DISASTROUS images of climate change are everywhere. An alarming graphic recently appeared in the UK media showing the British Isles reduced to a scattered archipelago by a 60-metre rise in sea level. Evocative scenes of melting glaciers, all-at-sea polar bears and forest fires are routinely attributed to global warming. And of course Al Gore has just won a Nobel prize for .
Such images are increasingly used to portray a global catastrophe that is not just imminent but happening now. The narrative is compelling – the end of the world as we know it, with a series of photogenic disasters along the way. The stories come thick and fast, and presents one more opportunity to sound the alarm.
There is a big problem here, though it isn’t with the science. The evidence that human activities are dramatically modifying the planet’s climate is now overwhelming – even to a former paid-up sceptic like me. The consensus is established, the fear real and justified. The problem is that the effects of climate change mostly haven’t happened yet, and for journalists and their editors that presents a dilemma. Talking about what the weather may be like in the 2100s, never mind the 3100s, doesn’t sell.
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Graphics and projections, even really scary ones, aren’t enough. Editors want pictures and personal stories about climate change here and now. As global warming has moved from being just a scientific story to centre-stage in the news agenda, it is often covered not by science specialists nor even environment reporters (who are often advocates of environmentalism) but by non-specialists with little idea about the subtleties and uncertainties of the data.
And so news becomes fiction. A conspicuous example is hurricane Katrina, which was reported across the board as a symbol of climate change – and to dramatic effect in Gore’s film. In the UK, large-scale floods in 2000 and a flash flood in the Cornish village of Boscastle in 2004 were reported by some as unequivocal evidence of climate change. The Guardian newspaper – on-message as always – : “Britain should expect more dangerous flash floods, catastrophic rain and hail storms, droughts and heatwaves from the rapid changes in rainfall patterns brought by global warming, the European Environment Agency said yesterday as clean-up operations continued in flooded Boscastle.” The key word in that sentence, of course, is “as”, which deliberately links putative future catastrophes with a current event and implies they share a common cause.
In fact, Katrina was an ordinary hurricane that hit an extraordinary target. Likewise, few climatologists would ascribe a localised flash flood in south-west England to global climate change. Other media stars of global warming include (which have been shrinking since the 1880s), the sinking islets of Tuvalu (which may have more to do with poor land management than rising sea levels) and of course the unfortunate polar bears. Pictures of polar bears – er, swimming, or perched on melting icebergs – are effective visual shorthand for “Arctic in peril”, but it is dishonest to show individual bears and claim they are in danger when they are not. One newspaper even drew a link between the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (caused by an earthquake) and climate change.
The British media is particularly keen on suggesting apocalypse, famine and extinction as a default rather than one end of a scale of possible future outcomes, but the problem occurs everywhere. When scientists calculate a range of possible temperature rises, journalists focus on the upper end. It makes for a better story. And every now and then, with weary inevitability, someone will trot out the implausible analogy of the planet Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect as a terrible portent of things to come on Earth.
Climate change is a difficult thing to communicate, but not impossible. It is natural to ask whether extreme weather events are part of a global pattern. Sometimes, as with the European heatwave of 2003, scientists agree it might well have been. But few see other events – localised flash floods, regional droughts, individual hurricanes – as evidence for climate change.
By attributing causation where there is none, claiming certainty when there is doubt, exaggerating and personalising the current and likely future effects of climate change (no one thinks we will see a 60-metre sea-level rise in our lifetimes) and implying that there is little hope for humanity, reporters risk pushing the undecided public from a state of concern into one of despair, and opening up a new front for climate change sceptics to attack.
“Reporters risk pushing the undecided public from a state of concern into one of despair”
Those who deny that anthropogenic climate change is happening are now out on a very thin limb. Reporters shouldn’t help them back into the mainstream by writing silly scare stories that can be blown away by the slightest breeze of scepticism.
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