Twenty years on: covering climate change
I wonder what the long-term impact will be on my personality of writing about climate change.
I am writing a chapter for a book provisionally entitled ‘Media and Climate Change’, an academic text, and my focus is on the reporting of the policy texts: how the Kyoto Protocol, IPCC reports, UK Climate Bill, etc, have been received and dealt with in the press, and what impact this has had on effective action.
It can be upsetting and depressing work. It would be fair to say I’m struggling this week. One example why: read this intro to a news story I was anaylsing:
SCIENTISTS, politicians and journalists are part of a conspiracy to predict catastrophe through global warming, a Channel 4 programme suggested last night. The programme claimed that disparate groups were making this claim for their own reasons and presented data allegedly demolishing the greenhouse theory. Scientists from the Meteorological Office meet today to decide whether to complain to the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
Sounds familiar? The Great Global Warming Swindle from last year, right? No. This was The Greenhouse Conspiracy, broadcast by Channel 4, which I found while researching media coverage of the first IPCC report in 1990. Watch it on Youtube.
Upsetting and depressing. We’ve gone around in circles. And as an IPSOS-MORI report released this weekend and covered by Juliette Jowitt in the Observer, the public continue to be confused by the messages they receive through the media about the science.
How does this happen? This quote is from the report itself:
One of the main sources of public confusion is the media coverage which has provided both a barrage of messages on climate change as well as conflicting and competing discourses. Programmes such as Channel Four’s The Great Global Swindle are having an impact. Whether the public accept alternative discourses in their entirety or not, it appears they are influencing public attitudes. Recent research supports this view and finds at least some people unsure how to filter the information and arrive at a reasoned judgement.
One thing I will say up front - it is not in general the journalists who are responsible for this, but the economic and institutional structures of a media run for profit. Cultural theory of institutions moves beyond the individual, even the individual organsiation, to look at norms, values and world-views. As a connected thought, one element of my research I found inspiring was that some of the journalists that I am hoping to interview for the book chapter were the ones writing about climate change back then: Steve Connor, Mick McCarthy, George Monbiot. They have written about climate change consistently and clearly for nearly two decades now, and, if Britain has moved forward in its overall understanding and acceptance, then these people must take a large part of the credit for that.
Journalist, academic, campaigner?
Last week I was in Oxford to speak to Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees (which has won the Royal Society book award) and one of the five or six journalists in the UK doing most to try to raise awareness, at public and poicy levels, of the requirement for action on climate change. I was also interviewing him for the book chapter.
I spoke to him about Six Degrees, which degree by degree walks the reader through the scientifically reviewed literature that explains the catastrophe of a warming world. I asked him how he maintained a sense of belief in the light of what I was finding overwhelming science. He said, thankfully, that he wasn’t immune himself:
I vacillate a lot between pessimism and optimism. I’ve had an optimistic six months. I was pessimistic when I wrote Six Degrees. It seems that it’s more unlikely to be able to do something about climate change, because our thresholds are non-linear.
But doesn’t that sometimes paralyse him? Can’t the issue itself just stop you in your tracks?
“You can’t be a pessimistic campaigner,” said Mark.
Campaigning journalist, campaigning academic?
Mark was quick to made the distinction between journalist and campaigning journalist. Is there a similar distinction to be made for academic and campaigning academic? Yes, there is, if at the very least to protect the trust which is placed in academics by both politicians and public. It’s important to be clear and responsible about your own world-view and ethical position when researching. Both journalists and academics make choices about what to include, what to leave out. And being objective does not mean being disinterested, as the Knight Science Tracker makes the point about the NYTimes reporter Andy Revkin, who’s been reporting on environmental issues for a few decades now.
There is of course an odd disjunct between the levels of trust placed in ‘academics’ and the trust then placed in ’scientists’ who are, on the whole, and certainly for the IPCC process of peer-review, mostly academics.
Take for example, NASA’s James Hansen, who gave a speech to Congress yesterday, celebrating his 20th anniversary of bringing the issue of climate change to the world’s attention. (And huge kudos to the Guardian and Observer journalists John Vidal, Ed Pilkington, Juliette Jowit, Kate Sheppard, who covered this in breadth and depth).
I wish I had been one of the audience members of James’ Hansen’s speech yesterday: as Andy Revkin at the NYTimes describes it, although not well attended by the lawmakers that invited him, the young activists were fired up by his calls to action. Particularly by his call to put oil and coal companies that have purposefully delayed action on trial for crimes against humanity (and nature).
Hansen believes 350ppm (parts per million) of CO2eq (that’s CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases) is the safe level of gases to have in our atmosphere so the world doesn’t warm dangerously. Activist Bill McKibben has just launches his 350.org campaign to try and renew political momentum around a clear, unambiguous message. But we’re already at 387ppm, and growing by 2ppm each year.
Twenty years? Make it sixty
And 350 is not even the global consensus. Nor Is Hansen’s credentials. See a few attacks on his speech here and here and here.
But what is beyond question is that we have delayed, and emissions have risen since Hansen gave his first speech to congress in 1988. And if you wanted to look back, this year is the 60th anniversary of G.S. Callendar’s original paper to the Royal Meteorological Society in London where the scientist proposed that anthropogenic carbon dioxide going into our atmosphere would warm up the world. They’ve certainly risen since then.
But let’s stick to twenty years, and the view of Lord Stern, the government’s economic advisor in residence on climate change. Last week Lord Stern and the London School of Economics released a report calling for ‘A Global Deal’ on climate change, in time to influence the UK Climate Change Bill going through parliament. It wasn’t really picked up in the media, except by Philip Stephens at the Financial Times.
There’s an important section of the report which, for a moment, moves away from sober alarm into a call for action:
Had emissions reduction begun 20 years ago, when the stock was significantly lower, 450 ppmv CO2e might have been both feasible and affordable. Delay for another 20 years would mean that concentrations would likely approach 500ppmv CO2e, so that subsequently stabilising at or below 550ppmv CO2e could prove expensive, requiring a sudden decline in emissions.
The costs of meeting a given temperature or stabilisation target will tend to rise for every month that policy action is delayed.
The word ‘delay’ doesn’t really sum up the impacts of inaction.
The relationship of this new ‘mini-Stern’ report to the much larger Stern Review from 2006 feels very much analogous to the two Stop the War marches that took place in 2003, before the UK and US led the invasion of Iraq. The first march, on Feb 14th, was attended by upwards of one million. I was there, and felt, despite the inability of the movement’s leaders to think six steps ahead (ok, stop the war? but how? in what process), that actually the size of this movement may have the impact we wanted.
And then, two months later, on a dreary April day, there were only 150,000 of us. The moment had passed, we had gone to war, and the movement was effectively defeated. It lost. We invaded, and we’re still there.
Of course, this mini-Stern is only a report. The IPCC documents are only reports. The Kyoto document is only a text.
But to misquote Freud, “words are deeds”
It’s accepted that what appears in the media has some effect on the world-views and beliefs of those who consume their particular brand. As the IPSOS-MORI poll also clearly shows, there is a major difference in the views and perspectives of the different UK daily newspaper readerships;
The pressure groups, oil lobbies, and, in many ways, the short-cycle politicians that manipulate the unknowing and lethargic public voter, also know this: why else would they spend so much time ’spinning’ the media, or funding think tanks to seed doubt in stories, online or in print?
Should I go on writing about climate change? Researching is a bit lonely and generally without encouragement. I guess I need to take some inspiration from those who have been campaigning and writing and researching for the long-haul, and learn from those who have been writing about it so well for decades. As Lord Stern says (who thought I’d be quoting an economist at the end of this?! Counsellor, sure…), delay is not an option. So I’ll keep calling for action, learning the trade, and hopefully passing on some of that enthusiasm and skill to my students. And hoping and waiting for the optimism to return. It was sunny last week. Maybe it’s something to do with the weather…
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One Response to “Twenty years on: covering climate change”
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And temperatures have fallen since Hansen gave his dire global warming prediction in 1998, even while CO2 continued to rise.
You and I are debating similar issues on our respective blogs. You see the media spinning climate change to the benefit of the skeptics while I see just the opposite. But I’m glad you’ve done your research, as much as I may disagree with your statements. I commend you for the hard work and dedication to your cause, and the lack of mud-slinging that is prevalent in so many other places on the internet.
Nice blog, and I appreciate the link back to mine.