Peter Dykstra, an environmental activist turned journalist who was known for his sardonic wit, once asked Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, Congress’s most aggressive denier of climate science, for an interview, to take place in 2034.
Mr. Dykstra’s idea, as he wrote to the senator’s office in 2019, was that by that year, when Mr. Inhofe would turn 100, there would be no question about “who was right and who was wrong” about global warming.
Mr. Inhofe, through a spokeswoman, replied: “Sure! How is 10 a.m. on Friday, November 17, 2034?”
The interview will not take place. Mr. Inhofe, a Republican who repeatedly called climate science a “hoax,” and Mr. Dykstra, a former Greenpeace activist who became an environmental journalist for CNN, died within weeks of each other this summer: Mr. Inhofe on July 9, at 89, and Mr. Dykstra on July 31, at 67.
But the question of who was right and who was wrong has already been answered. Mr. Dykstra was right. This year is on track to be the hottest ever recorded, with man-made warming contributing to fiercer hurricanes, more intense wildfires, longer droughts and deadly threats to human health.
Mr. Dykstra’s death, in a hospital in Atlanta, was caused by complications of pneumonia that led to respiratory failure, his family said.
He had used a wheelchair since 2017, when he became paralyzed from the waist down after a spinal infection.
Mr. Dykstra was heard most recently on the public radio show “Living on Earth,” to which he contributed a weekly summary of the latest environmental news, recorded at his home in Brookhaven, Ga.
“He was a very gregarious person and an extrovert who knew everybody in every nook or cranny of the environmental beat,” Kate Tobin, a colleague of Mr. Dykstra’s at CNN, said in an interview. “I’d put him against any environmental journalist anywhere at any time.”
Mr. Dykstra joined CNN in Atlanta in 1991 and worked there for 17 years. He started as a research manager and worked his way up to senior executive producer of a unit covering science, technology, weather and the environment.
A baseball fanatic with a deep store of statistics, he had an equally encyclopedic command of environmental topics. He drew on that knowledge, along with his mischievous wit, to sell his bosses at CNN on environmental stories, which they did not always see as fitting into the 24-hour news cycle.
“The CNN morning call, which was probably 1,000 people on four continents, Peter could kill on that call, making people laugh,” Miles O’Brien, a science and environmental correspondent and anchor who worked with Mr. Dykstra, said in an interview. “That’s how he was able to persuade people to the wisdom of what he knew.”
Mr. O’Brien said that in the late 1990s, when Mr. Dykstra’s supervisors at CNN insisted that fossil fuel interests be given equal weight with scientists in climate stories, Mr. Dykstra argued that this was a false equivalence that misrepresented the truth. “We got it to about 75-25” — in favor of scientists — “which at the time was considered a victory,” Mr. O’Brien said.
At CNN, Mr. Dykstra shared a 1993 Emmy for coverage of flooding on the Mississippi River, a 2005 Dupont-Columbia Award for coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and a 2005 Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
In 2008, his entire unit was laid off, in a cost-saving measure typical of those that periodically thin the environmental reporting ranks in U.S. newsrooms.
Mr. Dykstra became the publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate, websites that publish original reporting and aggregate coverage from other outlets. He held that job until recent years, when he stepped back to become a contributor to the sites as he faced health challenges. To pay for round-the-clock care, he turned to a GoFundMe appeal to “help keep Peter Dykstra rolling.”
Peter David Dykstra was born on March 2, 1957, in Hackensack, N.J., and raised in nearby Hasbrouck Heights. He was one of three children of Marie (Lauten) Dykstra and Leonard Dykstra. His father was an executive at Remco, a toy manufacturer.
Mr. Dykstra graduated from Boston University in 1979. In 1986, he married Meryl Nash. She survives him, along with their children Alyson and James Dykstra and a brother, Paul. Another son, Matthew Dykstra, died in 2016.
Mr. Dykstra entered journalism through the side door of activism. For nearly a decade before he joined CNN, he was the U.S. media director in Washington for Greenpeace, the group whose dramatic protests against nuclear power, toxic waste and other pollution imbued it with a raucous and youthful image. Greenpeace volunteers hung giant protest banners from bridges and smokestacks and sailed their ship, the Rainbow Warrior, in campaigns against whaling, commercial seal hunting and nuclear testing.
Publicity, Mr. Dykstra’s domain, was a major part of the organization’s work.
“Peter Dykstra was a master of getting the word out; that was the point, that was the leverage that the organization depended on,” said Patrick S. Noonan, a former president of the Greenpeace office in Boston, where Mr. Dykstra started as a volunteer in 1978.
Journalists who cover climate change have been known to struggle for a sense of purpose as the gloomy news they report piles up and politicians and citizens avert their eyes. Mr. Dykstra never saw his work as futile, and he did not gloat when science showed the deniers were wrong.
“I always told my CNN folks that their stories should look smart on the day they’re aired, and look even smarter 20 years down the road,” he told the newsletter of the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2012.
“There’s nothing I’d like better than for my colleagues and me to be proven totally, abjectly wrong about things like climate change,” he said. “But the science says there’s very little chance of that. Our refuge is to tell the truth as we see it, about climate, about human health and the environment, about the oceans, and about habitat loss. They’ll all still be issues for our lifetimes and beyond.
“It’s not a pretty picture,” he added, “but at least we’re doing our jobs well.”
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