This week the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reported that climate coverage in the media has entered a 'downward spiral' that has come 'amid bouts of extreme weather across the globe—historic wildfires in Arizona, drought in Texas, famine in the Horn of Africa.'
Last week, a front-page New York Times 'news analysis' by Justin Gillis found Washington 'essentially frozen on the subject of climate change' at 'the end of one of the most bizarre weather years in American history.'
The analysis declared that 'efforts to put out prompt reports on the causes of extreme weather are essentially languishing' for many reasons. Is a climate-news-coverage decline one of them?
The CJR article quotes heavily from the website The Daily Climate, which reportedly found that the number of articles, blog posts, editorials, and op-eds has 'declined roughly 20 percent from 2010's levels and nearly 42 percent from 2009's peak.' In the English-language newspapers that were tracked in Europe and North America—the implied but not actually stated geographical boundaries—1229 editorials appeared in 2009, but only 580 in 2011. (Australian news organizations constitute a big exception, and coverage seems to be growing in India, China, Brazil, Mexico, and Africa, says CJR.)
Gillis charged that 'as the weather becomes more erratic by the year, the public is left to wonder what is going on' because 'the political environment for new climate-science initiatives has turned hostile' in a time of federal budget crisis. A 1 January Times editorial cited and praised his analysis and paraphrased this paragraph:
A typical year in this country features three or four weather disasters whose costs exceed $1 billion each. But this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tallied a dozen such events, including wildfires in the Southwest, floods in multiple regions of the country and a deadly spring tornado season. And the agency has not finished counting. The final costs are certain to exceed $50 billion.
The editorial joined Gillis in blaming Republicans in the House of Representatives. Here's how Gillis put it:
This year, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tried to push through a reorganization that would have provided better climate forecasts to businesses, citizens and local governments, Republicans in the House of Representatives blocked it. The idea had originated in the Bush administration, was strongly endorsed by an outside review panel and would have cost no extra money. But the House Republicans, many of whom reject the overwhelming scientific consensus about the causes of global warming, labeled the plan an attempt by the Obama administration to start a 'propaganda' arm on climate.
Gillis ended by summarizing the hope of the British climatologist Peter A. Stott for the development of 'a robust capability to analyze weather extremes in real time.'
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for Science and the Media. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
