The elephant with heat-stroke in the room
Why isn't media joining the dots between extreme heat and fossil-fueled climate change?!
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The Climate Beat, a newsletter from Covering Climate Now, has cited fresh polling data indicating that climate change is not a burning issue for many American voters. Not unreasonably, it asks, “Would climate change be a higher priority for American voters if more of them understood its connection to the dangerous heat blasting much of the world? Do voters have a clear enough understanding of how a warming climate affects every aspect of their lives?”
That’s a question I’ve been thinking over and over as I read a number of New York Times articles and posts about the extreme heat wave that many parts of the country has been experiencing. And the more I think about it, the more I think the answer is a frustrating, disappointing, “No!”
The Climate Beat goes on:
The Guardian reported today that scientists at World Weather Attribution have concluded that the heat wave that has killed over a hundred people and withered crops across northern Central America, Mexico, and the southern US was made 35 times more likely by climate change — a ferocious start to what will undoubtedly be a brutal summer. Yet most news coverage continues to ignore the connection between climate change and extreme heat, not to mention the fact that climate change itself is driven by fossil fuel use. A new Media Matters report shows that just 12% of national TV segments aired during the recent heat wave in the southwest US made connections to climate change.
There are important exceptions that deserve praise. Almost half of CBS’s segments included explicit links between heat and climate change, far outstripping its competitors in coverage. The network’s local segments and streaming videos — which also spell out the role fossil fuels play in the heat wave — show just how easy it can be to make climate connections for audiences. (For more examples of how to make the climate connection, check out CCNow’s recent extreme heat reporting guidance.)
Those connections are key to helping voters grasp the stakes of November’s elections. “The more people understand climate change's ‘here, now, us’ realities,” Ed Maibach, a professor at George Mason and director of the university’s Center for Climate Change Communication, told Covering Climate Now, “the more they support ambitious climate policies and candidates who will propose such policies.”
Read the rest
As someone who reads about climate voraciously and widely, the connections between extreme weather’s increased frequency and intensity and man-made climate change is obviously and alarmingly apparent. But, it’s important to remember that many—most—people don’t pay obsessive attention to these connections like I do; in fact in some instances they may not fully understand they even exist.
Further reading
For more on why it’s crucial for media to acknowledge climate change in their coverage of political races, read “Yes, Senator, but What Are You Going to Do About the Climate?” in the Columbia Journalism Review by Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope (the founders of Covering Climate Now, an organization which “supports, convenes, and trains journalists and newsrooms to produce rigorous climate coverage that engages audiences”)
Also worth looking at is Bill Mckibben’s recent piece about the poorly-considered choice of images used to illustrate articles published about extreme heat:
What you can do.
If you see an article on extreme weather that fails to mention how it is connected to fossil-fueled climate change1, write a letter to the publication asking it to do better. The media’s role is to inform, explain and contextualize. Voters are a lot more likely to start prioritizing this as an issue if they have a better understanding of how it is affecting them.
To read (and support) journalism that does do an excellent job on climate (and how politics and climate relate to each other), check out Drilled,
, DeSmog, The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian (particularly the sterling work being done by its climate correspondent Dharna Noor on the misdeeds of fossil fuel companies). If you have the means to, I encourage you to support their excellent work by subscribing2. Ensuring that these organizations are able to continue doing rigorous, insightful climate accountability journalism is arguably one of the best ways you can contribute to the fight for a liveable (and less polluted!) future.Here’s how NASA explains the connection:
As Earth’s climate changes, it is impacting extreme weather across the planet. Record-breaking heat waves on land and in the ocean, drenching rains, severe floods, years-long droughts, extreme wildfires, and widespread flooding during hurricanes are all becoming more frequent and more intense.
Human actions since the Industrial Revolution, primarily the burning of fossil fuels, have caused greenhouse gases to rapidly rise in the atmosphere. As carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases increase, they act as a blanket, trapping heat and warming the planet. In response, Earth’s air and ocean temperatures warm. This warming affects the water cycle, shifts weather patterns, and melts land ice — all impacts that can make extreme weather worse.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Sixth Assessment Report released in 2021, the human-caused rise in greenhouse gases has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Most of these I’ve mentioned are non-profits which you can actually give donations to. (The LA Times is privately owned and so this doesn’t pertain to that particular publication—though that doesn’t stop you from subscribing.)