NYT Times' Revkin: Get real on global warming

“We are modifying Earth in ways that are profound and permanent,” Revkin said to a crowd of around 40 community members, professors and students in the Frist Multipurpose Room.

Revkin spoke about his experiences as an environmental journalist and writer and about the crucial role humans play in altering the planet.

“We’re becoming the driver of important dynamics on the planet,” he explained, pointing to slides of a treeless forest and an extinct dolphin species. “We are interfering with the way biology works and interfering with cycles.”

Revkin emphasized the world’s growing human population, predicted to reach nine billion by 2050, and noted the challenges of trying to develop impoverished countries without having them contribute to the destruction of the environment.

“There are two separate challenges with climate-related risks,” he said. “There is the rich country challenge, and there is the poor country challenge.”

Displaying a picture of Guinean students sitting in the parking lot of an airport to do homework because it was the only source of light, he emphasized the large number of people who have no electricity.

“Two billion people are still not thinking about candescent versus fluorescent lightbulbs,” he said.

Revkin noted that societal priorities and values are impediments to combating global warming.

“The outcomes [of our actions] still lie far off in the future,” he explained.

To showcase general disregard of climate-related risks, Revkin cited an example from his experience with the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1980s. He said that a plan to add a science section was eliminated because it would not bring additional revenue to the newspaper.

“Science journalism is not a booming enterprise,” Revkin said. “Trying to get stories on climate on the front page is hard.”

Revkin also brought attention to the “disservice” some journalists do to the environmental field.

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“For every Ph.D., there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.,” Revkin said, commenting on the way that reporters pit scientists with opposing views against each other in their articles.

This practice, he said, causes a “disengagement from what we do know, and the facts tend to get hidden.”

The lecture was part of Princeton Environmental Institute’s (PEI) Currents Lecture Series.

“We wanted Andrew Revkin to explain the breadth and depth of what he has done and where we still need to go to bridge the gap” between current efforts to fight global warming and ideal practices, said Jean-Marie Layton, PEI manager of communications and outreach.