It Is About How to Package the Stuff

They call it climate fatigue, a symptom of too much reporting of climate change. This, like cancer fatigue in the 1970s and ‘80s, causes people to become desensitized to the issue. In my classes at Spokane Falls Community College, and throughout my teaching career at Gonzaga and earlier at the University of Texas, I’ve seen more and more students grow at odds with their parents’ global warming denying and sustainability pooh-poohing mindset. This is progress, and I reiterate what Bill Nye the Science Guy recently pointed out: The younger generations seem more capable of comprehending the cause-and-effect relationships behind climate change, at both the regional and global scales, than the older folk. This isn’t to say students still do not have difficulty arguing the urgency to act on the negative effects of climate change. They, like the general public, have been bombarded with so much media spin and false balancing that even those majoring in the environmental sciences require quick lessons on how to engage the climate change deniers and delayers. Maybe it’s been a case of so much screaming on FOX News against sound science, against Al Gore, that’s gotten into our DNA. Or maybe one false dichotomy after another is turning us illogical. According to media scholar Robert Entman: “Balance aims for neutrality. It requires that reporters present the views of legitimate spokespersons of the conflicting sides in any significant dispute, and provide both sides with roughly equal attention.” This balancing does mean inaccurate coverage, especially when it comes to the science of global warming. How many of these skeptics—many of them funded by carbon-based industry players — have been continuously consulted and quoted in news reports on climate change? Longtime journalist and editor Ross Gelbspan points this out in his books “The Heat Is On and Boiling Point.” This “misapplication” of the journalistic ethics standard of balanced reporting on issues of fact has contributed to inadequate U.S. press coverage of global warming: “The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present competing points of view. When the issue is of a political or social nature, fairness—presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight—is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to issues of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of view on a scientific question as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not,” Gelbspan writes. The echo chamber, climate change censoring carried out in the Clinton and Bush administrations, the scientific dissonance in the general public, as well as the false reporting and balancing on climate parallel a more systemic flaw: for every five hours of cable television programming, only two minutes are devoted to science-related topics. The authors of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future,” Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum discuss how it is we have so little regard for scientists on many fronts – like glaciology, marine biology, geology, geo-physics, and the dozens of disciplines tied to climate change research – yet embrace paranormal investigators, UFO hunters, anti-evolution intelligent designers, and global warming deniers. David Suzuki, one of the world’s informed scientists who also made a career as a writer of over 43 books and producer of TV documentaries popularizing science, made it clear before being interviewed on my KYRS radio show, “Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge,” last year as a Get Lit! reader why he doesn’t submit to live phone-in radio shows. “I am not doing any more interviews for call-in radio audiences because it’s been just a bunch of ignorant people yelling and blasting sound science with their illiterate views,” he told me. “They’ve called me names, spewed uncalled-for hate and disregarded any sort of evidence-based findings. I’m not going to give them any more air time bumbling around with their lies.” If fact, over the past two years, interviewing scientists like Tim Flannery (author of” The Weather Makers”) and Phillip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, and a vast array of experts who’ve written articles and books on climate change’s impact on many earth and human systems, it’s obvious that callers who don’t accept the prevailing scientific consensus have done their research to back up their prejudices. I’ve engaged first-hand these individuals who have to prove their self-possessed knowledge by prattling on about any number of scientific-sounding false claims: Global warming isn’t happening on other planets; urban heat islands (cities) thwart global thermometer readings; the atmosphere’s lowest layer, the troposphere, isn’t warming at the rate predicted by climate models; and the like. As a science communicator, I know the finger pointing and blame game doesn’t work. Indicting the K-12 education system, the media, or the parochialism of the American public for climate change illiteracy gets us nowhere. Chris Mooney says it clearly: “Members of the public aren’t empty vessels waiting to be filled with science; the refusal to tailor such information to their needs virtually assures it won’t be received or accepted. And pointing fingers at the public or its surrogates—politicians, journalists, celebrities, and so on—is not only insulting and alienating but discourages reflection about the role scientists might be playing in the equation.” It all comes back to framing, sound writing, good reporting and meeting the American public halfway in this struggle to get the world on track to deal with some impending catastrophic results of global warming.