IPCC chair: climate change severity underreported.

• Position: EYE ON EARTH - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Brief article

The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the news media are not sufficiently addressing the severity of climate change.

R.K. Pachauri, head of the 2,500-member IPCC, told a gathering of U.S. environmental journalists in October that unless policies are enacted soon to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, the global perils from shifting weather patterns and sea-level rise will worsen in the coming years.

Pachauri suggested that major news agencies now rely too much on high-level science reports or large climate-related events for their stories, rather than on examples of climate change's ongoing effects. "We need to go beyond the cyclical coverage of climate change and emphasize the day-to-day relevance," he said.

The financial instability of many U.S. newspapers may further limit the quantity and quality of environmental reporting. Many news organizations cut their reporting staffs and the size of their publications in 2008 due to dwindling...