Introducing the New Climate Desk: Stories for a Changing World


Climate change is one of the defining stories of our time: rising sea levels, bigger storms, peak oil, colder winters and hotter summers. That begs the questions: Why aren’t we talking about it more, and what the hell are we going to do about it?

Fortunately, there is a host of scientists, politicians, educators, artists, entrepreneurs, community leaders, journalists, and others who spend every day thinking about the answers to those questions. Maybe you’re one of them. Ultimately, the story of climate change is their story—your story. But the media could still do a better job of telling it.

That’s where the Climate Desk comes in.

Two years ago (the hottest year on record, by the way), a group of forward-thinking news outlets (The Atlantic, Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, Mother Jones, PBS’ Need to Know, Slate, and Wired) launched an innovative journalistic collaboration to explore the impact—human, environmental, economic, political—of a changing climate. Climate Desk has been gathering pace ever since, and today we’re proud to announce our revamped website and the addition of a new partner: The Guardian. It’s one of the UK’s oldest and most distinguished newspapers, and has a substantial digital footprint in the US. The first UK newspaper to launch a dedicated environment section, the Guardian has one the biggest and most prolific environmental coverage teams in the world.

We’re here to sift through the policy, protests, and polar bears to bring you the most important climate change stories: the ones that affect you, your corner of the world, the changes in your own backyard.

Check out our latest video, Pond Scum to the Rescue, to understand how algae might battle political derision to become a vital fuel source. Your Town Is Fracked shows how Pennsylvania limits local control over oil and gas drilling—potentially jeopardizing residential neighborhoods, watersheds, and even school zones. Climate Desk’s one-on-one with Michael Mann, reported and written by , is the climate scientist’s account of attacks by entrenched interests seeking to undermine his “hockey stick” graph.

We want to hear from you. What are you concerned by, or want to know more about? Tell us and keep checking back with the Climate Desk for more from this unfolding story .

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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