Reheating the Climate Change Story

Here's a climate conundrum: while scientists declared 2010 to be the
hottest year on record, media mavens have been afire with the fact that
US media coverage of climate change dropped precipitously, or as the popular Daily Climate blog put it, "fell off the map". 2010 was a scorcher of historic proportions, so proclaimed Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organisation, but the quantity of media coverage on this pivotal issue plunged to pre-Inconvenient Truth levels.

As a revealing snapshot, 5,000 journalists attended the recent North American International Auto Show in Detroit, whereas only 2,000 accredited journalists attended last month's COP 16 climate-change summit in Cancun.
But beyond the number of gumshoe journalists patrolling the climate
change beat, the plummet in coverage also came about because global
warming is no longer perceived as novel and dramatic. Climate change is a
slow-burning tick-tocker of an issue marked by incrementalism,
slathered in arcane science, and often lacking whipsaw political
theatre. The "hottest-year-on-record" media morsel hasn't held its fresh
taste.

In the month straddling the UN meetings in Cancun, US
media heavy-hitters - the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, Fox, MSNBC and NBC - offered in
aggregate less than 200 stories that tackled climate change in a
minimally substantive way. Incidentally, another media world is
possible: the Guardian, in fact, ran more stories mentioning climate
change or global warming than all these US media outlets combined. Like
other long-term, seemingly intransigent issues, climate change has lost
its media mojo. But there is a way to rekindle its sex appeal:
economics. Thomas Carlyle may have dubbed economics "the dismal
science", but economic issues work the US public into a tizzy, routinely
topping the list of concerns in "most important problem" public opinion polls.
Environmental journalists could leverage this public opinion fact to
help jolt us out of our climate slumber and bring the issue into focus
in a way that makes clear how climate disruption will affect all of us.

So
far, journalists have done nothing of the sort. In the month
surrounding the Cancun conference, the US media outlets mentioned above
turned to economists as news sources in a measly two articles. That's
right, only the comments of Robert Stavins of Harvard University and David W Kruetzer of the conservative Heritage Foundation
wedged their way into the media discussion of climate change. That
translated to less than 1% of all sources. Clearly, journalists could do
better.

Since its release in 2006, the Stern review on the
economics of climate change has forced economists, environmentalists and
political wonks of all stripes to acknowledge the impacts climate
disruption could inflict on the global economy. In the US, for a long
time, the gold standard for modelling the economics of climate change
has been William Nordhaus's
behemoth Dice model. To his credit, Nordhaus opened his books to other
economists for inspection, which led to a slew of principled criticism
that he was understating the intensity of economic impacts. Turns out,
assumptions are where economists hide the good stuff, or at least, where
they quietly cram uncertainty.

Reframing climate change as an
burning economic issue could help journalists breathe life into the most
important - and complex - issue of our time. Without getting mired in
the morass of elaborate mathematical equations and the arcane
economics-speak of "discount rates", journalists could turn to
independent environmental economists for honest assessments of how
climate change will affect the global economy. For instance, Economics for Equity and the Environment Network, or E3
- a wide-ranging coalition of academic economists - has a strong track
record of translating the mind-numbing humdrumism of economics into
lively, comprehensible analysis in everyday language. The Real Climate Economics website
stockpiles over 100 up-to-date, peer-reviewed economics articles that
support the aggressive emissions reductions scientists recommend.

Aside from the beyond-the-pale advocacy journalists at Fox News network - who are under explicit instructions from their superiors to inject climate change scepticism
into their reporting - environmental journalists understand the gravity
of climate disruption. And there has been significant improvement in
the quality of coverage, with the US media casting aside their "balance
as bias" approach, which, for years, meant putting pseudo-scientists and
their benefactors on equal footing with independent climate scientists
and their peer-reviewed research.

The downturn in the quantity of
climate change media coverage is no small matter, since it affects
public perceptions about the seriousness of climate change: if an issue
does not remain on the public's mental fingertips, concern dwindles and
urgency becomes overkill. Plus, it allows our elected leaders to squirm
off the political hotseat. But as the world burns, quality matters, too,
and journalists have - right there, in front of them - a short-term
solution to the quandary of covering climate change: economists who can
lend climate disruption the gravitas and drama it deserves.