FEED: What is your position at the University of Colorado Boulder?
FUNNY OR DIE Rollie Williams’ 2 Minutes of Fact- Checkable Climate Change Facts for Skeptics goes on for more than two minutes and features geese
MAX BOYKOFF: I have several hats. I’m a professor, teaching in environmental studies, and also our department chair. I’m also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), which is a collaboration between the University of Colorado and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I’ve been here 12 years. Before that, I had a postdoc research fellowship, that became a fixed-term lectureship at University of Oxford, for the Environmental Change Institute in the School of Geography and Environment.
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MB: We have a media and climate change observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder, tracking 130 or so sources inTV, radio and newspapers around the world, covering 59 countries, in 13 languages. I originally started the work with colleagues at University of Oxford, then brought it with me to Colorado. It’s expanded a lot and now involves collaborators in ten institutions, working incredibly hard to update our research every month. We started tracking in January 2000, for reasons of data availability. But climate change began to be part of a sustained media conversation in 1988, with Professor James Hansen’s speech to the US Congress.You can also point to Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1), with her efforts to break up the oil industry and an influential 1988 speech she gave to the Royal Society in London. Coverage of the environment and climate is at historic levels right now. In 2009, there was a spike around the Copenhagen climate talks (COP 15) which took place right after the University of East Anglia ‘Climategate’ scandal. But we’re at a point now where media are paying more attention to climate change than ever before. FEED: Tell us about the research you have been doing?
FEED: How did you get started researching environmental issues?
MB: After my undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, I was in the US Peace Corps in Honduras, working in agriculture. I hadn’t travelled much at that point in my life, and was eager to get out of the country and experience something new. I was there in 1998, when category 5 Hurricane Mitch came on land and devastated the region.The place I was living was hit very hard, and that got me asking questions. Not only about what happened, but why it happened?Why were some places impacted more than others, based on land- use practices? I was in a rural place with just one telephone in town. Or, you could send a telegram.We were cut off from everything for a week before getting out – we had to rebuild a road back to the Pan-American Highway. Later, when I compared the media coverage to my own first-hand experiences, it got me thinking about media representational practices.That led me into studying communication about climate change – and how the media covers environmental issues. “WHY WERE SOME PLACES IMPACTED MORE THAN OTHERS BASED ON LAND-USE PRACTICES?”
(1) Read full text of Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech to the Royal Society at margaretthatcher.org/document/107346
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