ABCNEWS' Bill Blakemore
Sept. 1, 2008— -- ABC News Correspondent Bill Blakemore spearheads the news division's coverage of global warming, traveling from the tropics to the polar regions to report on the impacts and dangers of climate change, as well as possible solutions for it. Mr. Blakemore helped create ABC's multi-platform exploration of global warming on broadcast, Internet, radio, and print platforms. He reports for all ABC News' broadcasts and platforms and is also anchor of "Nature's Edge," a weekly program on climate and environment news on ABC News NOW, the network's digital channel.
Mr. Blakemore joined ABC News in 1970 and has covered a wide variety of stories during his career. He began focusing on global warming even as he was finishing his 27-year coverage of the entire papacy of Pope John Paul II; Blakemore was part of the ABC News team that won the duPont-Columbia Award for its live coverage in Rome of John Paul's funeral and his successor's election.
On September 11, 2001, Mr. Blakemore reported live from Ground Zero before the Trade Towers fell, and in following months from Afghanistan on the Taliban's demise; from Pakistan's Frontier Province on fundamentalist electoral victories; and from Karachi in the wake of journalist Daniel Pearl's murder. In 2003 during the start of the Iraq war, Mr. Blakemore reached Baghdad just after Saddam Hussein's statue fell, reported on the subsequent confusion there and got the first on-camera interview with a chief Iraqi biological weapons scientist. In 2004, he reported from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on the frustrated hunt for al Qaeda leaders.
Mr. Blakemore has covered twelve wars since he joined ABC News three and a half decades ago. They include the 1991 Gulf War, which he covered from Baghdad; two Arab-Israeli wars and the Palestinian intifada; the Iranian Revolution; the Black September War in Jordan; the Beirut civil war; the Turkish invasion of Cyprus; and the Indo-Pak Bangladesh war.
Based in New York since 1984, Mr. Blakemore has continued to travel widely as a domestic and foreign correspondent covering stories of conflict and politics, the arts, nature and science - and now global warming and other narratives involving the love-hate relationship between nature and man.
