Media bigwigs that have ignored climate change throughout the presidential campaign, like NBC News’s Chuck Todd and Brian Williams, finally brought it up during their coverage of Sandy, even in simplistic, passing references. The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof broke his silence, too, but delivered a more detailed, compelling article—with hardly a word of exaggeration. That’s progress.
But in New York City, at least, climate change as been part of the conversation since 2007, when Bloomberg released his longterm “green” development plan, PlanNYC. It set a goal of reducing citywide greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause global warming, by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and there has been slow, but steady progress toward meeting that target. Obviously, that’s not enough to ensure the city’s safety, however, and critics have been saying for years that in addition to carbon pollution, Bloomberg needs to address other bad habits as well.
“There are many reasons why the city is adaptation-averse, and, of course, they start with real-estate interests,” Wayne Barrett wrote in The Village Voice in 2007, pointing out that some of the city’s biggest development projects were located within the danger zone on the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s (FEMA) 100-year floodplain map.
It’s great to see climate change making inroads in the national conversation about extreme weather, and one hopes that the media will continue to emphasize its role with the same urgency that Businessweek did. But splashy covers, and the articles they tout, usually don’t paint a full picture. And our love of beachfront property is the type of important consideration that gets lost when we blame disasters like Sandy on global warming alone, and don’t pause to consider how we increase our vulnerability in other ways, too.
Clarification: A sentence in the second paragraph of this article that read, “Sandy was a reason to be concerned about global warming, not, as the magazine’s cover suggested, a manifestation of global warming itself,” was deleted and replaced with another for clarity. In addition, a reference to Munich Re’s report being the “first time” the company had presented evidence of a climate change signal in disaster losses was deleted.
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I think that the odds of East Coast politicians accepting and addressing the climate vulnerability with a meaningfulare plan are slim or none. The course of action will likely be to obfuscate and divert attention by hyping cap and trade/carbon taxes, green economy, evil conservatives, etc. rather than address actual solutions to future threats. I hope I'm wrong.
#1 Posted by Windy, CJR on Tue 6 Nov 2012 at 02:39 PM
" journalists, especially those on the presidential campaign trail, haven’t been giving climate change its due (in part that’s because the candidates haven’t been giving it its due)"
Ah yes - it's a reporters job to make the news, not report it. After all, who's important in a Presidential election - the candidates or the reporters?
#2 Posted by MarkB, CJR on Tue 6 Nov 2012 at 09:28 PM
Seriously, MarkB? You think it's not the job of journalists to ask questions that the interviewee might prefer never be asked? Surely you don't believe if the candidate doesn't bring it up, neither should the reporter. That's not journalism, that's stenography. In the sense of asking the unasked question, yes, reporters do "make the news".
#3 Posted by Methuselah, CJR on Wed 7 Nov 2012 at 09:05 PM
No, what should make the news is the data and according to its relevance to our society. Unfortunately 'relevance' is not measured by all people equally and by few people objectively which is why, as Chris Hayes says:
[T]he thing that’s so frustrating is the future farmers of america who will see livelihoods destroyed are not voting in [this] election. The people who live in inland coasts who will see their habitats destroyed are not voting in [this] election. [T]he people working in coal companies now are voting in [this] election. I understand what their livelihood means to them. there’s an asymmetry between the people voting and the future people who aren’t. We talk about it all the time in terms of deficit but we don’t talk about it in terms of climate.
We have confused relevance with priority, the priorities in question belonging to those who have power and worry about getting tasked with more taxes.
We need to start telling those people "Screw your priorities. When unemployment is near 10% and half the country is in drought, we don't focus on cutting your taxes and paying down (your tax cut) debt. You had a decade of Bush II to pay debt and you said NOTHING as he blew Clinton's surplus. You blew your shot."
The press needs to make the data more relevant when the powerful wants to brush it off.
That's assuming, of course, that the press serves the public and not the powerful.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 7 Nov 2012 at 10:51 PM
This will be the battle, realigning priorities to do what is required, not what is desired in board rooms and back rooms.
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 7 Nov 2012 at 10:56 PM
"Climate change" is a term pushed (I've heard by the fossil fuels industry P.R., but I don't know that for sure) to make GLOBAL WARMING sound LESS urgent. Any journalists and environmental scientists who believe that people should consider the issue urgent should stop calling it "climate change" and call it what it is, "global warming."
#6 Posted by SJP, CJR on Thu 8 Nov 2012 at 11:57 AM