Covering Climate Now and the Gulf of Maine

Ahead of United Nations Climate Summit in New York next week, more than 170 news outlets have signed on to Covering Climate Now, an effort organized by the Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, and The Nation to have reporters release local, national, and global climate stories in a singe week. This week in fact.

The Portland Press Herald signed on to the effort, and the first two stories -- by yours truly -- appeared in yesterday's Maine Sunday Telegram and today's Press Herald.

The first is on the unfolding climate crisis in the Gulf of Maine, the second fastest warming part of the world's oceans, a phenomenon scientists have linked to the rapid meltdown of the Arctic region and Greenland ice sheets, with have altered the qualities of the currents that feed the Gulf. This is essentially an update on what has been learned or experienced since our six-part series on the issue, "Mayday," appeared in 2015. (It got some additional national attention after being named a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.)

The second -- in today's paper -- is on the policy response. After years of inaction under Republican Gov. Paul LePage and his partisan allies in the legislature, Maine is now moving aggressively to make up for lost time, under a new governor and Democratic-controlled legislature. Congress, however, is still stalled. Details within.

My Press Herald colleagues continue the series this week, starting tomorrow with a story on woodlot owners and carbon sinks.

Speaking on the crisis in the oceans and Gulf of Maine, Portland, Mar. 7

I'll be speaking about the crisis in the world's oceans and in the Gulf of Maine on March 7th at the Portland Public Library here in Maine. The talk was originally to have taken place in early February, but was postponed by a winter storm.

[Update, 3/7/18: Alas, this event has again been postponed by a winter storm. The new date is April 4, same time and place.]

The event -- which kicks off at 6pm in the Rines Auditorium in the main library on Monument Square -- is the 2018 Sustainability Series Keynote. It's free and open to the public.

As a foreign correspondent, I long focused on oceans policy and global environmental reporting, and my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, took me to Antarctica, the tiny atoll states of Central Pacific, the coral reefs of Belize, the depleted cod banks of Newfoundland and the troubled waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea. My second book, The Lobster Coast, told the story of coastal Maine and its ecosystem, and "Mayday," a 2015 series I wrote for the Portland Press Herald, was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

I'll be speaking about the nature of the multi-faceted marine crisis, what it means for humans, and what might be done about it. Hope you can make it.

Talking oceans, climate change with PBS' White House Chronicle

Llewellyn King, host of the public television series "White House Chronicle" was kind enough to pay me a visit at the Portland Press Herald newsroom to film an interview on the crisis in the world's oceans, climate change in the Gulf of Maine, and my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas.

The segment has been airing this week on 200 public and community television stations across the country -- including WETA in Washington, DC and Rhode Island Public Television -- as well as Voice of America and Sirius XM radio's POTUS channel. It's also now available for online viewing.

For those interested in learning more about how climate change is effecting the Gulf of Maine, the six-part Portland Press Herald series we discuss in the segment -- "Mayday" -- can be read from here. On the oceans crisis more broadly, there's Ocean's End and my subsequent reporting from places like Greenland, the Adriatic, and Iceland.

While in Maine, King also interviewed me for a segment on American Nations, my book on North American regionalism, which aired last month.

Speaking on the "front lines of climate change" at UMF, Mar. 27

Tomorrow evening, March 27, I'll be the presenter du jour at the University of Maine at Farmington's Spring 2013 University Forum on the State of the Planet.

I'll be speaking on my experiences as a globetrotting science and environment writer, which have taken me to the front lines of climate change: Antarctica and Greenland, the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia, The Netherlands and Louisiana, the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the hearing rooms of Washington and Augusta.

The presentation is entitled "The Great Meltdown: Tales from the Front Lines of Climate Change," and will begin at 7 p.m. in the Lincoln Auditorium at the Roberts Learning Center. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Personally, it will be fun to be speaking at UMF, as my family lived in a house tucked in the campus when I was a kid, and I spent a fair bit of my spare time as a third and fourth grader devouring books in the Mantor Library -- World War II aircraft and naval history, if you must know, which came in handy in Micronesia -- and hanging out with friends in (what seemed to us to be) the sprawling student center.

For those interested in more tales from my travels, I recommend my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas.

Arctic news hounds rejoice!

Ever since traveling to Antarctica while writing Ocean's End, I've been something of a polar news addict. After all, the poles are where climate change effects are most obvious and alarming, and the international governance of both regions is very much in flux, what with all the cruise ships getting themselves in trouble in the Antarctic and oil prospectors crawling around Greenland. Following polar developments is very much keeping ones hand on the planetary pulse.

But tracking polar news is extraordinarily difficult. Nobody really lives in Antarctica and the Arctic region is divided among several countries with different languages, agendas, and internal awareness of their Far North. Even the Inuit have a hard time keeping in touch with one another.

Fortunately, my colleagues Kieran Cooke and John Bennett are putting together a free weekly news digest called Arctic Monitor, which allows for one stop shopping on the latest developments in the High North. No plans for an Antarctic edition, but you can still learn a fair bit about the Southern Continent by following the news feed at the Antarctica and Southern Ocean Coalition and the official newspaper of the US Antarctic Program, the Antarctic Sun. (The latter, oddly enough, was once edited at McMurdo Station by Portland, Maine's own Jeff Inglis.)

Two other Arctic resources to check out: the Arctic Focus news service (which loads very slowly from New England at least) and Canada's Aboriginal People's Television Network, which has more regular coverage of far northern issues than most. (For example, this piece on ongoing polar "land" grab.)

Photo (c) 1998-2010 Colin Woodard. All rights reserved.

Antarctica's penguins, 12 years later

Flying back from Prague, I had a chance to catch up on my reading and ran across this New Yorker piece on the retreat of Adelie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula and the work of penguin expert Bill Fraser.

In 1998, I visited many of the same locations on the Antarctic Peninsula while researching my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and interviewed Fraser about how climate change was turning the regional ecosystem upside down. Penguins were being attacked by fleas (whose eggs were now surviving the winter) while snow was overwhelming the Adelie's breeding sites. On the islands around the United States' Palmer Station, the penguins were in retreat, as was the 10,000 year old glacier behind the station.

What's astonishing is just how quickly things have gone from bad to worse, as the New Yorker piece makes clear. The pace of change -- be it penguins, glaciers, or floating ice shelves -- has exceeded the wildest dreams of the glaciologists, ecologists, and climate experts I spoke with in 1998-99. Indeed, the same is true for many of the other issues I raised in Ocean's End, including the pace of sea level rise threatening small island states like the Marshall Islands, the decline of coral reefs in Belize and other countries and, most dramatically, the hurricane threat to New Orleans.

On the bright side, the Black Sea is showing clear signs of recovery and the U.S. appears to have finally turned the corner on fisheries management. Unfortunately, neither will be much help to the penguins.

Iceland: exporting geothermal know-how

My feature on Iceland's geothermal power industry -- and its efforts to export know-how to the U.S. and other nations -- is in today's San Francisco Chronicle.

I visited Iceland's newest geothermal plant -- it's a tourist attraction with a swank, high-tech visitors' center -- where steam from the Earth is used not only to generate power, but to heat Reykjavik's homes, water, and even the streets and sidewalks (keeping them ice-free in winter.) Other geothermal plants heat the greenhouses that keep Icelanders in tropical fruits, despite living on the Arctic Circle. The story discusses how Icelanders hope to build similar plants in California (which still has enormous geothermal potential) and Africa (where they could provide freshwater supplies for drought plagued regions.)

Personally, the publication of this piece is bittersweet, as my editors say it is likely to be the last Chronicle Foreign Service story ever, owing to the Chronicle's financial woes.

[Update, 9/1/09: Several eagle-eyed readers noticed a typo -- put in by a copy editor -- which has been corrected in the online edition. The phrase "fifty-mile-deep wells" should have read "fifty mile-deep wells." (emphasis mine). Thanks to those who pointed it out.]

Image (c) 2009, Colin Woodard. All rights reserved.

Antarctica: my story on the Explorer sinking investigation

For those following polar cruise ship tourism, my piece on the investigation into the sinking of the cruise ship MS Explorer is now up at The Christian Science Monitor. There's audio as well.

The Canadian-owned ship sank in Antarctica's Bransfield Strait in November, 2007. As I reported at the time, the initial explanations didn't add up.

Antarctica: Sinking of the MS Explorer update

In late 2007, I reported on the sinking of the cruise ship M/S Explorer off the coast of Antarctica for The Christian Science Monitor, with a follow up on how the facts as they had been presented did not add up. Since then we've been waiting for the government of Liberia -- where the Canadian-owned vessel was flagged -- to release the results of their investigation.

Sunday the London Independent reported on the leaked contents of that report, which apparently suggest that the Explorer's captain was responsible for plowing into what one passenger called a "wall of ice." The leak comes at an uncomfortable time for the Antarctic cruise ship industry, as it comes in the midst of a major annual meeting of the parties to the Antarctica Treaty, who are considering tighter restrictions on cruise ships there.

I saw the M/S Explorer in Greenland a few months before her final voyage. The vessel I was on at the time -- while covering the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople's efforts to draw attention to climate change -- also suffered a serious accident in Antarctica later that season.

I visited the Antarctic for six weeks in 1998 while writing my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and happened to pass through the straits in which the Explorer went down. As you'd expect, it's a cold and forbidding, not the sort of place you'd want to face in an open lifeboat.

Photograph (c) 2008 Colin S Woodard.