Greenland ice faster melt – Bing video
But after Trump’s 4 years of record temperatures, devastating wildfires and some of the most destructive hurricanes in US history — the media is facing new pressure – often from the candidates themselves – to give the subject more prominence.
Two Years Ago, MSNBC devoted more than five minutes to Beto O’Rourke’s rollout of a $5trillion climate plan, calling climate a “kitchen table issue” for 2020. Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who is seeking to make climate change the central thrust of his campaign, is calling on the Democratic National Committee to host a debate focused on climate.
Bernie Sanders raised the issue during his town hall on Fox News earlier this month – and even drew cheers from the audience when he talked about new jobs in the renewable energy sector. Rising temperatures and the crisis they pose for humans were part of every Democratic candidate’s pitch during CNN’s marathon of hour-long town halls last week.
In the run-up to 2020, as newsroom leaders grapple with their mistakes in the 2016 election – from reliance on inaccurate polls to underestimating the impact of fake news – the failure to press candidates on climate change is emerging as an area of self-examination.
“In 2016 there were almost no questions asked , which is insane,” says Tony Bartelme, a senior reporter who covers climate change for the Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. “It’s a good start that we’re starting to hear questions for 2020.”
The Guardian is joining forces with Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation to launch Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World, a project aimed at dramatically improving US media coverage of the climate crisis. The project kicks off today with an event at Columbia Journalism School featuring CJR’s editor-in-chief, Kyle Pope, the Nation’s environment correspondent, Mark Hertsgaard, and the Guardian climate columnist Bill McKibben.
The Green New Deal – progressives’ vision for slowing climate change without further burdening the poor – has also helped catapult the subject into the 2020 conversation. In March, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took the highly unusual step of devoting an hour to the idea, in a show featuring the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But even as there are signs that airtime for climate is beginning to increase, questions remain about the depth and quality of the coverage. “I don’t see the media paying much attention to differentiating how serious each candidate is on the climate question,” said David Gelber, the creator and executive producer for the Showtime series on climate change, Years Of Living Dangerously.
More Americans than ever are worried about climate change. A poll of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa ranked climate change about on par with healthcare as the top issues they want candidates to talk about.
Research indicates that major national newspapers are beginning to pay more attention to climate – but local publications and TV news haven’t kept up. The major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX – spent just 142 minutes on climate change last year, according to one calculation from the progressive group Media Matters. And about half of Americans hear about global warming in the media once a month or less, according to surveys by climate communications programs at Yale and George Mason universities.
Meanwhile, five major national US newspapers – the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times – have, in aggregate, roughly tripled their coverage of climate change since four years ago, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The New York Times nowhas a desk of about a dozen covering climate. Climate editor Hannah Fairfield said the team is collaborating with the politics desk to report on the 2020 candidates’ climate positions.
But climate coverage is not just a question of volume– it’s also a question of approach. We spoke to experts in the field for their advice on how news outlets should cover climate in ways that make voters listen during the 2020 race.
Quote conservatives
Adam Berinsky, who studies why some people believe political rumors – such as that climate change is a hoax – said people who buy into political rumors are driven by a “combination of conspiratorial dispositions and political motivations”. They are more likely to change their minds if they hear from sources they identify with, often fellow conservatives.Advertisement
Aaron McCright, a sociology professor who studies public opinion at Michigan State University, said journalists should give the small but growing numbers of conservatives who care about climate change “more of a mouthpiece so that their message could start competing” with science denialism.
Republicans who want to limit climate pollution for the sake of national security or as part of a plan for energy independence need to compete better with climate deniers, said McCright. “Those could be effective messages if they’re promoted hour by hour, day by day, week by week, by dozens or hundreds of conservatives in everyday life, TV, papers, Congress.”
Bring up climate, even when the candidates don’t
Gelber says reporters should bring the campaign story back to climate change, even if the candidates aren’t discussing their proposed solutions. He said they should help audiences differentiate between the candidates, explaining to viewers and readers how specific they have gotten in their plans.
Cover climate as a local news story
Edward Maibach, a George Mason climate communications scientist, said “most people are saying they rarely hear climate change news because most people pay attention to local news. Most climate news in America is not local news”. Maibach’s program, Climate Matters, trains weathercasters and local reporters to explain the local consequences of a warming world.
Bartelme suggests trying to connect local catastrophes to the climate story and explain why the extreme weather is happening.
“What we can do is make those connections for people,” Fairfield said. Reporters can seek out “local stories that have climate fingerprints on them”.
Focus on solutions
Elizabeth Arnold, a longtime reporter and professor at the University of Alaska, argues that “doom and gloom” coverage alone may force the public to disengage.
“Repetition of a narrow narrative that focuses exclusively on the impacts of climate change leaves the public with an overall sense of powerlessness,” she said in an introduction to one paper.
Choose words carefully
Susan Hassol, director of the organization Climate Communication, said the phrase “heat-trapping pollution” is easier to understand than “greenhouse gas”, and “global warming” conveys more meaning than “climate change”.
The Guardian is partnering with Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation today on “Covering Climate Change,” a town hall event with media leaders about how to change the media narrative on climate change.
Watch the event live here between 9am and 2pm.
Tornado Path United States History –
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| 1851-2004 | 109 | 72 | 71 | 18 | 3 | 273 | 92 |
| Average Per Decade | 7.1 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 1.2 | 0.2 | 17.7 | 6.0 |
Climate change is a problem facing countries around the world, but media coverage of the topic differs from one nation to the next. A new study from the University of Kansas shows the way media frame climate change coverage can be predicted by several national factors, yet none tend to frame it as an immediate problem requiring national policies to address the issue.
While richer countries tend to frame climate change coverage as a political issue, poorer countries more often frame it as an international issue that the world at large needs to address.
“Media can tell people what to think about. At the same time, framing can have an effect on how people think about certain issues,” said Hong Vu, assistant professor of journalism at KU and the study’s lead author. “Not only can framing have an impact on how an issue is perceived but on whether and how policy is made on the issue. With big data, machine-learning techniques, we were able to analyze a large amount of media climate change coverage from 45 countries and territories from 2011 to 2015.”
Vu and co-authors Yuchen Liu, graduate student at KU; and Duc Vinh Tran of Hanoi University of Science and Technology published their findings in the journal Global Environmental Change. They analyzed over 37,000 articles and considered national factors such as economic development, weather and energy consumption. They reviewed headlines from nationally circulated publications of varying political ideologies that contained the keywords “greenhouse gas,” “climate change” and/or “global warming,” or the local language equivalent.
The most consistent predictor of how the issue was framed was a nation’s gross domestic product per capita.
“We showed that the issue is more politicized in richer countries. In poorer countries, it was framed more as an international issue,” Vu said. “Which makes sense, as poorer countries don’t have the resources that richer countries do to fight it.”
Even when richer countries framed the issue as one they could address with their more plentiful resources, it was often also framed as a political issue and would focus on debate or argument about political approaches as opposed to proposing policy solutions. Media from richer countries also focused more on the science of climate change.
When climate change was framed as an economic issue, it was in countries that had the most severe climates and those that have experienced the most adverse consequences of climate change and natural disasters, loss of life and property, and economic effects.
How media around the world frame climate change news:
In terms of social progress framing, richer countries framed the issue in terms of energy policy and use. Those that emit the most carbon dioxide framed content in terms of energy issues, while poorer countries and those that had experienced the most severe climates focused more on natural impact.
The study also used independent nation-level variables from several databases, including the World Bank, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, the Global Carbon Atlas Project and Freedom House, all nongovernment organizations working in development or on climate change.
The authors argue that the international relations frame being the most widely used reflects the fact that climate change is a problem every nation needs to address. Economic effects being second most popular reflects that fighting climate change will have impacts on every economy and that when natural disasters and climate change were discussed, they were nearly always brought forth in an economic sense. They also contend that richer countries framing the issue as political reflects that climate change skeptics in those nations gaining more media prominence and the efforts of multiple groups trying to politicize the issue, influence media agendas and policymaking.
The study helps add to the understanding of media influence on climate change coverage, Vu said. Future work will address questions of framing the topic, if it’s done on local, national or global levels, if communicators suggest solutions, if such solutions are attributed to individuals, businesses or governments and efficacy of proposed solutions. Three decades of communications on the topic show there is not a sense of immediacy in covering the problem and influencing policy.
“As communications researchers we want to know why, if climate change entered public discussion more than 30 years ago and we’ve been covering it as a global problem since, why can’t we slow the warming climate down,” Vu said. “If we want the public to have better awareness of climate change, we need to have the media impart it in an immediate sense. By looking at how they have portrayed it, we can better understand how to improve it, and hopefully make it a priority that is reflected in policy.”
Planet of the Humans Full Documentary|| Michael Moore is an eye-opening (2019) film about the alternative energy “industry.” As public interest has grown for environmental protection, a major area of concern has been about global warming caused by greenhouse gases.
Blast from The Past! Ohio River DRIED UP !
Here’s a pic from the drought of October 15, 1908. View is from the W. Va. side looking across to Bridgeport, Ohio.
This is west of Wheeling Island, the main stem of the river is to the east of Wheeling Island. Impressive, but there was still water flowing through the Ohio River.
Warming Up to the Truth: The Real Story About Climate Change | The Heritage Foundation
Planet of the Humans (2019) – Planet of the Humans (2019) – User Reviews – IMDb
I pledge allegiance to the flag Of the United States of America And to the Republic, for which it stands One Nation under God, Indivisible With Liberty & JUSTICE for ALL! Stand for our National Anthem & kneel to pray to almighty God, Amen! Aaron Lewis – Am I The Only One (Lyric Video).
Country music songwriter Jeffrey Steele released a single “Afghanistan,” inspired by admin’s disastrous pull out that left 1000’s of civilians & allies stranded behind enemy lines & the deaths of 13 service members.
Take a listen: https://youtu.be/x-TgCxUnank via @YouTube/
