Taking the Media’s Temperature

As delegates trickle into Doha for the annual UN climate change negotiations,  journalists too have followed in droves. With 1,500 registered press on the books, there has been concerns that the media centre is, at best, only at twenty percent capacity.

How the media report on climate change is a high-blood-pressure-inducing subject, often prompting people to scream at their computers and whittle away hours fighting trolls in comment sections before passing out in anger and dismay.

As environmentalists hope for a binding agreement to emerge from days of COP18 negotiations in Doha, it’s time to analyse the long term trends at play in the public sphere to see what kind of progress is being made in the rhetorical arena.

To simplify: the debate used to be about science, now it’s about politics.

In general, commentators are focussing on the debate between whether to continue polluting and adapt to global climate changes, or to mitigate emissions to a level necessary to avoid ‘catastrophe.’

Very few media outlets have a dedicated ‘environment’ section, let alone one for ‘climate change.’

Below is The Verb‘s analysis after the first week of COP18.

Matt McGrath is an environment correspondent for the BBC. McGrath identifies the major sticking points of COP18 negotiations as ambition, money and disengagement. Ambition coming from developing countries, who are calling on rich countries to cut more of their pollution. Where the money will come from is another issue. Developing countries want to be paid not to pollute, and to be given the means to grow their economies without emitting carbon dioxide. Disengagement from major emitters (Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States) is threatening to derail the legitimacy of the entire process. Herein lies the tensions between international politics and scientific reality. If rich countries simply pay developing countries for their pollution permits, the goal of reducing overall pollution will be undermined.

Until now, environmentalists have suspected that media outlets have been framing the debate to be between ‘climate believers’ and ‘climate sceptics.’ Ostensibly in the name of balance, in order to protect advertising dollars from the fossil fuel industry. Today, the focus has shifted from the old scientific debate (‘are we really causing global warming?’) to a new debate, which is about power, justice, and distribution – a debate over politics.

Aaron Sorkin sums up this bygone fetish for ‘balance’ in a recent Newsroom episode:

“There aren’t two sides to every story. Some stories have five sides, some only have one. Biased toward fairness means that if the entire congressional Republican caucus were to walk into the house and propose a resolution stating that the earth was flat, the ‘Times’ would lead with ‘Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on shape of earth.'”

Andrew Revkin, writing in his Dot Earth blog for The New York Times, highlights how the United States federal budget is skewed in favour of traditional military security at the expense of energy security. Revkin calls for the funding ratio (currently about 75:1 in favour of military spending) to be redirected in favour of energy security and efficiency.

It’s important to note that United States military interventions abroad, especially in the oil-rich Middle East, can’t exactly be distinguished from its energy policy. However, as domestic natural gas usage intensifies in the United States, and the need for clean energy solutions increases, the more compelling his overall message becomes.

Fear of loss, especially of material possessions, is a favoured method of persuasion. The New York Times has interactive maps showing what would happen to major cities in the event of rising sea levels which, in the context of Hurricane Sandy, may just jolt people into thinking more about how climate change will affect them.

On CNN, the right-leaning presenter of Fareed Zakaria GPS recently hosted a discussion with Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and Time Magazine senior writer Bryan Walsh on mitigation and adaption in response to climate change.

Zakaria acknowledged the need to “stop or reverse climate change” but, also advocates adaption measures in the meantime to adjust to “what is the new normal.” Mentioning the fact that “four million Americans live within just a few feet of high tide,” making them extra vulnerable to a rising and ferocious ocean, Walsh understands that adapting to climate change can bring up just as many political conundrums as mitigating pollution.

For example, if you built a sea wall around lower Manhattan, the risk of flood to the surrounding areas would increase. Walsh notes that “the great cities around the world are on coasts.” He concludes that “there’s no way we’re going to beat this just by adapting to changes. We are on a path of raising the impacts so powerfully that if we don’t get climate change itself under control, I don’t think we’ll ever catch up.”

Sachs agrees that stopping human induced climate change is “absolutely the first resort.”

For all the rhetoric, however, CNN‘s Tim Lister is pessimistic. “There is already widespread doubt that at the global level, aspirations will be matched by deeds,” he writes. Conversely, CNN‘s Matthew Knight reports on the exciting prospect of ‘greening the desert,’ by using clean energy to maintain water supply and grow plants  in arid areas as part of the Sahara Forest Project.

CNN‘s coverage of James Balog, the director of the Extreme Ice Survey, is compelling. Balog and his team record how ice is retreating as a consequence of climate change. They look at 16 different glaciers, making a progressive record since 2007, which has been made into a new film called ‘Chasing Ice‘ with the same director as ‘The Cove’ documentary.

Russia Today has nothing on COP18, and very little on actual environmental protection. It seems to be little more than free public relations for large oil companies that “have agreed to protect the arctic environment during exploration of the region’s natural resources.” And RT managed to talk about the costs of Hurricane Sandy without mentioning climate change or the environment once.

The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch newspaper, has very little on climate change and COP18. Instead the WSJ focusses on defectors from global negotiations, such as Japan, Indonesia and Vietnam “sidestepping slow-moving multilateral efforts to address climate change.”

Karl Ritter and Michael Casey, writing in The Huffington Post, summarise the key conflicts, such as the rich/poor nation divide, the U.S. vs. the rest perception, and include some useful quotes from negotiators such as United States delegate Jonathan Pershing.

Fear of loss figures heavily here, too. At the bottom of Ritter and Casey’s article there is a slide show entitled ‘Climate Change Just Might Ruin,’ which aims to shock readers into thinking about a world without pancake breakfasts, coffee, wineries, baby polar bear videos, strawberries, coral reefs, salmon, water front real estate, honey, snow, fresh water, and fast WiFi. Look out for the hashtag #climatechangeruins

Melbourne newspaper The Age has environment editor Ben Cubby providing an interactive report on the permafrost carbon feedback loop, aptly titled ‘Where even the Earth is melting‘.

The Australian newspaper, another Murdoch masthead, is mostly using syndicated content from AAP and AFP. Its environment editor Graham Lloyd was heavily criticised by Dave Clarke in Independent Australia earlier in 2012 for his anti-wind farm stance. Clarke points to the structures that allegedly affect Lloyd’s reporting within the Murdoch news empire:

“An environment editor who has a grudge against one of the world’s most successful forms of renewable energy must be quite a rare bird. But for an employee of the Murdoch News empire it is probably a wise career choice. Opposing the huge and powerful fossil fuel/mining industry would not be good for Lloyd’s future prospects in that system.”

Fox News has been using some syndicated content from Associated Press, but editorial decisions clearly favour a more action-oriented approach rather than its previous approaches. Interestingly, Fox News published the exact same story that was unassumingly titled ‘UN Climate Change Conference Opens in Doha’ in Huffington Post, as ‘US Fights Back at Climate Critics Defending Enormous Efforts at UN Talks‘. Fox certainly hasn’t lost its trademark parochialism.

France 24 had nothing but syndicated content.

Al Jazeera understandably has other editorial pressures in the Middle East, but has given considerable focus to COP18 in Doha with a noticeable presence inside the conference centre. AJ hosted a Google Hangout on the issues facing governments, companies, non-governmental organisations and policy makers during the COP18 negotiations. They have also had a reasonable amount of original online content.

Al Jazeera’s Counting the Cost program (running time: 25 minutes) did a detailed report into the varied costs of climate change, and its The Climate Question: Degrees of Change examines communities on the front line of global warming.

Der Spiegel‘s Oliver Geden is pessimistic about progress:

“In the search for a negotiated agreement to combat global climate change, US domestic politics play an outsized role. But even if President Barack Obama unexpectedly pushes emissions reduction legislation through Congress, the resulting treaty would still have to be ratified. Such a process would take too much time — and it is time we don’t have.”

Geden calls climate negotiations a “farce” and describes them as “bizarrely ritualistic” because the petty debates over financing ignore the reality of the costs of allowing a temperature rise of more than two degrees Celcius.

There have been reports that scientists are losing the battle to convince the public that climate change is real and caused by humans. Warren Meyer of Forbes argues that there has been foul play from both sides of the climate debate. But these are all notes in the margin.

Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones downplays the importance of the climate negotiations in as she explains the history of the UNFCCC process, and her decision to not physically attend this year as “nothing big is expected to happen.”

The Guardian, widely commended for their specialist environment coverage, have John Vidal and Fiona Harvey on the ground. With interactive features, nitty gritty coverage of the policy and broader coverage of Qatar as a whole, The Guardian is cementing their position as the ‘go to source’ on UNFCCC matters.

As far as media coverage is concerned, the debate has shifted towards politics, and that is a whole other ball game.

By Lachie McKenzie, photo by Laura Owsianka.