Is there a media bias against raising concerns about climate change, asks Colm Keena, Public Affairs Correspondent
Is there something oddly muted about the media's coverage of climate change, the most critical topic acing humanity?
A search on the Factiva global publications database for the past month indicated 4,909 articles had appeared in the period with the words "climate change" in them.
Over the same period, the database, which principally covers the printed media, indicated there were 16,134 articles with the words "bird flu" in them, ie more than three times the number on climate change.
Climate change is undoubtedly a greater issue, involving as it does a happening rather than a potential disaster. It is causing desertification, a cull of the number of species on earth, the melting of the North Pole. It has already led to the deaths of millions of people due to flooding, droughts, mudslides, and other "natural disasters".
The argument that climate change is a less immediate issue than bird flu doesn't hold up. Climate change has already killed vast numbers of people, not all of them in the developing world.
Tens of thousands died as a result of the heatwave that hit southern Europe in 2003. New Orleans was evacuated last year because of a hurricane. Every summer more and more forest fires rage in Europe and North America, and elsewhere, as water tables drop and tree lines retreat higher and higher up mountains.
If the disaster that is global warming is to be prevented from getting worse, very serious measures need to be taken. The 1992 Kyoto agreement was a compromise agreement, involving targets that scientists at the time believed were too low by up to a factor of 10. And its targets are not being met.
The Bush administration in the US, presiding over the single greatest contributor of greenhouse gases, has taken an aggressive approach against the agreement, which it does not adhere to. It has sought to distort scientific findings. None of this has seemed to have affected Bush politically.
Of course climate change receives massive coverage in the world's media, but is the coverage compartmentalised and lacking in its sense of crisis? People don't want to think about climate change because it is such a huge and terrifying issue, calls for troublesome changes in our day-to-day lives, and seems like an insurmountable problem. Journalists share these feelings, or failings, just like everyone else. And, like others, they can be turned off when the word "science" is mentioned.
But is there more to it than that? For instance, in the past number of years scientists have been identifying troubling changes in the world's oceans, leading to speculation that severe climate change effects could arrive with a bang in North America and Europe sooner than we used to think.
Behind this thinking is the idea of abrupt climate change, a phenomenon that is causing increasing concern. In 2002 the US National Academy of Sciences said, "available evidence suggests that abrupt climate changes are not only possible but likely in the future, potentially with large impacts on ecosystems and societies".
In 2003, in a paper delivered to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Robert Gagosian, of the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, considered a scenario where an abrupt change to the Gulf Stream over the coming two decades would "quickly and markedly cool the North Atlantic region, causing disruptions in global economic activity". (Abrupt climate change occurs when certain thresholds are passed. It can create localised changes, such as significantly colder winters in Europe, while temperatures globally increase.)
A search on the Factiva database for the past month for the words "abrupt climate change" throws up only eight instances. Only one of these was in a mainstream publication (the Santa Fe New Mexican letters page). Three were on a website dealing with new US legislation, reporting the introduction of a Bill in the US by Senator John McCain which would increase funding for the study of abrupt climate change.
Is this odd? Abrupt climate change is an inherently sensational story, involving as it does the potential to severely affect some of the richest regions of the world. Does the muted coverage of the issue reflect a bias in the media that is not simply to do with confusion or some other human response?
The media has a crucial role to play in educating the public and changing attitudes so that consensus can be created for necessary action. If there is a bias in the media against fostering a climate for radical action, then that bias becomes part of the problem.
It is well known, and well documented, that a lot of money has been spent on spin and lobbying by powerful interests who want to delay action against climate change. There is a huge and probably related lack of political leadership, if not positive distortion of the situation, from those in power. The Bush administration is the prime example of this.
The topic undoubtedly now receives huge coverage in the media, but does more not need to be written and broadcast about the extent to which the effects of climate change are already all around us, that the situation is already critical and needs to be, but is not being, addressed?
Journalists, like so many others, read articles about global warming while parked beside the sea, their engines running, or while on a Ryanair flight to some distant city for a cheap weekend away.
But it is also well documented that they tend to be influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by the commercial interests of their owners, the commercial concerns of the business that employs them, and the dependence of media outlets on advertising.
This may be another factor in play in the media's coverage of climate change.
Recently Time magazine and the London Independent produced comprehensive special editions focusing on climate change, the absence of leadership on the issue, and the urgent need for action. Given what is happening, is it not odd that the print and broadcast media are not routinely producing such coverage?
