If you spend any time looking through climate news, it’s easy to get bogged down with misinformation and filled with anxiety. Everybody has an opinion and lots of people have an ulterior motive for writing about climate change. These are a couple of the free sources that I come back to time and time again for trustworthy information on the climate crisis. 

For just news, I typically go to the NPR climate section. NPR is known for their radio broadcasts, but you can easily listen to them on their website at any time.They also have many articles about a variety of topics from international politics to ways people are living more sustainably and everything in between. They have many journalists as climate correspondents who each have their own specialty. For example, Ryan Kellman has done a lot of segments on conservation in New Zealand and endangered species around the world. 

For mostly feel good stories about developments in science and technology, I really enjoy the Smithsonian Magazine. The reason I most enjoy the Smithsonian Magazine is because instead of being about what policies did or didn’t pass, they are about the real world impacts on nature and what solutions people have come up with that we might see in the future. 

While there aren’t a lot of articles directly related to climate change, there is still a lot of information that a person interested in learning about the problems the natural world faces  could find. I really enjoyed this article about students who created a robot that can reforest areas affected by wildfires written by Ramsha Waseem (a freelance reporter who specializes in new technology). They also have a lot of articles about different species of animals. For example this article about rockhopper penguins is written by Cheryl Katz, a specialist in Arctic animals. 

Finally for entertainment, I would watch Climate Town. Climate Town is a youtube channel run by Rollie Williams, a graduate of Columbia’s climate science and policy program, and a team of researchers and comedians. The videos are about 40 minutes long, so typically you have to be interested in the subject to sit through the whole thing. That being said, they do a lot to make the videos interesting and entertaining, and they manage to keep your attention. I like them because they make topics that would be extremely boring in a class (like water rights and parking policies) and make them understandable and engaging. Rollie William also has a podcast with comedy writer Nicole Conlan (who has a masters degree in urban planning) called the Climate Denier’s Playbook that covers different climate myths and misinformation and why they’re not true. Similar to Climate Town, I think that the slightly older episodes are best, and I would recommend More CO2 is Good for Plants because this is actually an argument that I have heard in real life by a climate denier.