Ross Gelbspan, who highlighted climate change failings of industry and journalists, dies at 84 - The Boston Globe

Ross Gelbspan, who highlighted climate change failings of industry and journalists, dies at 84

In the early 1990s, Ross Gelbspan had already been covering environmental issues for two decades when he suggested one day that Minnesota’s attorney general force four climate change skeptics who were testifying at a legislative hearing on coal burning to reveal who was paying them for their research.

“Lo and behold, under oath, they provide their list of funding and it’s all coming from the fossil fuel industry,” Mr. Gelbspan, the only reporter at the hearing, later recalled in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.

A groundbreaking writer who was among the first to expose and publicize the fossil fuel industry’s financial ties to scientists in the climate change denier camp, he was just as tough on US journalists who lagged behind their European counterparts in reporting on global warming — and he zeroed in on why.

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“The reasons have to do with the culture of newsrooms, the misguided application of journalistic balance, the very human tendency to deny the magnitude of so overwhelming a threat, and, last though not least, a decade-long campaign of deception, disinformation, and, at times, intimidation by the fossil fuel lobby to keep this issue off the public radar screen,” he wrote in a 2005 essay for Mother Jones magazine.

Mr. Gelbspan, who helped conceive, direct, and edit the Globe’s “Race Factor” series on race relations that was awarded the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for local investigative specialized reporting, died at home on Jan. 27 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 84 and lived in Boston.

While writing clearly about the complex science of climate change in ways non-scientists could grasp, Mr. Gelbspan augmented his recommendations for how “to mend a fractured world” with steady, dire warnings.

“On Jan. 4 it was 64 degrees in Boston. On Jan. 11 the city celebrated a record 303rd day without snow,” he wrote in the Globe a couple of weeks after a January thaw in 2000. And while predicting that Greater Boston could “experience more shirtsleeve December and January days in the coming years,” he cautioned that “this is gift-wrapping on a time bomb — a precursor to climate chaos.”

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After leaving the Globe in the early 1990s and turning from daily journalism to books, he wrote “The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription,” which was published in 1997.

In 2004, he published “Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Have Fueled a Climate Crisis — And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster.”

In “Boiling Point,” Mr. Gelbspan wrote that “what began as a normal business response by the fossil fuel lobby — denial and delay — has now attained the status of a crime against humanity.”

He took issue with more than the industry’s disinformation campaign, however. Mr. Gelbspan pointed out that, for the sake of balance, reporters kept quoting climate change-denier scientists long after overwhelming evidence had proved them wrong.

“Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the American news media’s coverage of global warming for the past two decades,” Al Gore, the former vice president who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change activism, wrote in a New York Times review.

“Indeed, when the author investigates why the United States is virtually the only advanced nation in the world that fails to recognize the severity of this growing crisis, he concludes that the news coverage is ‘a large reason for that failure,’” Gore wrote.

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In a 1997 Globe review, Robert Braile called “The Heat Is On,” Mr. Gelbspan’s earlier book, “an urgent, take-no-prisoners, in-your-face expose on what the author considers the reality of global warming, of our societal denial of the problem, of the self-serving, shortsighted, morally bankrupt industry that has manipulated us into that denial, and of what will happen to the planet and to us if we don’t act now to solve the problem.”

In that book, Mr. Gelbspan sharply criticized the fossil fuel industry’s “propaganda campaign” and the efforts of “hear-no-science” high-profile Republicans to downplay climate change.

“Environmentalists have been warning us about global warming for years,” he wrote then. “What is news is that global warming is no longer merely a future possibility. The heat is on. Now. Its early impacts, in the form of more extreme and unstable climate, are being felt even as I write.”

Born in Chicago on June 1, 1939, Mr. Gelbspan grew up in Chicago and nearby Winnetka.

His father, Eugene Gelbspan, ran a company that supplied equipment and materials to restaurants. His mother, Ruth Ross Gelbspan, worked with Eugene in his business until their children were born.

Mr. Gelbspan graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Kenyon College, which years later awarded him an honorary doctorate. He also did graduate work at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

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In 1973, he married Anne Charlotte Broström of Sweden, a year after they met while he covered the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which was considered the first international gathering where the environment was the major issue.

Anne, known as Tottie, spent a quarter century as a nonprofit developer of affordable housing for homeless families in Boston, New Bedford, and Lawrence.

Mr. Gelbspan also had written for The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, and The Village Voice. He was at the Boston Herald American before joining the Globe in 1979, and was special projects editor while directing 1983′s “Race Factor” series with Globe editor Ron Hutson, who died in 2020.

In 1985, Mr. Gelbspan revisited the topic in an article, co-written by Jonathan Kaufman, which examined the Globe newsroom’s slow efforts in hiring and promoting reporters and editors of color.

Though the number of Black newsroom employees “including secretaries and library staff” increased from 6.1 percent in 1982 to 8.7 percent in late 1985, “a year and a half after the Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on job discrimination against Blacks in the Boston area, no Blacks have assumed top positions at the paper,” they wrote. “At the Globe’s 10:30 a.m. news meetings, none of the editors who decide the day’s news budget are Black.”

In addition to his wife, Anne, Mr. Gelbspan leaves their two daughters, Thea of New York City and Joby of Philadelphia; and his sister, Jill of Boulder, Colo.

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A celebration of his life will be announced.

Anne said her husband was “religiously passionate” about music, from classical to bluegrass and the blues. As a youthful harmonica player, he once sat in with legendary blues harmonica player Sonny Terry.

For an accomplished journalist and author, Mr. Gelbspan “was a remarkably undefensive person,” a careful, thoughtful listener who was open to the possibility of having his mind changed, Thea said.

“There aren’t that many men I know who have a lot of professional achievements and a great depth of knowledge, and also are able to remain humble,” she said. “He was very quick to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that — tell me more.’ "

And he championed truth and honesty wherever he was.

“He really brought me and my sister up to be honest intellectually and emotionally,” Thea said, adding that for her father, truthfulness was essential, “even if the consequences really make you grit your teeth.”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.