Starting tomorrow, The Oklahoma Observer joins more than 250 news outlets worldwide in focusing a week’s worth of coverage on our deepening climate crisis.

Dubbed Covering Climate Now, the global media initiative was organized by two of American journalism’s iconic publications: Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation.

“The need for solid climate coverage has never been greater,” said Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher. “We’re proud that so many organizations from across the U.S. and around the world have joined with Covering Climate Now to do our duty as journalists – to report this hugely important story.”

The week-long emphasis serves as a prelude to Sept. 23’s United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York, when governments are expected to detail their efforts to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.

It also leads up to Friday’s Global Climate Strike, which includes demonstrations from noon to 2 p.m. at City Hall in OKC and Guthrie Green in Tulsa.

The Observer’s online coverage will include essays from our stable of contributors, including Mark Y.A. Davies, the director of the World House Institute for Social and Ecological Responsibility at Oklahoma City University, and Johnson Bridgwater, director of the Sierra Club’s Oklahoma chapter.

We also will share climate-related content from The Guardian, The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, Christian Science Monitor, Toronto Star and other news outlets.

Thanks to its economic over-dependence on fossil fuels, Oklahoma is a hotbed of global warming skeptics, the science be damned. We hope Covering Climate Now will help awaken more Oklahomans to the reality that our very existence is threatened. – Arnold Hamilton, Editor