A story in the twenty four hour news extravaganza has the life expectancy of an adult mayfly.
There was much media coverage of climate change early in the 2000s, with events like sea ice loss in the Arctic making the headlines. But disaster narratives can only be sustained for so long. Soon after the UN’s Copenhagen talks in 2009, there was a sudden silence, with coverage in 2010 down 70% on the previous year. Fossil fuel lobbyists and others took advantage of the need for constant, instant news to silence the issue.
Even when we turn out in numbers the media misses the goddamned point
The problem with all this coverage was that mainstream media focused on the event, the celebrities, size and spectacle, rather than using the coverage to begin (or continue) a deeper discussion of climate change and its consequences. And those in the front lines of the march barely figured in the pictures and video footage
One insidious result of the headline story seeking
The online release of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia in the UK turned into a media event, “Climategate”. Although extensive investigations by the university proved the charges mostly baseless, polls showed the event caused many in the US to lose faith in climate change. Polls also showed shifts toward more sceptical positions in the UK.
A dangerous expectation of magic science
Popular culture has played a key role in this de-contextualising. Big-budget movies such as The Day After Tomorrow (3) portray global warming and freezing as rapid, cataclysmic events, and sometimes suggest that science can offer a quick solution (which can reinforce the view of environmental deterioration as separate catastrophic events, interspersed with business as usual) or an equilibrium that can be re-instated with magic bullet science.
We have politicians even when they admit total ignorance in the sciene claim that their belief trumps the science they do not understand.
We have a media in search of the big story whilst totally missing the biggest story out there.
Some have the expectation that some magic solution exists and will solve the problem if it gets bad enough or that we can somehow magically find somewhere else to live once we have trashed where we live.
We have corporations using the above three points to fudge the issues whilst they continue to asset strip the planet.
Until the sources where many get there information change the way the information is treated this situation will continue.
As Ban Ki-moon warned:
“There is no ‘Plan B’ because we do not have ‘Planet B’.”
Global changes are usually slow and have a very big time delay built in. Climate change at the moment with respect to normal environmental time delays is progressing at break neck speed, even if it is often too slow to notice in the normal news cycle window. Spectacular events rather than explaining the build up to why they happen may make good news, but as for transfer of information they are near on worthless unless the background is explained.
The way climate change is reported needs to be of the same level as the science that explains the process. Until then confusion will only serve nefarious interests.
There is no magic science that will save us.
There is only the boring old slog of trying to ameliorate the damage already caused, but perhaps not yet spectacular enough to be reported upon before it becomes so.