Silver Chips wins gold for climate change coverage

As I write, there's a copy of a publication next to me that may well be the first of its kind. It's Silver Chips Climate Edition. Yes, it's the student newspaper published at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where I grew up.

This time out, though, the award-winning periodical, which has been around since 1937, hoists a breathtaking new platform. In structure. In substance. In creativity. In meaning.

The product, a 32-page, full-color, full-gloss journal, brims with an urgency, a siren call, surrounding the creeping threat of climate change. Remember, the people responsible for this strikingly jawdropping publication were born when George W. Bush was in the White House. It's crystal clear that these are old souls inhabiting youthful bodies, visionaries on the cusp of inheriting the reins of power.

Silver Chips serves up an editorial diet that would give anyone pause — even election and/or climate deniers. It has earned a place in the pantheon of required reading.

The topics cover the proverbial waterfront. This is a publication that should be required reading.

There's one piece that outlines the effort to greatly enhance the state's weather monitoring network amidst swirling weather events like tornadoes and flash floods. In the aftermath of May's deluge of rain across the Front Range — and the threat of wildfires — residents here can relate all too well to what comes next.

The piece is accompanied by a meaty graph that tracks the number of tornadoes and the damage they leave behind, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last fall, the article continues, NOAA launched into geocentric orbit a satellite that feeds data regarding the Blue Planet's dramatic