Resurgence of the ‘Consensus’
This morning the Guardian carries Bjorn Lomborg’s latest perspective on global warming, suggesting that both McCain and Obama are barking up the wrong tree in their support for a US cap-and-trade system to curb emissions.
I’m reading similar critiques of the cap-and-trade argument by leading economists/scientists in Ernest Zedillo’s book Global Warming. The main thrust of the counter-argument is that people such as Lomborg, to quote Freeman Dyson, writing in the NY Review of Books:
are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.
This is Lomborg’s position, clearly communicated by this piece in today’s Guardian. Read on, Lomborg pulls the article round to promote / PR the Copenhagen Consensus, Lomborg’s organisation which, back on May 30th this year, released version 2 of the list of the world’s top problems/solutions, in a priority order, that it first released back in 2004. Then, mitigation against global warming came bottom of its list of 50 actions, ordered against cost/benefit economics — that is, mitigation was the least cost effective of all the ‘public goods’ that the world leaders could invest in.
And this time round?
Global warming mitigation again comes bottom. It is ‘competing’ in the minds of the ‘Consensus’ (which, as Real Climate pointed out back in 2006, is not really a consensus but a group of eight; compare to the IPCC scientist list of 2,000) with malnutrition, women’s rights, hunger and development.
Press coverage?
Back in 2004, the ‘Consensus’ gained huge press coverage. This time round the press have been understandably more cautious. 2004 was perhaps the emotional peak of the argument between ’sceptics’ and ‘believers’. The press were reporting both sides equally, providing what Boykoff and Boykoff called an ‘informational bias’ by putting side by side arguments from an overwhelming majority against a small group of contrarians. Before this morning, only The Times had covered the 2008 consensus in any depth. Other smaller magazines (the right-wing Reason) had some coverage, and other members of the Copenhagen Consensus organisation have been pushing the news through Project Syndicate.
Here’s a decent critique of the approach that Lomborg and his ‘Consensus’ have taken. Read more
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: Read more
Media’s blind eye to advertising
Yesterday I wrote about protests by publishers and car manufacturers against plans by the EU to introduce compulsory rules governing pollution info on car advertising. In last night’s 7pm Channel Four flagship news programme, the producers covered the story (good) but relegated it to the ‘And Finally…’ slot (bad) generally reserved for the more lighthearted story of the day.
I want to pick up on this, because news media play an important role in developing the public’s broader understanding of political and health issues.
Is Climate Change a serious issue or not?
Serious political and health issues are well covered, in general, by C4. And, just like smoking (the example C4 used as a parallel), climate change is both a political and health issue. So why the almost clownish approach? Watch it for yourself:
By relegating the story to the lighter-hearted final slot, through its ordering of scenes and interviews, by its very headline (’Driven to Distraction by Brussels’) and therefore by its emphasis on certain aspects of the story, the importance of the issue was downplayed. If this health threat concerned fire hazards in toys or flooding in the home counties, would it have be covered in the same way?
Media’s blind eye to advertising
No. And the reason is, I feel, the fact that advertising came into the mix. This report provides what I see as an example of the ‘institutional blind eye’ from which media suffers in relation to advertising. Generally this comes, in relation to climate change, in the form of charges of hypocrisy levelled at writing articles criticising government and business, but accepting advertising money from polluting products (airlines, car manufacturers etc). MediaLens picked up on this. For the Guardian, Monbiot and the readers’ editor responded.
But last night was interesting in that the turn of this blind eye became in many ways more subtle, challenging and, I feel, dangerous. The relationship moved beyond one of reliance, to one of defense: that is, this report, this news piece, made advertising the hero, in exactly the same way the car is made the hero by advertising. Read more
Ad agencies say adverts don’t work: believe them?
What do you think of this advert?*
Now, does it conform to what you would consider responsible advertising? Does it (thanks Leo Hickman) meet Advertising Standards Authority’s code of practice section 2.2. “All marketing communications should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society.” Well, yes, unfortunately it probably does, unless you’re progressive enough to read ‘environment’ every time you read ‘consumer’ or ’society’.
If you’ve got this far (and deniers will have clicked away, well, three seconds ago). you might agree with me (and George Marshall. Thanks George) that car manufacturers and advertisers are, in fact, not taking the issue of climate change seriously.
Well, this morning they are. But not as you’d hope. As reported in The Guardian, magazines publishers and TV, print and media executives are today to protest against EU plans to introduce large and, importantly, compulsory warnings about CO2 emissions on car advertising. They fear that:
As a packet of cigarettes carries a mandatory health warning, a Mercedes C-class advert may be forced to carry a climate hazard alert within months. Manufacturers would be forced to stop supplying pollution information in barely readable small print at the bottom of ads.
Some quotes from the protesters:
“The massed ranks of the media are up in arms,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. “This will not achieve the goal,” said David Mahon of the European Federation of Magazine Publishers.
So, rather than reflect on their contribution to environmental sensibility, car manufacturers and publishers are concerned that their creative and commercial rights are being attacked by EU lawmakers. Germany, in particular, despite its green credentials, feels targeted. The UK is joining in, as “car companies supply about 10% of ad revenue and are threatening to halt magazine advertising if forced to make loud statements about pollution.”
However, perhaps the most interesting defence against the plan is that “the ad agencies argue their work has a minimal role in persuading people to buy a new car.” As the Guardian points out, as the Independent did back in May, if that’s the case, why do car companies spend so much money on them? Read more
Imagining our environment: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Research for my PhD took us last weekend to the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and an exhibition of the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Japanese-born New Yorker Sugimoto has been exhibiting since 1987 and is recognised as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers. Contemporary, but using almost archaic photographic equipment and practices, such as an old 19th century large-image camera, and an army of assistants touching up the black and white prints by hand.
It is this approach, along with the subject matter, that now draws me to Sugimoto as a case study of how we ‘talk’ about - in visual and verbal languages - and therefore represent the environment.
Why the environment?
Many of Sugimoto’s images are of, or relate to, how we experience the environment, both built and ‘natural’. Some of his most arresting images are of architecture in slow exposure (blurred) focus, teasing out how great design is strengthened by reconnecting with its more impressionistic, ‘yet to be realised’ image in the architect’s mind: what the design must have first ‘felt’ like. This urge to reconnect what we experience is the present with what we have experienced in the past, either internal or external to ourselves, is central to Sugimoto’s work, and is the kernal for perhaps his most emotive and powerful work, his Seascapes. Read more
Artemis ads hunting me down
That’s Artemis Investment Management, not the Greek goddess of of the hunt.
I’m thinking through the choice of cultural objects as case studies for my PhD that explores how we represent, talk about and communicate the environment. I’ll be looking at media, long form journalism, literature, poetry, and now, I think, a key contender has to be advertising. In particular, the long-term campaign and advertisements of Artemis Investment Management: The Profit Hunter.
The Profit Hunter Campaign
I’ve been incensed by these ads for a while. They’re all over the UK travel network (tube, train, bus) and, here’s a great example, on a London taxi.
The Artemis brand is moulded around this conceit of profit hunting as a mimetic analogy with profit as an animal in the natural wild, tracked down, hunted, by its investment specialists. Its advertising campaign uses a pastiche of 1930s Great Adventurers in hunting gear.
It’s not a metaphor, stupid
What astounds me is that the people behind this campaign, both client and ad agency, present the goal of capital profit gain at the metaphorical expense of the environment, when they must, surely, understand that what they are communicating is no longer, and never has been, simply a metaphor?
The animal itself, the profit, is a clever illustration that marries together a line graph profit and what looks like an extinct, or soon to be extinct, primitive bird that can’t outrun the smart investor/hunter.
I’ve been a reader of semiotics and deconstruction for some time now, and will develop the argument in detail, but in essence it’s not difficult to anticipate my position. The signification of these advertisements contributes to the cultural meaning-making that the environment is a resource for human endeavour, from which great profits will be plundered. Fair play to Artemis, they’re not exactly subtle about the evisceration of our planet by capitalism’s global financial racket, are they? In fact, any typical semiological analysis would be redundant faster than you could say “What’s that you smell boy, a profit up ahead?” But how can we address these ads as cultural objects? Read more
“The walls will fall”: last night’s calamity on C4
“When humans disappeared, sea levels were already on the rise.” This is not, as you might expect, the tale of house owners retreating from Brighton beach because the English Channel is swelling, caused by man-made climate change. This is a tale of the immediate disappearance of the human race (we’re not told why), and the water levels are rising because there are no longer humans to operate the pumps to clear the metro tunnels of ground water, to monitor and maintain the dams; to keep, to be precise, the dangerous forces of nature in check
Last night’s Channel 4 programme on a world without us, Life Without People, was a calamity for serious consideration of the issues facing the planet. The programme, an American documentary with American settings and predominantly American experts, with scenes of an overgrown New York reminiscent of Will Smith’s recent remake of The Omega Man, I Am Legend, showed us what Life would be like without humankind to stop it from getting out of hand. So what did we do? Read more
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.
Media’s responsibility to climate change
The UK tabloids and US broadsheets were both in the news this week for their poor coverage of climate change. Poor in either volume (US) or tone and accuracy (UK).
In the UK, The Guardian picked up on new research carried out by Max Boykoff and Maria Mansfield at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, reporting on the coverage of climate change in the tabloid press (.PDF). They analysed 974 articles published between 2000 and 2006 in the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Mirror, and found that:
UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change. Moreover, there was no consistent increase in the percentage of accurate coverage throughout the period of analysis and across all tabloid newspapers. Findings from interviews indicate that inaccurate reporting may be linked to the lack of specialist journalists in the tabloid press. (Boykoff and Mansfield, 2008)
These are in line with findings in another paper, by Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool, presented at the Political Studies Association conference in Bristol, September 2007. Gavin found a similar paucity of content in the tabloids, which was, again in line with Boykoff and Mansfield, that tabloid coverage has been consistently low over the period. It’s worth a closer look at the issue… Read more
‘Balance as bias’ in climate change reporting
In a New York Times Dot Earth post on ‘Climate and the Web’, author Andy Revkin reflects on how digital media and culture can contribute to the tackling of climate change. But the article continues to support the journalistic norm of reporting with ‘balance’ which, in the case of climate change, distorts the real and certain consensus on the role of humans in creating the crisis.
The Dot Earth blog is a leap forward in climate coverage in the US elite mainstream press. These are the top four newspapers of the NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal that Boykoff & Boykoff call the “Prestige Press” in their paper ‘Balance as Bias’ (2004), published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change. Andy Revkin’s blog is clear, concise, and mainly constructive in its communication of the impact of human behaviour on greehouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, and its dangerous consequences. So, I believe Andy in this sense is doing a good job.
However, while Andy and his publisher the NYTimes.com are “conducting an experiment” to deconstruct Bush’s most recent speech on climate change, I think Andy is also contributing to the phenomenon of informational ‘balance as bias’ that Boykoff & Boykoff identified in their 2004 paper.
The ‘balance as bias’ argument is one that shows how the journalistic norm of the balanced reporting of two sides of a particular issue is problematic when one side is so overwhelmingly supported by the factual and scientific consensus, and when the other side is hugely lacking in the same level of scientific fact and peer-reviewed consensual agreement. And in regards to climate change, in the words of James Baker at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “[t]here’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”
Providing equal attention to the two sides in this case (and Boykoff and Boykoff’s research over a 14 year period from 1988-2002 showed that 53% of articles gave ‘roughly equal attention’ to both sides) is a hugely disproportionate response to the actual peer-reviewed scientific support for the ’sceptical’ view. So why do U.S. journalists keep doing this? Read more
