The New York Times trumpets immediate effects from climate change
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0182
Google shows little media coverage of last week’s report Extreme Weather, Climate and Preparedness in the American Mind —except in the New York Times, where Justin Gillis published the third-of-a-page-long article ‘In poll, many link weather extremes to climate change .’ Gillis’s piece and a sampling of other recent articles suggest that the Times readily attributes specific weather events and much else to climate change—right now, not just in the future.
Gillis’s news article begins, ‘Scientists may hesitate to link some of the weather extremes of recent years to global warming—but the public, it seems, is already there.’ He’s referring to a March 2012 poll that underlies the Extreme Weather report, which was sponsored by the climate-communication projects at Yale University and George Mason University. The report begins:
In 2011, Americans experienced a record-breaking 14 weather and climate disasters that each caused $1 billion or more in damages, in total costing approximately $53 billion, along with incalculable loss of human life. These disasters included severe drought in Texas and the Great Plains, Hurricane Irene along the eastern seaboard, tornadoes in the Midwest, and massive floods in the Mississippi River Valley. In the period of January through March 2012, Americans also experienced record warm temperatures, with temperatures across the contiguous United States 6.0 degrees F above the long-term average. In March alone, 15,292 warm temperature records were broken across the United States.
In March 2012 we conducted a nationally representative survey and found that a large majority of Americans say they personally experienced an extreme weather event or natural disaster in the past year. A majority of Americans also say the weather in the United States is getting worse and many report that extreme weather in their own local area has become more frequent and damaging. Further, large majorities believe that global warming made a number of recent extreme weather events worse. Only about a third of Americans, however, have either a disaster emergency plan or an emergency supply kit in their homes.
Alluding to another poll, Gillis suggests ‘that direct experience of erratic weather may be convincing some people that the problem is no longer just a vague and distant threat.’ He quotes Anthony A. Leiserowitz of Yale: ‘People are starting to connect the dots.’ Later Gillis adds, ‘Dr. Leiserowitz said that recent events might be puncturing the public’s ‘very simplistic mental model of what global warming is supposed to be.’ ‘
Gillis also quotes William E. McKibben, the climate-change activist: ‘My sense from around the country and the world is that people definitely understand that things are getting freaky. During that crazy heat wave in March, everyone in Chicago was out enjoying the weather, but in the back of their mind they were thinking, this is not right.’
Given the Times‘s confidence about the present effects of climate change, it’s odd that Gillis includes what the Atlantic‘s James Fallows would call a ‘false equivalence’ and what the climatologists at the blog RealClimate would call ‘the false objectivity of ‘balance.’ ' But Gillis does, in one paragraph, grant climate skepticism equal footing with the climate consensus:
A large majority of climate scientists say the climate is shifting in ways that could cause serious impacts, and they cite the human release of greenhouse gases as a principal cause. But a tiny, vocal minority of researchers contests that view, and has seemed in the last few years to be winning the battle of public opinion despite slim scientific evidence for their position.
A sampling of other recent articles at the Times, however, shows the newspaper operating on little doubt about the present reality of human-caused climate disruption:
• The op-ed ‘Early bloomers ,’ invoking Henry David Thoreau’s mid-nineteenth-century records of the first flowers, leaves, and migratory birds of springtime, suggested that changes in seasons’ lengths offer ‘insight into how changes in climate are affecting the world around us.’
• The article ‘Climate change to affect corn prices, study says ’ reports on findings suggesting that ‘unless farmers develop more heat-tolerant corn varieties or gradually move corn production from the United States into Canada, frequent heat waves will cause sharp price spikes.’
• The Times‘s blurb for ‘No place for heated opinions ’ says, ‘A Discovery Channel series about changes in polar regions does not mention causes, avoiding the fury that often accompanies mention of climate change.’
• The columnist Tom Friedman recently argued that ‘in an age of disruptive climate change,’ the ‘Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well.’
• A column in the Science Times section engaged the question ‘Will climate change affect the incidence of diseases and medical conditions?’ The answer began, ‘Health experts say that global warming is already causing more deaths in many regions of the world.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.