Climate Change in the Media

Reporting Risk and Uncertainty

James Painter

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857733856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Scientists and politicians are increasingly using the language of risk to describe the climate change challenge. Some researchers have argued that stressing the 'risks' posed by climate change rather than the 'uncertainties' can create a more helpful context for policy makers and a stronger response from the public. However, understanding the concepts of risk and uncertainty - and how to communicate them - is a hotly debated issue. In this book, James Painter analyses how the international media present these and other narratives surrounding climate change. He focuses on the coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the melting ice of the Arctic Sea, and includes six countries: Australia, France, India, Norway, the UK and the USA.

1

Introduction – ‘Even Ostriches Need Third-Party Insurance’

2012 was an extraordinary year for extraordinary weather.¹ The extreme became commonplace. It did not seem to matter much where you lived on the planet. The UK experienced some of the most unusual weather on record as the driest spring for a generation gave way to the wettest recorded April to June in a dramatic turnaround never documented before. By the end of December, England had suffered the wettest year on record, the whole of the UK the second wettest.

Many other parts of Europe had their worst cold snap in decades; in China the average winter temperature hit its lowest in 28 years; warmer temperatures in the Arctic were one factor behind a record low level of sea ice cover in September; Australia suffered its hottest summer since records began in 1910; the north-east of Brazil had its worst drought in decades; and in September, Nigeria experienced its worst flooding in 50 years.

In the USA, 2012 was particularly extraordinary for a series of weather extremes, many of them unparalleled in recent American history. The average temperature for the year was a full degree warmer than the previous record set in 1998. It was, in the words of a senior climate observer, ‘a huge exclamation mark at the end of a couple of decades of warming’ (Borenstein, 2013).

The area of contiguous USA (the 48 states not including Alaska or Hawaii) suffering drought conditions peaked at around 62 per cent in July – the largest area to be affected since the infamous Dust Bowl drought of December 1939. That July was the warmest on record in the USA for any month since records began in 1895.

Hurricane Sandy made landfall on 29 October near Atlantic City in New Jersey. At that moment, it registered sustained winds of 80 mph, and a central minimum pressure of 946 millibars, the lowest pressure ever recorded along the north-eastern coast. Parts of New York City harbour registered a high water level of nearly 14 feet, beating the previous record by three feet. Sandy’s storm-force winds covered more than 940 miles of the north-eastern US seaboard. It was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, as measured by diameter.

Sandy’s political impact may not have been as significant as the tens of billions of dollars of damages, but it was hardly negligible. President Obama could be seen being presidential and sympathising with victims, while the Republican challenger Mitt Romney struggled to find a role. But of central importance to this study was the reaction of the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who threw his weight behind Obama because of Romney’s failure to back climate change measures. The Guardian put these words from Bloomberg on its front page on 2 November:

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week’s devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action. (MacAskill and Goldenberg, 2012)

The three concepts of climate change, uncertainty, and risk were all woven together in this short quote. The dominant sentiment was remarkably consistent with what most climate scientists would maintain about climate change and its link to the individual weather extremes described above. Despite recent advances in attribution modelling (see for example Otto et al, 2012; Pall et al, 2011; Stott et al, 2004), most of them regard it as misguided to attribute single weather events – and particularly tropical storms – too closely to human-made climate change. But it was Bloomberg’s representation, or, to use the terminology of social science, his ‘framing’ of the climate change problem that was particularly interesting for those large groups of academics, policy makers, psychologists, and environment groups who have long grappled with the fiendishly difficult challenge of communicating climate change.² Bloomberg was linking climate change to current extreme weather events, rather than future ones, or in other words he made the threat immediate rather than future.

There is a growing sentiment amongst several experts that placing more emphasis on the climate change challenge as risk may be a helpful tool in framing or communicating the uncertainties around it. These advocates of a ‘risk-based’ approach argue that – in certain circumstances – such a framing can give policy makers more clarity about options and the process of making decisions about them. Some also argue it is less of an obstacle to public understanding, engagement, and behaviour change than other ways of portraying climate change, although this view is more contested.

In 2010, Bloomberg’s office wrote a report outlining the multiple threats posed to New York by climate change, called ‘Climate Change Adaptation in New York: Building a Risk Management Response’.³ Bill Solecki is the co-chair of the New York Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) which wrote the report and an advisor to Bloomberg. He explains that ‘when Bloomberg endorsed Obama like that, he was following the same logic we have been following at the NPCC. Our basic approach has been that it is hard to say that any one extreme event is climate change, but it is clear that the environmental baseline of the city is changing. So it is prudent to make the city more resilient for all types of climate risk – both present and future’.⁴

Bill Solecki is one of several experts who now portray the climate change problem as one of risk in a context of uncertainty – the risk that the continuing rise in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities may well exacerbate weather extremes and cause widespread and harmful impacts. As has been well-documented, and as we shall review in Chapter 2, there are large areas of uncertainty that surround the climate, certainly about the past but more pertinently about the future. The planet’s climate system is immensely complex and difficult to understand fully; the computer models used by natural scientists give multiple ranges of future temperature increases and potential outcomes; and social scientists are cautious about the possible pace, timing, and scope of the social and economic impacts from higher concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere.

However, some eminent climate scientists and economists have long argued that although there are these important uncertainties surrounding the future of our climate, a better way of looking at the problem is to emphasise the risks. The US climate professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who spent much of his life engaging in public discussion about climate change and thinking about the role of the media, was one of the first to employ the everyday concept of risk.

He would ask his audience, ‘How many of you own a home?’ Many of his (often well-off) audiences would put up their hands. ‘How many of you have had a house fire?’ Very few would put up their hands (typically it is much less than 1 per cent of households, although 1–2 per cent in California). He would then ask, ‘How many of you have fire insurance?’ Most people would put their hands up.

He would then proceed to point out that many people are happy to manage risk at a personal or household level, even when they are acting on a very low chance (less than 1 per cent) of a negative impact. But with climate change, he argued that the risk to the planetary life support system was much higher, and yet some sceptics were saying there was not enough certainty to take action.⁵

In the UK, the Conservative former secretary of state for the environment, John Gummer, uses the same analogy with the house insurance market. He called a talk in February 2013 at Oxford University ‘even ostriches have third-party insurance’,⁶ and drew parallels between how people deal with questions of insurance and how governments should deal with climate risks. He said that most British people are not ostriches and take out house insurance, but sceptics ‘were constantly saying that because there was no absolute certainty, we should do nothing’.

And in Australia, the leading climate scientist Professor Will Steffen uses a different form of risk language in describing the link between global warming and Australia’s recent records in weather extremes. He told the Sydney Morning Herald in March 2013 that ‘statistically, there is a 1-in-500 chance that we are talking about natural variation causing all these new records. Not too many people would want to put their life savings on a 500-to-1 horse’ (Siegel, 2013).

The seminal 2006 Stern report on the economics of climate change was probably the first to explicitly represent the climate policy problem as one of decision making in a context of uncertainty and risk. Its author, Lord (Nicholas) Stern, still argues that climate change is all about risk management, albeit on a colossal scale:

The main point is that this is all about risk management in some shape or form. Do we want to play Russian roulette with one bullet in the barrel or two? And even if we can’t be that precise about one or two we can say that we can, through sensible action, dramatically cut the risks. And delay is dangerous because of the ratchet effect of a flow-stock process and the lock-in of capital and infrastructure. Thus those who favour inaction have to say that they know the risks are very small – agnosticism does not make their case.⁷

In his report, Stern famously recommended that it was necessary to invest 1 per cent of the world’s GDP annually for the next few decades to move from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy (although he now says it is more like 2–3 per cent because of the greater costs involved in keeping GHG emissions to below 450 ppm). Those who baulked at the tens of billions of dollars this would entail were reminded that the global insurance industry, excluding life insurance, is worth 3.5 per cent of global GDP. As one Australian commentator observed at the time,

If the world is prepared to pay the equivalent of 3.5 per cent of its total annual output to guard against the possibility of all sorts of risks that, in any one year for any one client, are quite remote, such as fire and theft, then the prospect of paying a 1 per cent premium to protect against a catastrophic global event seems entirely reasonable. (Hartcher 2007)

A number of more recent reports have explicitly introduced the concept of risk into their titles and focus. Two stand-out examples of this are the March 2012 report by the world’s most important climate science body, the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), on extreme weather events (Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation or SREX report), and the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) of January 2012, which was the first of its kind in the UK.⁸ For example, the CCRA pointed out that there were a large number of uncertainties surrounding climate models leading to a wide range of possible results, but stressed (unusually) that not only were there some opportunities from climate change (new shipping lanes through the Arctic and fewer cold-related deaths in winter) but also multiple risks from flooding, heatwaves, and water shortages. Indeed, the CCRA press release mentioned the word ‘risk’ 19 times.

The portrayal of the climate change challenge as managing risk is certainly a growing trend, particularly in policy making circles, and this is just one reason why it is important to study the way the media report risk and uncertainty. There are several others.

Greater risk, but (in some areas) greater uncertainty too

In late 2012 a swathe of reports from the World Bank, the CIA, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) all highlighted the growing possibility of a 3-degree or 4-degree warmer world by the end of the century, and the greater risks that this would entail (Clark, 2012). For example, the IEA warned in November 2012 that the world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, factories, and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, which, in the judgement of governments, means less than 2°C.

In the same month, the World Bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, made an urgent plea for action to address the ‘devastating’ risks of climate change while launching the Bank’s report ‘Turn down the heat’.⁹ The report detailed the impact of a world hotter by 4°C by the end of the century, which the Bank described as ‘a likely scenario under current policies’. It said that ‘extreme heat waves would devastate broad swathes of the earth’s land, from the Middle East to the United States. The warmest July in the Mediterranean could be 9°C hotter than it is today – akin to temperatures seen in the Libyan Desert’.

Proponents of the tipping point approach argue that one of these points may have already passed with the (then) record Arctic sea ice melt of 2007 (see for example Marshall, 2013). The tipping point approach holds that a system can exist in several more or less stable states, and that when a certain threshold is reached, it ‘tips over’ from the state we see now into another one. Furthermore, as there is an interconnected web of tipping points, when it comes to impacts or consequences of climate change, a small change can unleash a big change which may be unstoppable. For example, when the Arctic sea ice flips into a new, less stable state, this may push the planet quickly into another tipping point – the thaw of a vast expanse of the Siberian permafrost.

However, at the same time that the risks were being laid out with greater urgency, in an apparent paradox some prominent experts on climate change also stressed that, as researchers dig deeper into the field of climate science, more uncertainties about some aspects are being, and will be, uncovered. For example, one widely-quoted article in Nature written by a leading climate scientist argued that despite the advances in our knowledge about climate science, the 2013–14 report by the IPCC would have a greater amount of uncertainty in some of its predictions and projections, which could ‘present a major problem for public understanding’ (Trenberth, 2010). Indeed, a leaked draft of the first section of the report suggested that the IPCC was changing some of its projections about droughts, tropical cyclones, and ocean circulation (Marshall and Pearce, 2012). And the slowdown in the increase in global mean surface air temperatures since 1998 has led to heated debate in the media about climate sensitivity, or the amount of global surface warming that will occur if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled (see for example Economist, 2013; Rose, 2013).

Public understanding of scientific uncertainty

As we shall see in Chapter 2, the general public are often unaware that many areas of science involve uncertainty whereas, for a scientist, uncertainty is often seen as something positive which can prompt further research. As the former director of the British Antarctic Survey, Professor Chris Rapley, obs...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Blurb
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Executive Summary
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Introduction - ‘Even Ostriches Need Third-Party Insurance’
• 2. When Uncertainty Is Certain
• 3. The Language of Risk
• 4. Reporting the Future
• 5. Uncertainty and Risk in the International Print Media
• 6. Country Studies
• 7. Conclusions and Recommendations
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Series Page