Here’s a sign of how badly the big networks are blowing it: (U.S.) ABC’s
World News Tonight spent more than seven minutes reporting on the birth
of royal baby Archie in the week after he was born — more time than the
program spent covering climate change during the entire year of 2018.
Other major TV news outlets in the U.S. have also severely
underreported the climate crisis yet found plenty of time to note the
arrival of Archie, son of Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess
of Sussex. He’s now seventh in line to the British throne, which means
he probably won’t be a king but definitely will be a tabloid mainstay.
On May 6, the same day Archie was born, the United Nations released a summary of a major new report
warning that human destruction of the natural world, including through
climate change, now threatens up to a million species with extinction.
That’s dire news for our species too, as it also threatens our water
supplies, food security, and health. The destruction of ecosystems and
species “means grave impacts on people around the world are now likely,”
the report warned. Robert Watson, head of the group of scientists that produced the report, laid it on the line: “What’s at stake here is a liveable world.”
Yes, this extinction crisis is grim news, and many people need a
little light fare mixed in with their misery — a report on a royal baby,
if you’re into that kind of thing, or a sports recap, or a segment on
disgruntled Game of Thrones fans. But when the light fare takes over and
the real news is shut out, that’s beyond lopsided. We’ve got a problem.
U.S. broadcast news coverage of climate change and extinction vs royal baby Minutes of coverage on nightly news shows from Nay 6 to May 12
Media Matters tracked broadcast news coverage on May 6 and found
that ABC and NBC’s nightly news programs failed to even mention the
U.N. biodiversity report. They did, however, air two segments each on
Archie. CBS was the only national broadcast network that ran a segment
on the biodiversity report that night, and of course it ran one on the
baby, too.
The perverse priorities of TV newscasters became even more obvious in
the following days. Archie stayed in the news. Biodiversity and climate
change stayed out of it.
By May 12, the three networks’ nightly news shows had spent a total
of 17 minutes and 56 seconds on baby Archie. The extinction report and
climate change garnered a total of one minute and 21 seconds — all of it
in that single CBS segment on May 6.
ABC’s World News Tonight devoted the most time to the royal
baby: seven minutes and 14 seconds over the week. Compare that to the
six minutes and three seconds the program spent on climate change over
the entire course of 2018. ABC typically lags behind its competitors in time spent covering climate change, as MediaMattershaspreviouslydocumented. The network has devoted less airtime to the climate crisis than CBS and NBC everyyearsince 2013 — even though CBS and NBC don’t have
great track records themselves. Lest you think the old broadcast
dinosaurs don’t matter anymore, their flagship nightly news programs
still attract an average of 25 million viewers a night, including more than 5 million between the ages of 25 and 52.
Within hours of Archie’s birth, Vice’s Derek Mead published a post
headlined “Who’s Going to Tell the Royal Baby That Our Planet Is
Unequivocally Dying?” He concluded, “royal baby aside, the most
important news of the day, the decade, our lives, is this: We have
pushed the planet far past its limits, and we ignore that at our
existential peril.”
Mead joins a small but growing group of journalists and citizens
demanding that our media step it up and cover climate change like the
looming existential crisis it is. As Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope wrote last month for the Columbia Journalism Review, “If American journalism doesn’t get the climate story right — and soon — no other story will matter.” The Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and The Guardian are launching
a #CoveringClimateNow project to spur the media into action. The
disproportionate hullabaloo over the royal baby, juxtaposed with the
near silence over the extinction crisis, shows exactly why we need it.
Imagine if mainstream media covered climate change with anything near
the fervor of a royal wedding or a royal birth. Weeks of high-pitched
pieces anticipating the release of new climate action plans.
Minute-by-minute coverage dissecting every aspect of new scientific
reports. Splashy, in-depth profiles of the people leading new climate
movements. Homepages and front pages dominated by the climate crisis and
climate solutions, day after day. If we can imagine it, can we make it
happen?
*Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters for America and was previously a senior editor at Grist. *Ted MacDonald is a climate and energy researcher at Media Matters. Links
“Can you hear me?” Greta Thunberg asks
the 150 members and advisers in the U.K. Houses of Parliament. She taps
the microphone as if to check if it’s on, but the gesture is meant as a
rebuke; she’s asking if they’re listening. She asks again later in her
speech. “Did you hear what I just said? Is my English O.K.? Is my
microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.” There is laughter, but
it’s unclear if it’s amused or awkward. Thunberg is not smiling. She’s
here to talk climate; a catastrophe is looming, her generation will bear
it, and she knows whom to blame. “You did not act in time,” she
declares.
Castigating the powerful has become
routine for the 16-year-old. In December, she addressed the U.N. Climate
Change Conference in Poland; in January she berated billionaires at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Her London speech was the
last stop of a tour that included meeting the Pope. (“Continue to work,
continue,” he told her, ending with, “Go along, go ahead.” It was an
exhortation, not a dismissal.)
Just nine months ago, Thunberg had no such audiences. She was a lone figure sitting outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm,
carrying a sign emblazoned with Skolstrejk for Klimatet (School Strike
for Climate). She was there for a reason that felt primal and personal.
While Thunberg was studying climate change in school at the age of 11,
she reacted in a surprisingly intense way: she suffered an episode of
severe depression. After a time it lifted, only to resurface last
spring.
“I felt everything was meaningless and there was no point
going to school if there was no future,” Thunberg says. But this time,
rather than suffer the pain, she decided to push back at its cause,
channeling her sadness into action. “I promised myself I was going to do
everything I could do to make a difference,” she says.
Inspired by the survivors of February 2018’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla.,
she began a weekly schoolwork strike every Friday, turning to social
media to implore politicians to support and take steps toward halting
carbon emissions. Since the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December,
Thunberg’s Twitter following has grown by nearly 4,000% to reach
612,000; many have also followed her lead offline, striking to demand
change. “Before, I never really spoke when I was in my lessons or with
my classmates,” she told me shortly after her London speech. “But now I
am speaking to the whole world.”
The world is listening. Organizers estimate that on March 15, a remarkable 1.6 million people
in 133 countries participated in a climate strike inspired by
Thunberg’s solo action—mostly students who walked out of school for a
few minutes, an hour or a full day of protest. Since then, the walkouts
have continued, with students around the world united by the
#FridaysForFuture and #YouthStrike4Climate hashtags. As well as
spreading across Europe, the U.S. and Australia, students in Global
South countries experiencing severe effects of climate change such as
Brazil, Uganda and India have taken action too, following Thunberg’s
lead. In the words of Parkland student Emma González,
Thunberg’s way of “inspiring steadfast students and shaming apathetic
adults” has turned her single idea into a worldwide movement. “There’s a
massive intergenerational injustice here,” said 18-year-old U.K. strike
organizer Anna Taylor, at the London leg of the global school strike on
March 15. “Striking is the only way to make our voices heard.”
As the movement has attracted attention, Thunberg’s life
has been transformed. She never expected the whirlwind of interest,
saying it was initially tricky to convince other students to join her
action. “I just went ahead and decided to plan it, even if I were
alone,” she says, with a persistence that has yet to waver.
Thunberg attributes her determination to her diagnosis of
Asperger’s, a mild form of autism spectrum disorder. “It makes me see
the world differently. I see through lies more easily,” she says. “I
don’t like compromising. For me, it’s either you are sustainable or not —
you can’t be a little bit sustainable.” Her openness about her
diagnosis, and willingness to share about her experiences of depression,
anxiety and eating disorders, are another reason why many see Thunberg
as a role model. “To be different is not a weakness. It’s a strength in
many ways, because you stand out from the crowd.”
Not that all of the attention has made her terribly impressed. She indulges a brief smile at a mention of President Barack Obama’s tweet
in praise of her, but she returns quickly to her larger message. “I
believe that once we start behaving as if we were in an existential
crisis, then we can avoid a climate and ecological breakdown,” she says.
“But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We have to start
today.”
Thunberg joining a school strike in Paris on Feb. 22 Lionel Preau—Riva Press/Redux
After the round of European appearances
in April, I join Thunberg and her father Svante on the two-day,
1,200-mile journey back to Stockholm from London. As one of our trains
prepares to depart from Brussels at 6:25 a.m., she takes a photo to
share with her 1.6 million Instagram followers before putting on an eye
mask for a nap. Five minutes into the journey, a man stops to ask if he
can take a photo with the sleeping teenager, saying she has inspired his
own daughters. Svante politely replies, “When she wakes up, in
Cologne.”
There’s a certain retro glamour in the phrase—redolent of
an era when train travel was an elegant indulgence, rather than a
time-consuming headache compared with going by air. But for Thunberg,
the cost in convenience is marginal compared to the greater savings in
carbon emissions. She’s not alone. In what her father jokingly calls the
“Greta effect,” German and Swedish rail operators have reported a
year-on-year rise in passenger numbers. Moreover, Swedish airports have
seen fewer flyers since September, in part attributed to a phenomenon
Swedes call flygskam, or “flying shame.”
It’s impossible to know if travelers with places to be and
schedules to keep are really following the lead of a 16-year-old, but
Thunberg is widely credited with setting an example. “People are taking
their cues from Greta,” says Naomi Klein, activist and author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. “There’s
something very hard to categorize about her, and I think because she’s
not looking for approval and is not easily impressed, people don’t know
what to do with that.”
Thunberg has been greatly influenced by Klein’s work and has welcomed
her support. But Klein thinks the teenager doesn’t really need anyone’s
advice. “I don’t think I would deign to tell Greta what she should do
in the future. She is following her own path with such clarity, and she
has tremendously good instincts.”
Thunberg greeting Pope Francis on April 17 Vatican Media/Reuters
Thunberg’s main goal is for governments to reduce
emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, limiting global temperature
rise to 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels. In October 2018, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
released a landmark report warning that carbon emissions would need to
be cut by 45% by 2030 to reach this target. “The report made it very
clear that we have to act now,” says Myles Allen, a co-author of the
report. Since the price of failing to heed these warnings will be paid
by young people, Thunberg believes the school strike follows an
inevitable logic. “We are children, saying why should we care about our
future when no one else is doing that?” she says. “When children say
something like that, I think adults feel very bad.” We arrive at Thunberg’s school 10 minutes
late for class, barely two hours after stepping off the train at
Stockholm Central and stopping briefly at home for breakfast.
Paradoxically, while ditching school is the animating action of
Thunberg’s campaign, working hard in class has become an oasis.
Conjugating verbs in French class and trying out different instruments
in a music lesson have a certain familiarity that addressing Popes and
Presidents doesn’t. Glimmers of the surreal outside world appear
occasionally—Thunberg has had the peculiar experience of quoting herself
when answering questions on current affairs in class—but life at home
is mostly unremarkable. In her spare time, she likes cooking vegan food
and playing with her two dogs. “Sometimes I feel like it’s not
happening, because it’s like two completely different worlds. Here I am
just a quiet girl, and there I am very famous,” she says during a break
on a school playground, surrounded by woodland. She manages to live in both worlds,
studying for a test and then writing a speech, finishing her homework
and organizing a strike. Unlike most global figures, Thunberg doesn’t
have a staff; her parents do what they can to maintain a sense of
normalcy for her and her 13-year-old sister, Beata, though Svante no
longer answers the phone unless it’s a trusted contact.
Meantime, there is a Greta effect within the home too.
Svante and Thunberg’s mother Malena Ernman have given up meat, installed
solar panels on their home and stopped traveling by air—decisions they
made because they tired of arguments with their stubborn daughter,
Svante likes to joke. It’s been a major shift for Malena, an opera
singer who no longer flies abroad to performances. “Once she realized
the consequences of that lifestyle, she was easy to convince,” Thunberg
says, sounding more like a parent than a child.
Thunberg speaking at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France on April 16 Michel Christen—EU-EP/REA/Redux
She and her fellow youth strikers in Stockholm are
planning for the city’s next major strike on Friday, May 24, two days
before the 2019 European Parliament elections. After that, she will pack
her bags again to continue spreading the word. A trip to the U.S. seems
unlikely for now, given the difficulties of crossing the Atlantic
without an airplane. But nothing is impossible for Thunberg, as we
ponder the logistics of how she might eventually travel to China one day
via the Trans-Siberian railway.
I end my week with Thunberg as she participates in a strike outside the Swedish Parliament on a sunny Friday,
where a crowd of around 100 people come and go, joining the strike
throughout the day. The group includes people of all ages, from a
10-year-old girl who spent a week making her own replica of Thunberg’s
sign, to a group of grandparents who met through joining the strike.
Thunberg is still exhausted from her European trip, but she feels
comfortable here—among people passionate about environmental issues,
speaking democratically about their ideas. She knows action on climate
change won’t happen instantly, but she’s prepared to dedicate years to
this cause, even if life in the public eye has its drawbacks. “When I
grow up, I want to be able to look back and say that I did everything I
could,” she says. “I think that more people should feel like that.”
Since she came to prominence, Thunberg has been the target
of negativity, trolling and even threats. Right-wing commentators and
climate-change deniers have called her a “PR puppet” who is paid by a
global network of billionaires to spread a “left-liberal” message.
Others have criticized her stern appearance and “monotone voice,” a
characteristic shared by many on the autism spectrum.
“It’s quite hilarious when the only thing people can do is
mock you, or talk about your appearance or personality, as it means
they have no argument, or nothing else to say,” she says, reading some
negative replies she’s received to a recent tweet. “I’m not going to let
that stop me,” she says, “because I know this is so much more
important.”
A small boat in the Illulissat Icefjord is dwarfed by the
icebergs that have calved from the floating tongue of Greenland’s
largest glacier, Jacobshavn Isbrae.
Michael Bamber, Author provided
Antarctica is further from civilisation than any other place on
Earth. The Greenland ice sheet is closer to home but around one tenth
the size of its southern sibling. Together, these two ice masses hold
enough frozen water to raise global mean sea level by 65 metres if they
were to suddenly melt. But how likely is this to happen?
The Antarctic ice sheet is around one and half times larger than
Australia. What’s happening in one part of Antarctica may not be the
same as what’s happening in another – just like the east and west coasts
of the US can experience very different responses to, for example, a change in the El Niño weather pattern.
These are periodic climate events that result in wetter conditions
across the southern US, warmer conditions in the north and drier weather
on the north-eastern seaboard.
The ice in Antarctica is nearly 5km thick in places and we have very
little idea what the conditions are like at the base, even though those
conditions play a key role in determining the speed with which the ice
can respond to climate change, including how fast it can flow toward and
into the ocean. A warm, wet base lubricates the bedrock of land beneath
the ice and allows it to slide over it.
Though invisible from the surface, melting within the ice can speed up the process by which ice sheets slide towards the sea.Gans33/Shutterstock
These issues have made it particularly difficult to produce model
simulations of how ice sheets will respond to climate change in future.
Models have to capture all the processes and uncertainties that we know
about and those that we don’t – the “known unknowns” and the “unknown
unknowns” as Donald Rumsfeld once put it. As a result, several recent studies suggest that previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports may have underestimated how much melting ice sheets will contribute to sea level in future.
What the experts say
Fortunately, models are not the only tools for predicting the future. Structured Expert Judgement
is a method from a study one of us published in 2013. Experts give
their judgement on a hard-to-model problem and their judgements are
combined in a way that takes into account how good they are at assessing their own uncertainty. This provides a rational consensus.
The approach has been used when the consequences of an event are
potentially catastrophic, but our ability to model the system is poor.
These include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the spread of
vector-borne diseases such as malaria and even aeroplane crashes. Since the study in 2013,
scientists modelling ice sheets have improved their models by trying to
incorporate processes that cause positive and negative feedback.
Impurities on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet cause positive
feedback as they enhance melting by absorbing more of the sun’s heat.
The stabilising effect of bedrock rising as the overlying ice thins,
lessening the weight on the bed, is an example of negative feedback, as
it slows the rate that the ice melts.
The record of observations of ice sheet change, primarily from satellite data, has also grown in length and quality, helping to improve knowledge of the recent behaviour of the ice sheets.
With colleagues from the UK and US, we undertook a new Structured Expert Judgement exercise.
With all the new research, data and knowledge, you might expect the
uncertainties around how much ice sheet melting will contribute to sea
level rise to have got smaller. Unfortunately, that’s not what we found.
What we did find was a range of future outcomes that go from bad to
worse.
Reconstructed sea level for the last
2500 years. Note the marked increase in rate since about 1900 that is
unprecedented over the whole time period.Robert Kopp/Kopp et al. (2016), Author provided
Rising uncertainty
We gathered together 22 experts in the US and UK in 2018 and combined
their judgements. The results are sobering. Rather than a shrinking in
the uncertainty of future ice sheet behaviour over the last six years,
it has grown.
If the global temperature increase stays below 2°C, the experts’ best
estimate of the average contribution of the ice sheets to sea level was
26cm. They concluded, however, that there is a 5% chance that the
contribution could be as much as 80cm.
If this is combined with the two other main factors that influence
sea level – glaciers melting around the world and the expansion of ocean
water as it warms – then global mean sea level rise could exceed one
metre by 2100. If this were to occur, many small island states would
experience their current once-in-a-hundred–year flood every other day and become effectively uninhabitable.
A climate refugee crisis could dwarf all previous forced migrations.Punghi/Shutterstock
For a climate change scenario closer to business as usual – where our
current trajectory for economic growth continues and global
temperatures increase by 5℃ – the outlook is even more bleak. The
experts’ best estimate average in this case is 51cm of sea level rise
caused by melting ice sheets by 2100, but with a 5% chance that global
sea level rise could exceed two metres by 2100. That has the potential
to displace some 200m people.
Let’s try and put this into context. The Syrian refugee crisis is estimated to have caused about a million people to migrate to Europe.
This occurred over years rather than a century, giving much less time
for countries to adjust. Still, sea level rise driven by migration of
this size might threaten the existence of nation states and result in
unimaginable stress on resources and space. There is time to change
course, but not much, and the longer we delay the harder it gets, the
bigger the mountain we have to climb.
