Environment training standard for journalists
Real Climate is pushing for a bet to be accepted by the authors of the recent ‘global cooling’ paper, published in Nature, that was picked up across our mainstream media, in some cases making the front page (e.g. The New York Times and the UK Telegraph).
Real Climate’s position is that the forecast of a global cooling period of the next ten years is wrong. And the reason why they have framed it as a bet is to increase the publicity around their corrections of the report’s forecast that was so easily picked up by journalists looking for a new angle. As one of my PR friends recently said, journalists in London feel the green issue has been ‘done to death’ (well, that comes in a couple of generations, when we’re outposted on the high peask of our submerged island).
So along comes a report saying ‘the world will stop warming for the next 10 years’ and the headlines are made. Real Climate’s reason for framing this as a bet (supported by a number of comments) is:
Mainly because we were concerned by the global media coverage which made it appear as if a coming pause in global warming was almost a given fact, rather than an experimental forecast. This could backfire against the whole climate science community if the forecast turns out to be wrong. Even today, the fact that a few scientists predicted a global cooling in the 1970s is still used to undermine the credibility of climate science
Edward Greisch comments on the Real Climate article, and it’s worth reading in full, but it struck a chord with some of the things I have been thinking and teaching: that the environment is now the critical issue of our generation, and rather than journalists write about the environment, they need to put the environment in everything they write. To make sure it is well informed, as Greisch puts it:
All bachelors level degrees, including journalism and English, should require the engineering and science core curriculum. Journalists do the journalism thing to sell papers. The journalism thing is exactly the wrong thing to do when reporting science. RealClimate needs to be read by the whole world.
I agree. And with falling newspaper readerships around the world (particularly Western countries) you’d think, or hope, it would be more likely. But with a move to gathering news online, or an end to news gathering among younger generations, there is more likelihood that Real Climate will remain read by those keenly interested and committed to the issue, rather than the wider populations that the big brands of journalism reach, and will probably continue to reach, albeit in different forms from today’s dead trees or analogue broadcasts. Which is why placing environmental issues at the heart of critical education is immensely important.
