Journalists Consider the Sobering Impact of Climate Change

[Hank Wilson]

By TC Brown


The blaze on the Cuyahoga River in 1969 is the kind of catastrophic event that will be the wake up call for unified action on the larger issue and impacts of climate change.

That was a central theme in the presentation Lonnie Thompson, a renowned ice core pioneer at Ohio State, gave to a room full of national and international journalists yesterday.

It was just one of a host of weighty issues and questions debated by scientists and reporters during a two hour give and take on the opening day of the McCormick Climate Change Conference at Ohio State University.

Journalists representing newspapers, Web sites and broadcast outlets from across the nation, and as far away as Australia, came to campus to ponder details and discuss a myriad of issues related to climate change.

The focus centered on how to cover climate change and make it accessible to a wide audience. Communication channels were opened and shepherded by Thompson, Fred Pearce, an environmental journalist and author, Matthew Nisbet, a social scientist from American University School of Communications, Christine Russell, a senior fellow from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Charles Petit a journalist and contributor to MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker.

On a glorious, sun-splashed day in Columbus, discussions about the rapid changes in climate occurring across the Earth was both eye opening and sobering.

Thompson likened the rapid retreat of tropical glaciers to the book and film, “Dead Man Walking.” Rather than accumulating new snow and ice, those ice masses are in full- blown retreat -- and dying. It’s significant because these glaciers are the canaries in the coal mine of climate change.

Consider:
• The 11 warmest periods on record occurred in the last dozen years.
• Temperatures are rising more at night and in the winter than in the summer, so the cause is not sun related.
• Stratospheric temperatures have dropped, consistent with greenhouse gas effects.

Basically, three options exist, Thompson said. Prevention through attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adaption by changing farming methods and building defenses against climate-related disease, or, lastly, and maybe the most difficult, suffering.

“There is no silver bullet,” Thompson said. “There is lot of silver buckshot. We have to use all the tools we have.”

Fred Pearce, author of last year’s book release With Speed and Violence, spoke of his detailed research with numerous climate change scientists and how their anxiety made a deep impression.

“Climatic monsters are even now being awoken. It convinced me to write a book,” Pearce said. “One of the biggest discoveries in the last five years is that when climate change happens, it is almost always fast and furious.”

The past 400 generations have basically experienced climate stability, but tranquility may well prove to be the exception, Pearce said. The tipping point could be a mere 40-to-50 years away.

Information on climate change is out there, but the public is not dialed in, Matthew Nisbet said.

“The public still does not see climate change as a political priority,” Nisbet said, citing a multitude of charts and studies. The media can be flighty in its focus too, he added.

Last year, when the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an important science report, it garnered coverage -- at least for a week until the death of Anna Nicole Smith and the astronaut love triangle stole the headlines.

Since then, climate change coverage in the press has fallen and is not likely to come to the fore anytime soon, said Chris Russell, who examined the past coverage.

Competition for headlines is stiff, but if journalists find ways to link climate change issues to energy concerns, more broadcast time and space will appear, Russell said.

One change, at least internationally, is the virtual disappearance of climate change skeptics on the news pages, said Charles Petit. He thinks the press “gets it,” but should be less worried if the average reader shows little concern about glaciers. The critical audience is the decision makers.

“We have to tell the story about the planet that will be a different planet in a few decades,” Petit said. “The challenge to a reporter is to make it lively.”