Hankering for more prominent coverage of climate change policy paralysis and need a quick fix? A clever column on Time Magazine's Ecocentric site by veteran enviro reporter Bryan Walsh makes one think one should read stories on the political impasse over easing the US national debt immediately (conservatives) or after the economy perks up (liberals). Only instead of reading words such as deficit and debt, swap in global warming. Surprising, but it sort of works.
In both cases, he explains, the argument features a camp that brooks no compromise or other deal-making that delays immediate, forceful action. The stakes are so high that, these rigid sorts believe, politics as usual must be cast aside. The very existence of civilization and the American way is at stake. Denialists (who either think the federal budget deficit can be tolerated quite a while longer, or that climate change is something to be dealt with a long time from now and is probably not so serious anyway) must be cudgeled into oblivion.
In the course of the column Walsh offers a melancholy observation:
"Good luck turning on a cable news show without getting an earful from one deficit scold or another …. But climate change doesn't quite have the same political or media firepower. Trust me, I know about the latter. Barring the occasional geographically-targeted superstorm, it's become pretty hard to clear out dead tree space for a climate change story."
Well done.
That quote is also a chance to pivot to a related but different theme for this post. I came across Walsh's nifty essay while pondering the ghettoization of climate news. It does get covered of course, often with class and brio. But for a topic that might be as deadly as a mile-wide asteroid, but with a slower punch, it is getting scarcer in the main pages of big, general news outlets. The job is falling more into the provenance of tightly-focussed and often agenda-laden specialty news outlets. Let's take a quick look at what's on two of them that reporters interested in this topic should include on their list of places to watch.
1) CLIMATE NEWS NETWORK: This Brit operation relies mainly on four reporters – who worry that climate change not only is the worst environmental threat facing humanity but that it is getting insufficient attention. Who pays for it is not crystal clear – it just says they pay for it themselves. Thank you, then, to Kieran Cook, formerly of BBC and Financial Times; the marvelous Tim Radford ex. of The Guardian, Paul Brown also former Guardian, and Alex Kirby, similarly former BBC. It takes as its audience not only the general public and decision makers, but the media that one might say is not giving climate change its due.
The Latest:
- Alex Kirby: Climate change 'causes wild weather'; An excellent summary of new research, this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research or PIK. The gist is that a new analysis puts gristle on a general hypothesis we've read of in recent years: that global warming, by warming the pole faster than the lower latitudes, is loosening the barriers between the Arctic and the rest of the planet. Thus cold air blasts come down from the north more often and, this study says, are also getting into locked trajectories for sustained periods. It has to do with the waves, ridges, and troughs that march about the Earth, pivoting roughly on the pole. Perhaps this is what just blizzarded Oklahoma for the second time in a week (and no doubt sent a river of warm air into the Arctic to replace the mass that blew down across the Canadian border).
Grist for the Mill: PIK Press Release ;
2) CLIMATE CENTRAL: This US-based outfit, a confederation of scientists and journalists and paid for by a lot of funds, foundations, government institutions (and one 'anonymous'), includes some familiar bylines on its news stories: Michael Lemonick formerly of Time Magazine, Lauren Morello late of the E&E newsletter empire, and Andrew Freedman, former Washington Post and Congressional Quarterly.
The Latest (choosing from a hefty list of current offerings):
- Lauren Morello: Climate Change is Cutting Humans' Work Capacity ; I guess the reply to contrarians who says climate change is no sweat is: IT'LL BE ALL SWEAT ALL THE TIME! This, like the example from Climate News Network, is making the rounds at other outlets, too. A report in Nature Climate Change holds that employers of the near future may be getting 20 percent less work out of their employers, due to heat and humidity, than they would get if climate were to stop changing so fast.
Grist for the Mill: Nature Climate Change abstract ;
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