Where there's smoke, there's climate change
Mainstream media is starting to take note – but it's still not enough
The climate emergency is getting worse and worse — so bad that mainstream media increasingly has to acknowledge it. Blackened skies in much of eastern Canada, spreading to a dozen states in the US, have made it impossible for millions of people to ignore. But too many stories still either ignore the role of human-caused climate change on natural disasters, or even try to hide the extent of its impact.
One of my main critiques of corporate media is that they “two-sides” every issue. The press’s role is not just to present different points of view, but to establish the facts. For example, a reporter that’s “two-sidesing” climate change might write an article saying that liberals claim the climate is changing (throw in a quote or two), but the GOP disagrees (throw in another quote or two). Okay, but what do experts say? What do the facts say? For example, the article could refute the climate-deniers by stating that 97% of climate scientists say that human-caused climate change is a reality.
You can be of the opinion that the Earth is flat, but science says you’re wrong. And a journalist’s job would be to point that out.
For far too long, and still to some extent today, what we often get are news stories related to extreme weather (violent hurricanes, record-smashing heat) that would either not mention the likely relationship to global climate change, or would do so with mealy-mouth caveats or bury it far down in the article past where most people will read.
The past year or so, this seems to have changed to some extent in mainstream sources, with some articles putting the link between extreme weather and climate change front and center. A few recent examples of headlines, both in national and local news, that have done a good job in making a connection between climate change and the recent wildfires in Canada and/or the air pollution aftermath they’ve caused:
ABC News: “How Canada’s wildfires and air quality warnings are connect to climate change”
The Hill: “An ungodly, dystopian landscape’: New York’s skies underscore climate stakes”
WSB-TV (part of Cox News) “This week's wildfire smoke could serve as a climate change wake-up call, experts say”
But there is still much work left to do in the media. Another couple of stories that buck the trend towards more transparency related to climate change
According to this headline in Yahoo News, “What's causing Canada's raging wildfires? It's not as simple as blaming climate change, expert says”
The writer argues that people saying climate change is behind the massive wildfires and resulting thousands of miles of smoke is too simplistic. If you go just by the headline, you’d likely think “oh, so it’s not climate change, it’s something else.”
If you read the article, “one expert” (yes, one person) says it’s partly due to “natural variability” — some seasons are drier than others. So the initial impression given is that either the wildfires are not due to climate change, or that’s just one of many possible factors.
But that’s a total mischaracterization of what their climate expert actually said, it turns out. It’s not until far into the story that the writer of the article admits “That’s not to say climate change isn’t a factor,” the quoting the same expert as saying “We see the extremes becoming more extreme and we have to harden our infrastructure to deal with the fact that extremes are becoming more extreme.”
So while it may not be as simple as saying climate change is 100% responsible, that doesn’t mean it’s not to blame for the extent of the damage. The article is misleading, or at best, downplaying the climate change angle.
This other article isn’t related to the wildfires, but is actually what inspired me to write about the topic today. I thought when I saw this headline in the New York Times, “The Grand Canyon, a Cathedral to Time, Is Losing Its River”, that they would be talking about how the climate emergency is affecting iconic natural landmarks. But I was wrong.
The Colorado River is drying up in the Grand Canyon, but the word “climate” is not mentioned a single time in the entire lengthy article. Not one time.
Towards the beginning, we get what initially appears to be a nod to climate change: “As the planet warms, low snow is starving the river at its headwaters in the Rockies, and higher temperatures are pilfering more of it through evaporation.”
However, the article attempts to explain away this sudden drying up of the Colorado River by referring to environmental trends over millions of years. What seems to be implied is: it’s just natural for the river to dry up, nothing to see here! “The lands of western North America know well of nature’s cycles of birth and growth and destruction. Eras and epochs ago, this place was a tropical sea, with tentacled, snaillike creatures stalking prey beneath its waves. Then it was a vast sandy desert. Then a sea once again.”
Lots of pretty words by a journalist who likely knows better. Trends over millions of years aren’t the same as sudden, violent changes to the environment caused by human activity.
The article serves the interests of their corporate news outlet, to obscure the truth of humanity’s impact on destroying the environment without coming out and lying about it — all the while furthering a climate denialism worthy of a blissfully ignore MAGA idiot who thinks the government is just making up climate change because they’re a bunch of gay transgender pedophile baby-killers who are too woke and spew rainbows. Or something like that.
Anecdotally speaking, of the dozen or so articles I looked at yesterday and today related to the wildfires, only the three I mentioned explicitly talked about climate change. Only the one from Yahoo seemed to initially suggest that the wildfires are not related to climate change (before eventually admitting they are), while the others didn’t mention either way.
Should every article about a natural disaster fueled by climate change mention climate change in it? I wouldn’t say necessarily so. But I think we need more of them to do so, and less articles like the ones from Yahoo and the one on the Grand Canyon by the New York Times that minimize, or even obfuscate, the role of humanity’s role in the rapid decline of our planet’s health.
Millions of people, especially in major cities in Asia, live daily with the type of air pollution the East Coast of the US is experiencing right now. We should all be fighting to reduce the impact we have, not living in denial and allowing our world to continue towards the path of becoming even more of an uninhabitable fireball.