It is my pleasure to nominate Dr. Joseph Romm, founding editor of ClimateProgress.org for GMU’s 2011 Climate Change Communicators of the Year award.

Joe is a respected scientist in his own right. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “distinguished service toward a sustainable energy future and for persuasive discourse on why citizens, corporations, and governments should adopt sustainable technologies.” He is perhaps best known, however, for the blog “ClimateProgress.org”, which he launched in 2006.

In 2009 Time magazine named him “The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” and a Hero of the Environment. The New York Times' Tom Friedman called climateprogress “the indispensable blog.” And U.S. News & World Report wrote, “In terms of his cachet in the blogosphere, Joe Romm is something like the climate change equivalent of economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman”. This is high praise indeed—and in my view, Joe has more than earned it.

ClimateProgress has become a unique force for disseminating accurate climate information. In 2010, a scientist named Simon Lewis explained in Nature how he fought back against "shoddy journalism" to "set the scientific record straight" on false claims about the IPCC. As Lewis explains that he filed an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission” but “I needed to make the complaint itself a story. I contacted The Guardian newspaper…. To reach the US audience, I handed the full complaint as an exclusive to perhaps the world’s most influential political climate-change blog, Joe Romm’s http://climateprogress.org."

Ultimately, Lewis explains, "it worked. It was widely recognized that the story was wrong and I had been badly treated." The Sunday Times apologized, retracted the article and replaced it “with a formal correction and apology…..”."

Romm helps drive an important public conversation not just about the science of climate change, but what to do about it. He helps keep the coverage and public discourse honest by calling out those who disseminate misinformation and disinformation (Joe has even coined a term to describe them— ‘disinformers’—that has forced me to update my Word spell checker).

I can tell you that many leading climate scientists in the U.S. and abroad read the blog regularly, in part because Joe covers the science—and its implications—comprehensively. Joe also covers this subject matter in a way that makes it accessible to a larger, non-technical audience. He adds much value to the work that e.g. my RealClimate.org colleagues and I do. Joe is able to further “digest” the sometimes semi-technical material in a way that allows it to further penetrate into the larger public discourse. One example comes to mind: While others were rehashing the non-story of the hacked East Anglia emails on the one year anniversary of their theft, Romm was reviewing what we learned about climate science in. His post typifies the blunt and courageous approach Romm takes to "the story of the century": "A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice."

For these reasons, Joe Romm is unusually deserving of this award. I give him my strongest possible endorsement for it.

Nominated by:

Michael E. Mann

Professor

Director, Earth System Science Center (ESSC)

Pennsylvania State University

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