By TC Brown

From space, the picture is rather stark. A “little blue band” of atmosphere, responsible for supporting all life, hugs the planet.

Senator John Glenn, a two-time space traveler, delivered this powerful and thought-provoking imagery of Earth’s climate at the tail end of the three-day McCormick Climate Change Conference at Ohio State.

Glenn told a gathering of journalists, broadcasters and bloggers that when he looked back at the planet from space, any doubts he harbored about the c… Continue

By TC Brown

Journalists drew closer the last day of the McCormick Climate Change Conference.

Collegiality? Perhaps. But 30-degree-below-zero temperatures in an ice core storage room probably was the most germane factor.

A busload of reporters, broadcasters and Web writers kicked off the conference’s closing day with a tour at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, an internationally recognized leader in polar and alpine research.

Barry Lyons, Byrd’s director, brought reporters through remo… Continue

By TC Brown

How times have changed.

Some of today’s premier climate change scientists debated the possibility of a coming Ice Age when they started careers in the 1970s.

That nugget surfaced from scientists gathered on the second day of the McCormick Climate Change Conference at Ohio State for a workshop to discuss with journalists the challenge of telling the story of climate change to the public.

As noted by one expert, climate change is the poster child for complexity, with a bell curve o… Continue

By TC Brown


The blaze on the Cuyahoga River in 1969 is the kind of catastrophic event that will be the wake up call for unified action on the larger issue and impacts of climate change.

That was a central theme in the presentation Lonnie Thompson, a renowned ice core pioneer at Ohio State, gave to a room full of national and international journalists yesterday.

It was just one of a host of weighty issues and questions debated by scientists and reporters during a two hour give and take on the… Continue

Hey folks. We're just about an hour away from kicking off the McCormick Climate Change Conference with paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson's talk, "Retreating Glaciers, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future."

If you can't be here, you can track the discussion or send us questions of your own by following us on TWITTER: http://twitter.com/mccormickC3/