By Margot O’Neill
Fresh from a sabbatical studying climate change reporting at the University of Oxford, the ABC’s Margot O’Neill considers whether or not the media has done a good job.
WHATEVER HAPPENED to climate change? This time last year climate change was a hot topic regularly appearing in news bulletins and on front pages. Phrases such as “the future of humanity could be at stake” were quoted, celebrities marshalled and 4,000 journalists prepared to descend on the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen. Apparently humanity’s future is now secure… or so it might seem given the paucity of journalism devoted to the issue in the mainstream media.
Where did all the climate change stories go? “The [programmers] are against it because it loses ratings,” says a senior BBC journalist. “The wave [of public interest] has gone. There is climate change fatigue. That is why I am not [reporting] it now.”
Other journalists agree. Even reporters at The Guardian, which especially targets environmental reporting, complain that it’s difficult to get a run. Another UK broadcast journalist said he was warned that putting climate change on prime time would risk losing a million viewers.
In a series of interviews with some of the UK’s top specialist environment and science correspondents, I explored the changing climate for reporters covering global warming - as part of the ABC’s Donald McDonald research fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Most of the journalists rated the media poorly on communicating what some have dubbed the epic news story of the century. “We have failed to engage the public,” said a broadcast journalist.
The key problems? The list is long but includes a cold winter in Europe, the distant impacts, the failure of the December 2009 UN climate change Copenhagen summit to produce a binding international agreement, public confusion about whether there is a reliable scientific consensus, and alarmist media coverage with Hollywood-horror headlines like “Be Scared; Be Very Scared!” that are more likely to induce the purchase of popcorn than solar panels.
‘Climategate’
The biggest hurdle mentioned by most journalists was the so-called ‘Climategate’, the controversy surrounding the publication of hundreds of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK between influential climate scientists. It was a “defining moment in all our careers,” according to an environment editor.
Given the underlying science has been exonerated in successive inquiries, what is it that the journalists believe they were guilty of? Firstly, they missed a cracking story that was instead first pursued by the blogosphere and which proved to be, unlike many other climate change stories, a hit with the public. After struggling to find stories the public wanted to read, a tabloid journalist observed “Climategate … got a strong response; it made climate change more topical.”
Many journalists say the UEA email hacking, combined with the discovery of an error regarding the melting of the Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also proved they had failed to cast a critical enough eye on climate science and that they had been far too dismissive of sceptics.
It’s the editors, stupid
Probably the most important reaction to the UEA hacking for journalists was in their own newsrooms, among their own editors who are the gatekeepers controlling if your work appears and how prominently. While some UK surveys show no dramatic loss of credibility for climate scientists with the public, here’s how some senior journalists described what it was like in their newsrooms after hacking:
“you told me the science was settled - and it isn’t!”
“Climate-gate was extremely damaging in many ways. It gave the impression that journalists had been duped. I think in the end it was mountains out of mole-hills but it looked really bad,” said a print journalist.
The science is never settled
“The science is settled” was an oft used slogan by governments, non-government organisations and scientists especially in the lead up to Copenhagen and was meant to encapsulate the certainty with which most scientists believe that man-made greenhouse gases are causing global warming. But some journalists and commentators now believe it implied too sweeping a claim and most scientists will tell you that science is rarely if ever completely settled - and certainly climate science is full of vast uncertainties about the extent and pace of global warming and its impacts.
Now, a key BBC news manager has declared that climate science “isn’t quite a settled question”; and the BBC Trust is investigating the impartiality of science reporting including on climate change and including whether sceptical views are given due airing.
Not all sceptics are equal
Previously, media coverage of sceptics had focused almost exclusively on whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change, but that is likely to change, the journalists say, because there are many different kinds of sceptics and a range of other debates. Some say they wished they had engaged credible sceptics earlier.
Looking to the future
So what is the future for the climate change story in the mainstream media?
The forecast is grim. Around 4,000 reporters went to Copenhagen, Denmark; only 150 attended follow-up negotiations in Bonn, Germany, and some senior correspondents say they might not go to Cancun, Mexico, in December for the next UN climate change summit. Some believe climate change as a story is finished. New York Times blogger, Andy Revkin, says it is now turning into an energy and business story.
The challenge for reporters is immense. Climate change is a multi-disciplinary story that requires at least some knowledge ranging from science and energy policy to potential military deployments, from coastal development to diplomacy and to mass biodiversity loss, to name a few. A BBC correspondent said it is arguable that journalists need qualifications in science, politics and economics to straddle the demands of climate change reporting.
Yet the issue has become newsworthy at a time when many newsrooms have been downsized while servicing an accelerating 24-hour news cycle. Not enough people. Not enough expertise. Not enough time.
Despite the present crisis of confidence among some UK journalists, I believe it remains a live story and that underlying the short-term news cycles is a number of titanic struggles and shifts which will force the issue back into mainstream press coverage no matter what tag it is given - these include the biggest global energy transformation since the industrial revolution; the unfolding, gobsmacking scientific mapping of the phenomenon (from ocean acidification to polar ice) as well as the reformation of an inward-looking scientific community to accept more transparency and robust public debate and explanation; and the great ideological clash over climate change policy including right-wing fears that it is a front for left-wing eco-fascism.
Then there’s the actual climate. If the scientists and insurance companies are right, it will produce increasing horror temperature, drought and precipitation events as well as more natural catastrophes. How we adapt to a dramatically changing climate, if or when it emerges, could, sadly, become the most compelling story of all. Read more of this story here.
See the comments - over 90% of the over 200 comments are skeptical. Will the ABC or the author notice.
By Lauren Frayer
Eruptions from Indonesia’s ferocious Mount Merapi keep getting worse, prompting more villagers to run for their lives and puzzling scientists trying to decipher Mother Nature’s plans.
Hot ash clouds are sweeping across central Java, shooting up to six miles into the sky and snarling local air traffic. Today’s booming eruptions have been the strongest since Merapi—whose name means “Mountain of Fire” in Javanese—exploded on Oct. 26, volcanologist Kurniadi Rinekso told Agence France-Presse.
Indonesian officials announced five more deaths from the suffocating lava and smoke, raising Merapi’s total death toll to at least 44, CNN reported. Nearly 75,000 people are huddled in evacuation shelters far from their livelihoods, and it doesn’t look as if they’ll be able to return home anytime soon.
“It looks like we may be entering an even worse stage,” state volcanologist Surono told The Associated Press. After predicting earlier this week that eruptions would ease up, scientists are throwing up their hands as they are confronted today with eruptions three times stronger than expected. “We have no idea what’s happening now,” Surono said.
Merapi’s ash prompted global concern today when a Qantas airliner suffered engine failure after takeoff from Singapore’s airport. The incident occurred several hundred miles away from Merapi, and officials say they’re still investigating, but it appears unlikely that volcanic ash could have affected the plane. The A380 managed an emergency landing back in Singapore, and no one was hurt.
The latest eruptions have also been accompanied by tremors, a sign that energy is still pent up inside the volcano and unable to escape, the head of the Volcanic Technology Development and Research Center, Subandrio, told The Jakarta Post.
“This can [also] be seen from the hot clouds that have been rising from the mountain’s peak,” he said.
Indonesia’s island archipelago sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where the world’s most volatile fault lines lie deep under the earth’s crust. Earthquakes and volcanoes are common there along the eastern and western Pacific rims.
See post here. See how volcanoes affect climate here.
By Andrew Bolt, Australian
SO you think I exaggerate when I say global warming is just the latest cause of the closet totalitarian? Then pay close attention to an experiment the warmists are about to inflict on the people of Norfolk Island.
Be warned. What’s being trialled there with $390,000 of Gillard Government money may, if it works, be spread to the mainland, say the researchers.
Which means it’s coming for you. The plan - and, no, I’m not joking - is to put Norfolk Islanders on rations to fight both global warming and obesity. Funded by the Australian Research Council, and approved by the Socialist Left Science Minister Kim Carr, researchers from the Southern Cross University will give each volunteer on the island a “carbon card”. Every time they buy petrol, electricity or an air flight, they will have “carbon units” deducted from the fixed allowance on their card.
More units will be lost each time they buy fatty foods, or produce flown in from a long way away. If, at the end of each year or so, they have carbon units left over, they can sell them. If they’ve blown their allocation, they must buy more. But each year, the number of carbon units in this market will be cut, causing their price to soar - and thus the price of extra food, power and petrol to rise - because the idea is to cut greenhouse gases and make Norfolk Islanders trim, taut and terrifically moral.
Conservatives well aware of human fallibility will immediately spot the obvious flaw in this latest scheme of the Left to remake humanity. It’s this: what happens when people run out of their carbon rations, and can’t afford the extra units they need to buy more fuel, power or even food?
This is precisely what I put this week to Garry Egger, head of this experiment and professor of Lifestyle Medicine and Applied Health Promotion at SCU. His response was astonishing and revealing, because this basic question - which so exposes the teeth of the totalitarian - would have been one you’d think he’d long wrestled with.
After all, his personal carbon trading idea is not new, so much does it appeal to the fingerwaggers and bullies infesting the global warming faith. As far back as 2006, Britain’s then environmental minister, David Miliband, proposed a similar scheme, since endorsed by the Environment Agency and House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, which even insisted the Government defy howls of protest from mere voters.
“Widespread public acceptance, while desirable, should not be a pre-condition for a personal carbon trading scheme; the need to reduce emissions is simply too urgent,” the MPs said, before being driven off to dinner.
(Or as our own Professor Clive Hamilton, author and former Greens candidate, puts it, global warming is so “horrible” that leaders must look to “canvassing of emergency responses such as the suspension of democratic processes”.)
Nor is Egger’s idea new in Australia, The farcical “ideas summit” of prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 1000 “best and brightest” Australians also recommended it - which is a very good reason to be alert and alarmed.
“We have the technology now to create a ‘carbon account’ for individuals,” says the summit’s report, in between appeals for chairbound workers to be given 30 minutes a day of exercise and stairs to climb at work. Yet although carbon rationing plans have been kicked around for years by the Left, that key question of the conservative has still not been answered. As in: what if people don’t want to live your dream? What if they rebel, or merely fail you?
Let’s go to the transcript of my interview with Egger on MTR 1377 this week, to see how he answered.
Me: What happens to those people who overdraw their carbon emissions ...
Egger: In the first year you are just warned ... (Later) if you overspend, you’ve got to buy the units that are cashed in ...
Me: If you put this in on the mainland and you were really strict about it - you really thought the world was warming very, very dangerously and someone exceeded their rations of these carbon units - one would presume that you would make food, for example, too expensive for them to buy.
Egger: That’s right ... so if you’ve got, for example, a very fatty unhealthy food that is imported from overseas which takes a lot of carbon to develop it, then the price would go up ...
Me: What happens to a very fat family, a very irresponsibly fat family, and they’ve blown their carbon budget to the scheissenhausen and you’ve made their food terribly expensive? What about the kids? They go to breakfast and they’ve got one baked bean?
Egger: In general you’ll find that in a very fat family they are low-income earners ... so those people would actually benefit from a scheme like this because the food that they buy, the energy that they use, they don’t use as much energy as the rich anyway ...
Me: But what happens? Their ration of carbon credits runs out and you’ve made food too expensive for them to buy. What happens to them?
Egger: Again, they get money back from doing the right thing.
Me: No, but they’ve done the wrong thing. That’s why they are fat and poor. They’ve done the wrong thing, they’ve run out of their carbon credits. What are you going to do to them then, when the food’s too expensive to buy?
Egger: There are going to be personal cases like this that need to be worked out and they need to be worked out in the tax system as well as in the carbon credits system.
Egger, founder of GutBusters, undoubtedly means to do good. He has no wish to see children starve.
YET I think we have here an insight into a key failing of so many grand schemes of the Left to improve resistant humans or build for them someone else’s idea of the perfect society.
These schemes so often are too perfect for the flawed humans they supposedly serve. But it’s the humans who must then adapt to the system, and not the other way around. Which is where some force is required; some democracy sacrificed.
What a buzz for the closet totalitarian then, to bully other people “for their own good” - in this case, to “save the planet”.
When the cause is so just, which planet-saver could let some contemptible fatty stand in their way, begging for the carbon credits to feed their chubby children? On the other hand, which planet-saver would deny themselves any aid or comfort in this great struggle?
Need an illustration of what I’m talking about? Egger himself plans to jet off to Mexico next month to boast to a United Nations global warming conference how he persuaded Norfolk Islanders to ration just such joy flights for themselves. This is your future coming right at you, folks. Best you realise it’s no longer a joke. See post here.
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or there is always forced starvation...to help control population.
Foolish Food Policies
Statement by Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition
The Carbon Sense Coalition today accused western politicians of creating a food crisis with foolish food policies. The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that climate alarmism and green extremism was being used to destroy farming and deny land to food production. “It is no surprise that the world is facing a looming shortage of food and edible oils. “Every market has two sides - demand and supply. On the demand side, increasing population and prosperity, especially in China, Brazil and India, must boost the demand for food. Normally this would increase food prices thus encouraging more production by farmers.
Unfortunately, the western world is afflicted by an epidemic of anti-food legislation. Four foolish food policies stand out.
Firstly, we have a massive diversion of cropland from producing food for humans to producing ethanol and biofuels for cars.
Secondly, we have destruction of cropping and grazing land by conversion to carbon credit forests.
Thirdly, there is a gradual suffocation of grazing land by a new politically protected species - woody weeds.
Finally, we have the gradual creation of agricultural and horticultural deserts by the artificial droughts caused by the progressive political squeeze on irrigation water.
If politicians are silly enough to add a carbon tax to the costs of fuels, electricity, cement and transport, even more farmers will give up and retire to the beach. We are told that all this anti-food legislation will save the environment and cool the climate by a degree or so over the next century.
The real aim is to harvest green votes. Starving people will not appreciate this barren harvest.