Can the media cover climate change accurately?

That's the question raised by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times in his blog DotEarth. And he has some thoughtful and compelling ideas, marshaled in response to complaints about the mainstream media's coverage of global warming:

[T]he main impediment to effective societal responses to global warming lies less in the count of front-page headlines than in the basic disconnect between the nature of the issue — complex, spread in time and space, laden with some unavoidable uncertainty — and the nature of human nature.

Frankly, I think one could write the perfect story on global warming, or create the perfect documentary, and repeat it over and over, and still not see much movement if the goal is to rapidly shift society out of its coal-fired comfort zone as the world heads toward 9 billion people.

Revkin wrote a chapter on exactly this topic for our book Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, from which he excerpts a few more choice thoughts in his post.

RTWT here.