Altogether, an extremely grim tableau. But among some environmental
activists there was cause for celebration. For once, climate change
had broken into the foreground of our insane news cycle. Within a week
of Trump’s California visit, there was a pileup of evening TV news
segments on the subject. “NBC Nightly News” did a piece about
California climate refugees. CNN anchors interviewed the former
California governor Jerry Brown about climate change and discussed
Trump’s appointment of David Legates—a known climate-change denier—to
lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Frankly, it
was better than anything I’d even dreamed,” the activist Genevieve
Guenther told me recently, from her home in the West Village. “I’d
been hoping the news anchors would mention climate change.
But they didn’t just do that. They talked about it as the emergency
that it is. And they gave their guests space to connect it to the
Presidential elections and American politics, and even talk about some
of the policy solutions.”
Guenther runs a volunteer group called End Climate Silence, which is
focussed on combatting something more subtle than the aggressive
climate denial espoused by Trump and his allies in government, or on
Fox News: when news anchors or weather forecasters breathlessly cover
an extreme-weather event—a hurricane, drought, forest fire, or heat
wave—without ever mentioning the C-phrase. Instead, they’ll talk
around it, using terms like “historic,” “unprecedented,” and
“record-shattering.” According to Guenther, this silence is just as
pernicious as denial. “There is a name for the unprecedented intensity
and scale and relentlessness of extreme-weather disasters,” she said.
“Climate change.” She added, “If you fail to mention that, it gives
people the impression that it’s not happening—that these disasters are
acts of God.”
Until recently, climate silence was the norm on television. In
September, as the wildfires raged, the nonprofit group Media Matters
published a study showing that only four per cent of ABC, NBC, and CBS
news segments on the wildfires the month before had mentioned climate
change. On September 10th, Guenther published an
op-ed
in the Boston Globe, citing another Media Matters finding that
there had been a similar silence around Hurricane Laura. (Out of fifty
network news segments on the storm between August 24th and August 27th,
none had mentioned climate change.) “For too long, journalists have
feared that reporting the links between extreme weather and climate
change might expose them to the charge of liberal bias,” she wrote. “But
the news media should not be influenced by such tactics.” She included
data from a poll that her group had commissioned, showing that the
majority of Americans—including the majority of Republicans—want the
media to highlight connections between climate change and extreme
weather. She promoted the findings on Twitter, where she has about
thirty-four thousand followers.“I tweeted at the prime-time news shows’
producers and anchors. And I suspect that they did see it, just because
of the dramatic shift in coverage,” Guenther said. Or the turnaround
could have been driven entirely by Trump. “Whatever it was, I’ll take
it.”
Guenther is relatively new to climate activism. Until recently, she was
an English professor. She got her Ph.D. from Berkeley, in 2004, in
Renaissance literature. Her first book, “Magical Imaginations,” analyzed texts by Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. (Renaissance Quarterly
called it “sensible” and “brilliant.”) In 2010, she was teaching at the
University of Rochester, where she had a tenure-track job. But she and
her husband, a software engineer, had a baby that year, and, as she
spent her maternity leave at her apartment, something gradually shifted.
Studying Renaissance literature began to seem less important. So did
commuting between the West Village and Rochester. Her husband worked at
Google, so they didn’t need the money. “I just couldn’t do it,” she
said.
She quit her job, stayed home, and planned to write a book on Shakespeare.
She spent hours nursing her son while scrolling through the
Times on her phone. “For the first time in my life, I started
really reading the newspaper,” she said. She lingered on the Science
section. “The stories about climate change really stuck with me, and
started to make me anxious,” she explained. “The articles were saying that
all these terrible things are going to happen by the year 2100 if we do
not bring our emissions down to zero.” Equatorial cities exposed to
furnace-like heat. New York, London, Mumbai, and Shanghai subsumed by the
sea. Wars in India and China as three billion people fight over water from
the evaporating Himalayan glaciers. Refugees flooding into southern
Europe, which will itself be struggling with food shortages and drought.
All these events are predicted to happen if the world is allowed to heat
up by three degrees Celsius by 2100—which, mind-bogglingly, it will do if
countries merely keep to the pledges in the
Paris climate accord. (And no major country is on track to do even that.) “My son was born in
2010, and I knew that his life was going to play out across the
twenty-first century. That meant he would see these predictions,” Guenther
said.
She put aside Shakespeare and started enrolling in online
climate-science courses. Then, in 2017, came an event that radicalized
her: the Times hired Bret Stephens, a former Wall Street
Journal columnist with a history of questioning climate
science, as a writer for its Opinion section. Guenther was outraged. “I
thought I could trust them to understand the gravity of this, and not
imagine that climate denial was a legitimate position in 2017,” she
said. She started an online petition calling for Stephens to be fired.
It didn’t work, but Guenther came to the attention of a group of climate
scientists who are active on Twitter, including Michael Mann, Peter
Kalmus, and Gavin Schmidt.
Guenther began to think that she might have something to contribute to
the dialogue. “In Renaissance literature, there’s a rhetorical principle
called energia—energy or vividness,” she said. “It means that,
if you’re trying to persuade your reader, you need to give them vivid
images that will capture their imaginations.” She found most “climate
communications” to be energia-deficient. “It was too
data-driven and abstract. It would talk about ice and the sea and polar
bears—none of the things that made it urgent and personal to me.”
Instead of the Shakespeare book, she began writing a book about what she
calls “the language of climate change.” It analyzes common words and
phrases in the field, arguing that many of them are counterproductive,
“misrepresenting the problem and biasing us against the solutions.”
Researchers such as Naomi Oreskes have documented the ways that, over
the years, fossil-fuel interests have weaponized the notion of
“scientific uncertainty” to manipulate public opinion. In one chapter,
Guenther focusses on the word “uncertainty” itself. “For normal people,
you hear ‘uncertainty’ and it suggests that you don’t know something,”
she explained. “But in climate science ‘uncertainty’ basically means a
range of possible outcomes. As in, ‘The uncertainty interval is from 1.5
degrees Celsius to three degrees Celsius.’ The synonym for that is
confidence.”
She also dislikes the word “consensus”—as in “the scientific consensus
on climate change”—because it gives rise to the vaguely conspiratorial
image of a group of scientists getting together and coming to an
agreement. “In science, consensus doesn’t refer to a discussion,” she
said. “It means knowledge that arises from independent research projects
which all achieve the same results.” She prefers the term “discovery.”
And she takes issue with the ubiquitous “we,” as in, “We could have
stopped climate change in the nineteen-eighties.” “You think this little
pronoun is so innocent, but it actually obscures the political reality
of the whole problem,” she said, bringing up the vast differences in the
carbon emissions of rich and poor countries, and the role of the
fossil-fuel industry in blocking solutions. She has written that,
instead of thinking of climate change as something that “we are doing,”
most people should think of it as “something we are being prevented from
undoing.”
Guenther was carving out a niche for herself discussing these ideas in
panel appearances and on Twitter, when, in the summer of 2018, she spent
a morning stuck in traffic, listening to public radio. In the course of
three hours, she listened to three stories: a segment about catastrophic
flooding in Japan; an interview with a cattle rancher in
drought-stricken Oregon; and an interview with a French-Moroccan
futurist. “He was praising the idea of covering the planet with rivers
of
driverless cars—without ever discussing the fact that we need to entirely electrify
our transportation system within the next thirty years in order to hold
warming at two degrees Celsius!” Guenther said. She went on, “These
three stories were clearly about climate change, but the announcers
never even mentioned it once. And this was NPR! I felt like I was in
some horror movie where I knew something terrible was happening but
everyone was going about their lives in this surreal, almost zombified
fashion.” She wrote a rant about the experience on Twitter, where it
sparked a discussion among journalists. A couple weeks later, the MSNBC
anchor
Chris Hayes
was weighing in on the subject, writing in a tweet, “Almost without
exception. every single time we’ve covered [climate change] it’s been a
palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.” Guenther
suggested that, instead of doing segments focussed on climate change, he
should make an effort to mention it in the coverage he was already
doing. Hayes replied, “That I agree with and it’s something we do.”
Over the past few years, environmental activists have taken on the news
media intermittently. There have been protests in front of the
headquarters of Fox News and the New York Times. The climate
group 350.org, which was co-founded by the New Yorker writer
Bill McKibben, marched into Times Square in 2012, as Hurricane Sandy sped toward New
York City, and unfurled a parachute that said “End Climate Silence.”
“It’s important, because you see from polling that one of the greatest
predictors of people’s belief in global warming is how much they hear
about it. There’s not a magic set of words,” Jamie Henn, a 350.org
co-founder who now runs a group called Fossil Free Media, said. “We
often see that, especially for TV, you get more coverage on climate when
people complain about it.”
But, for the most part, these initiatives were pushing news
organizations to cover climate change directly. Guenther wanted them to
mention it in their existing coverage, “so people understand that this
is not just a science or environmental story—this is the increasingly
pressing context for stories about extreme weather, energy, business,
finance, real estate, politics, food, travel, and even the arts.” To
that end, she set up End Climate Silence, which consists of herself and
two volunteer researchers. (The group also has a four-person advisory
board, which includes the climate scientists Mann and Kalmus.) The
volunteers comb through newspaper reports and transcripts of TV news
programs, flagging instances of “climate silence.” Then Guenther engages
in “direct outreach,” e-mailing journalists, producers, and television
anchors, and pressing them to improve. If they ignore her, she engages
in “external pressure”—basically, shaming them on Twitter. “It’s really
the public square for people who work in media,” she said. The group’s
account, @EndClimtSilence, has almost ten thousand followers.
The strategy has worked with print journalists, Guenther said: “They
listen to their critics. I think it’s because they really care about
their writing.” TV news people have been less responsive. “They don’t
care about me,” she said. “And, I realized, they don’t care about being
shamed. They’re shameless as it is. . . . They only care
about ratings.” That’s why she’s recently shifted her tactics, putting a
greater emphasis on public polling, to emphasize viewer interest.
This past week, Guenther said, the sea ice in the Arctic was struggling to
refreeze—another scary feedback loop. Hurricane Delta left hundreds of
thousands of people without power. There were ongoing wildfires in
California, and in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, southern Turkey,
and parts of Syria. And we just had the hottest September on record. But
Guenther was focussed on the next Presidential debate. She’ll be watching
to see which questions about climate change the moderator, NBC’s Kristen
Welker, poses to the candidates. She was pleased that climate change had
come up during the Vice-Presidential debates, though she wished the
moderator hadn’t framed the question as whether Pence “believed” that
man-made climate change was making extreme weather worse. “It’s not the
Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. The question is: Do you ‘understand’ or
‘accept’ climate science?” she said. Anyway. She added, “The work goes
on.”
