP are the UK Independence Party - the UKs only real party in denial about Climate Change.
Great work Dana et al.
Am looking forward to the publishing of the Australian edition of the Guardian -but I understand that won't happen before October.
A market penetration opportunity is being lost in not publishing before/during Australia's pre-election period.
Australia desperatley needs some honesty and integrity in news media- lets hope the Guardian can provide this.
Congrats Dana and John, I'm looking forward to reading more from you. I was not following the Guardian much before and that might change.
Great news. We were thinking of changing our Sunday paper in any case. This might just tip the balance.
Congrats, Dana; love the title ;)
CBDunkerson @1, sadly, when I just checked "global warming" in Google News, the top link is a denier article from the so-called "Washington Times Communities" with a big Washington Times logo at the top, and you have to read the fine print to see that "The opinions of Communities writers do not necessarily reflect nor are they endorsed by the Washington Times."
Then, the biggest, boldest headline is a James Taylor column in Forbes talking about how the "warmists" are resorting to their "last line of defense" - that the warming has gone to the "Bermuda triangle," i.e., the deep oceans, "you know, that part of our planet where we really can’t measure or find anything" . . . that is, unless you count the more than 3,000 Argo floats that have been recording data up to 2 kilometers deep in the ocean for the past six years!
Reminds of Bill O'Reilly's repeated mantra on TV, "tide comes in, tide goes out, no one can explain the tides..." The Daily Show nailed him on that with a guest appearance by Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is admittedly perhaps just a little overqualified to explain the concept that the tides are caused by the moon's gravitational pull...
jdixon1980, I wouldn't have expected it to remain the top link indefinitely... though I do still see it on the first page of results with a 'highly cited' tag. Clearly getting a lot of traffic and attention.
Congratulations, John and Dana.
I look forward to more.
Congratulations! By any standards, impressive. Do I hear expressions of fury from the region of WUWT?
Agnostic @16 - I believe you do. I certainly did! Probably several dozen commenters linking to a terrible cherry picking blog post response by Tisdale on WUWT.
Ironically cherry picking was the main subject I raised in my first Guardian blog post, and WUWT and Tisdale respond by...cherry picking data.
dana @17 - Is it really still irony when it happens every time? :]
Perma-irony?