As the slow-motion meteorological nightmare known as Hurricane Dorian approaches Florida's coast with life-threatening rain totals and historic wind speeds that are likely to leave a path of brutal devastation in its path, the media has shifted into its well-rehearsed weather disaster mode. As correspondents and reporters scour the coastline in preparation, the news media's attention to climate change and its critical connection to weather catastrophes continues to be criminally thin.
It's discouraging that in 2019, many years after the press should be doing a better job of making the explicit link to climate change in its coverage, news outlets still fail—and not just with hurricane coverage, but with the growing list of extreme weather events.
Climate change certainly does not cause hurricanes, which have been thrashing America's shores for centuries. But climate change clearly intensifies the storms, making them more powerful and more deadly. And that's news. Because of climate change, hurricanes now move more slowly (see: Hurricane Dorian), and they produce bigger, more dangerous rainfalls (see: Hurricane Harvey).
So why is climate change so often ignored during the ‘round-the-clock disaster weather coverage? Looking at cable news coverage since Friday, Aug. 29, "hurricane" has been mentioned more than 1,600 times on the three leading all-news channels. "Climate change" has been mentioned just 90 times, according to the monitoring site TVEyes.
"Judging by the climate coverage to date, most of the US news media still don’t get grasp the seriousness of this issue," The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review noted earlier this year in a jointly published article. "This journalistic failure has given rise to a calamitous public ignorance, which in turn has enabled politicians and corporations to avoid action."
This timidity, of course, comes in the face of a relentless and well-financed conservative crusade to cast doubt on the bulletproof science behind climate change, and man's role in increasing greenhouse gas emissions. That crusade enjoys huge support from powerful media players such as Fox News, which broadcast anti-science propaganda year round.
"Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez tonight is also out there promoting her radical green agenda and using this summer's heat—imagine that, heat in summer—as evidence of climate change. You can't make this up," Sean Hannity railed this summer. (Fact: She's right about climate change and the rise of deadly heat waves.) And of course the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, has transformed the United States into a lonely outpost within the global community where science deniers enjoy senior-level positions inside the Republican administration.
Against that misinformation backdrop, it's even more important that journalists be candid and unequivocal in their coverage of climate change, specifically when detailing the increasingly cataclysmic effect it has on weather patterns. Yet we keep seeing familiar failures. Despite a heat wave that broke records across the United States this summer and killed at least six people, the five major Sunday morning political shows aired "only a combined total of two segments that included at least a substantial reference to climate change," Media Matters recently reported.
And last year, when a distinguished group of scientists released a landmark report warning that humanity had a mere 12 years to radically slash greenhouse gas emissions or face a calamitous future in which hundreds of millions of people worldwide would go hungry or homeless or worse, less than one-half of the 50 largest newspapers in the U.S. covered that report.
Hurricane Dorian is currently dominating the news, but let's look at the news coverage of the slow-motion natural disaster that's been unfolding in the Midwest, with the Great Lakes running at record-high water levels and threatening to create permanent flooding woes in and around several major American cities including Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. “Carp are feeding in people’s front lawns," Eric Anderson, an operations coordinator for the Henderson Fire District, told the Watertown Daily Times.
"The high water levels are the result of several years of above-average rains and snowfall, including record amounts for the past 12 months, according to federal data," the Wall Street Journal recently reported, while completely omitting the crucial role climate change plays in the Great Lakes flooding. "Major winter snowfalls and excessive rainfall are primary drivers for high water this year," The Washington Post also reported, while making a passing reference, very late in the article, to what's driving the increased snowfalls and excessive rainfalls in the region.
The answer: climate change.
"We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” said Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist. “We are at the beginning of what’s going to be a number of decades where the climate is going to be changing very fast. During that time, we will have many unexpected weather events, and we need to learn from these events to better prepare for the future.”
"Over the last two centuries, the Great Lakes have been significantly impacted by human activity, and climate change is now adding more challenges and another layer of stress," added Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois. Meanwhile, a recent report confirmed that while annual U.S. precipitation increased 4% between 1901 and 2015, it increased nearly 10% in the Great Lakes region. That's why New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently had to declare a state of emergency in response to the flooding around Lake Ontario. He also called for better planning decisions in light of climate change.
Like so many other unfolding extreme weather events that endanger the U.S., climate change is at the center of the Great Lakes flooding and Hurricane Dorian. News coverage needs to make that abundantly clear, especially as the risks escalate in coming years.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.