The North Pole Was Here

New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin gave a fun and insightful talk on the issue of global warming and the lives of the scientists and journalists who deal with it. He seemed to strike just the right balance between scientific information, hilarious personal anecdote, and journalistic observation.

He started the talk off by recounting his personal journey — from wanting to be a scientist and going to live on an undeveloped island in the South Pacific, to living on a boat sailing around the world for a year and a half, to finally realizing he wanted to be a journalist covering the issue of human impacts on the environment. His photos and stories illustrated some of the events that triggered his change in interest: a man selling hundreds of leopard skins on a street corner in Djibouti; a beach on an uninhabited island covered with thousands of lightbulbs. (The explanation for the lightbulb mystery turned out to be that night-watchmen on all of the ships traveling through the Red Sea shipping lanes were throwing dead lightbulbs overboard rather than properly disposing them, and the tides gradually washed all of the bulbs up on the island’s shore.)

Revkin then explained his journalistic career — first going to LA to work on the LA Times‘ new science section (which, he lamented, was canceled because it was not going to be commercially profitable; “the journalism business is a business,” Revkin reminded us), then writing books on deforestation in the Amazon and the global warming issue, and finally working for the New York Times (where he was written over 1,000 articles in the last 12 years).

Some of his most interesting insights in the talk had to do with how controversial environmental issues, like climate change, are conveyed to the public. He showed how conservatives who want to deny or downplay these issues take advantage of both “balance and uncertainty” to make the negative effects less apparent. By using the seemingly-fair “balance” in reporting — including viewpoints from opposing ends of the spectrum — the environmental threat is actually made to seem less serious. And by exploiting the “uncertainty” that is inherent in all scientific disciplines — but is often understood by the public as a sign that the scientific evidence is less credible — the threat is further diminished. Revkin really drove home the importance of how scientific information is made public, and how this can make a huge difference in public understanding of the environment and its future.

The second half of Revkin’s talk dealt with his trip to the North Pole with a group of scientists gathering data on climate change. Some of his anecdotes and photos were hilarious (suffice it to say that they involved Santa Claus, scuba-diving scientists, and a runner-up to a Russian beauty pageant). But on a more serious note, he described and spoke highly of the scientists who are his “heroes,” gathering “good old-fashioned data” and receiving little recognition or reward for their important work.

We owe a lot of thanks to journalists like Revkin, then, for making the work of these scientists more available to us.

You can see more about Andrew Revkin, his new book The North Pole Was Here, and his work with the New York Times here.

Categorized: General