“CLIMATE DESK”
Rebecca Leber and Jeremy Schulman
This article was originally published by “Mother Jones” and is republished here as part of a collaboration with “Climate Desk”.
“The New York Times” has called climate change the “most important story on Earth.” Thus, it came as a surprise when the US President Donald Trump’s administration recently turned to major newspapers at a White House press conference to defend the President’s highly unpopular decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
At the press conference, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) Administrator Scott Pruitt was asked whether President Trump believes humans are impacting the warming of the planet. After refusing to comment on the President’s views, Pruitt stated that the “degree of human contribution” to warming remains unknown. This uncertainty, according to Pruitt, makes it difficult to decide how policymakers should respond.
He then read aloud from a now-infamous “The Times” column written in April by conservative, never-Trump columnist Bret Stephens. The article, which sparked a week of heated media debate, created a false impression of greater scepticism regarding climate change models—Stephens compared it to Hillary Clinton’s election campaign. “Much of what we take for granted as fact is actually probability,” he wrote. “That is especially true of the complex and faulty
models and simulations that scientists use to look into the future of the climate.” Last week, “NBC” announced that it would hire Stephens as a contributor.
Stephens, like Pruitt, insists he is not a climate change denier, but the journalist’s arguments were widely rejected by scientists, dozens of whom signed an open letter arguing that Stephens “misrepresents both known and unknown facts about climate change and misrepresents how science reports on uncertainty.”
It is not surprising that the misleading rubric of “The New York Times” is encouraged by a presidential administration that views global warming as a Chinese hoax. Sceptics have long sought opportunities to express their views through recognised media outlets. Often, they have succeeded. The following is a summary of climate-related disinformation that has reached mainstream media:
The 1990s and 2000s: Oil companies urge the media to stop covering climate. In 1997, all countries in the world signed the Kyoto Protocol, the first serious global attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A few months later, “The New York Times” reported on documents showing that the oil industry, including representatives from “Exxon”, “Chevron”, and “Southern”, was planning a campaign to “maximise the impact of scientific views on Congress, the media, and other key target audiences.” The campaign, as reported by “The Times”, would include efforts to track “the percentage of articles that raise questions about climatology and the number of radio shows featuring scientists who question the prevailing views.” It would also create a so-called “sound scientific alternative” to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), an international group of scientists that assesses climate change research.
Industry representatives informed “The Times” that it was only a “tentative” plan and had not yet been approved. Nevertheless, the following decades saw many equally devious and “he said/she said” arguments in news reports about climatology. In many cases, the claims of scientists and other experts were “balanced” by those of deniers.
In 2008, Maxwell Boykoff, now a professor at the University of Colorado, published a study in the journal “Climate Change” that examined news broadcasts on “ABC”, “CNN”, “NBC”, and “CBS” from 1995 to 2004. He found that 70% of the channels’ global warming stories maintained an information bias by including non-scientific climate sceptic opinions. In another study published in 2004, Boykoff examined news from major newspapers from 1988 to 2002 and found that
half of 636 randomly selected articles paid about the same amount of attention to sceptics' arguments about supposedly natural causes of climate change as they did to the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet.
“The Washington Post”, for example, published an article in 2004 about a study that used climate modelling to demonstrate that climate change increases the risk of heatwaves. The article quoted Myron Ebell of the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” (CEI): “Modelling is not science. It is a very small piece of paper based on modelling that can neither be proven nor disproven for the next 50 years.” The CEI is a conservative think tank closely linked to climate change deniers, which has also received funding over the years from “Koch”-backed groups and other fossil fuel groups. (Ebell would later head the EPA transition team for the Trump administration.)
2006: “CNN’s” controversial meteorologist. In 2006, immediately following the airtime dedicated to global warming, “CNN” meteorologist Chad Myers was on air to provide the daily weather forecast. Anchor Miles O’Brien told Myers: “I know you are a bit sceptical about global warming.” Myers rejected this statement and assured O’Brien that “CO2 warms the atmosphere.” Nevertheless, he suggested that climate research is exaggerated due to the urban heat island effect, as the heat retained by urban infrastructure causes artificial warming in cities. “Metro areas are getting warmer,” he said. “If you put the same thermometer in the middle of a cornfield in Nebraska, you might not see that much of a difference. We need to try and compare. You know, I’m aware it’s happening, but the question is how much is it happening. That’s it.” (In fact, urban heat islands have a negligible effect on global temperatures, and Nebraska is indeed getting warmer.)
Years later, Myers publicly retracted his controversial statements on climate. He emphasised that theories he previously considered plausible enough to express publicly are now called “zombie theories,” since they debunk myths about climate change that sceptics continuously use to fight against the facts of man-made climate change.”
March 2007: “NPR” broadcasts a debate on whether climate change is real. “Intelligence Squared”, an Oxford-style debate programme broadcast on “NPR”, held a debate on whether humans are the primary cause of global warming and what we should do. The side defending the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are responsible for dangerous levels of warming was represented by two climatologists and a NASA climate modeller. On the opposing side were two sceptical scientists: Richard Lindzen, an MIT
professor, who said the Earth is “always warming or cooling”, and Philip Stott, a retired academic who expressed a similar view. Joining Lindzen and Stott was science fiction writer Michael Crichton, who argued that scientists had not proven “whether carbon dioxide is a contributor to modern global warming.” Robert Rosenkranz, the host of “Intelligence Squared”, included even more flawed inequality in his opening remarks, including a jab at climatology:
“Perhaps the side that thinks there is no debate on this issue might find that there are some inconvenient truths that the other side simply does not want to address. I am old enough to remember when there was scientific consensus about global cooling, and that was in the seventies, with all kinds of alarming data on the subject.”
February 2009: George Will vs. the glaciers. George Will, whose “The Washington Post” column appears in hundreds of newspapers and reaches millions of readers, is one of the paper’s most persuasive voices denying climatology. In 2009, he received intense backlash when he stated that the argument for man-made climate change was negatively affected by glacier measurements. “As global glacier levels have declined, many experts said it was evidence of human-caused global warming,” he wrote. “However, since September, the growth of glaciers has been the most volatile, both up and down, since 1979 when they began being recorded by satellite. According to data from the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Centre, global glacier levels are now equal to those of 1979.”
But Will was wrong. The same source he relied on in his report to justify this argument—the report by University of Illinois researchers he mentioned—clearly indicated that glacier observations were, in fact, consistent with the scientific consensus on global warming. Several journalists took the unusual step of criticising their colleague’s column; one exposed Will, pointing out the deception of readers by “providing them with misleading climate news that contradicts the information available to scientists.”
Autumn 2009: “Climategate”
On 17 November 2009, just three weeks before high-level climate talks in Copenhagen, about 1,000 emails from climatologists were published online. Climate change deniers quickly declared that the published emails were evidence of large-scale fraud and dubbed the incident “Climategate.” In particular, they used a 1999 email sent by British scientist Phil Jones, famous for referring to efforts to “hide the decline.” The content of the emails clearly
indicated that Jones was not referring to deceptive efforts to hide (make disappear) a drop in global temperatures, but rather to a method of handling complications in tree-ring data.
As the controversy began to subside, the “Media Research Center”—a conservative media watchdog organisation—began demanding that major broadcast channels investigate the story. The channels complied with this demand. On 4 December, “NBC” reported that “for those who question whether man-made greenhouse gases are changing the climate, these emails show that climatologists are 'cleaning' data,” and aired a segment featuring Patrick Michaels, a climate sceptic at the libertarian Cato Institute, who called for an investigation. On 9 December, “ABC” inaccurately
reported that “one of the most damning emails received from climatologist Michael Mann reveals a method for hiding a temperature decline.” Mann had done no such thing. On the same day, “The Washington Post” published an op-ed by Sarah Palin, in which she claimed that the published emails revealed “data manipulation by scientists to hide a decline in global temperatures.”
A few months later, several investigations found that the researchers had not violated scientific standards and that the scientific justification for climate change remained as strong as ever.
2011: Misleading balance across the ocean
It is not just US media. An independent, now-defunct body, the “BBC Trust”, published a report in July 2011 on the “overly rigid application of editorial guidelines” at the “BBC”, which resulted in “undue attention to minority views” on climate change. The “BBC Trust” commissioned Steve Jones, a retired genetics professor at University College London, who wrote in an independent report: “For at least three years, climate change deniers have been at odds with scientific discussion, yet somehow they continue to find a place on air. Their ability to do so suggests that an excessive desire for due impartiality or argument still hinders an objective scientific story
reflection, even if “BBC” internal statements suggest there is no controversy. There is a contradiction between the clear requirements for due impartiality in “BBC” written guidelines and what is sometimes broadcast on air.
The “BBC” faced further pressure in 2014, when a parliamentary committee published a report pointing to the channel’s flawed understanding of balance.
2012: Avoiding controversy
In 2012, the “Discovery Channel” aired a documentary titled “Frozen Planet”, produced in collaboration with the “BBC”, which discussed how life and nature are changing during the warming of the Arctic and Antarctic. The programme made only fleeting mention of human-caused reasons for the warming. The show's producers said that, at the time, the filmmakers did not want to emphasise the scientific causes of climate change because it “would have reduced the credibility of an objective documentary and been used by people with political influence,” as reported by “The New York Times”. Climate activists launched a campaign calling on the channel to place more emphasis on climate change.
2013: The Pause
In recent years, a favourite argument of climate change deniers is that global warming has slowed significantly since the nineties, which, in their view, casts doubt on the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet to a very dangerous level. This is a deeply misleading argument based on the fact that 1998 was an unusually hot year and ignores the reality that since 2001, 16 out of 17 years have been recorded as the hottest. In the autumn of 2013, just as the IPCC was developing a major report on global warming, mainstream media took the bait. A “Media Matters” study found that 41% of news reports on the IPCC mentioned the so-called “pause”. Former “Mother Jones” reporter Chris Mooney highlighted one particularly problematic “CBS News” report from that time: At the start of the broadcast, “CBS” reporter Mark Phillips announced: “Another inconvenient truth has appeared on the road to the apocalypse. The new UN report on climate change is expected to blame man-made greenhouse gases for global warming more than ever. But here is the problem: the global atmosphere hasn't warmed lately.” Then came an animation showing that since 1998, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have not been associated with rising temperatures. Soon after, “CBS” turned to a scientist, trying to explain this apparent “pause” in global warming by saying that the missing heat had gone into the oceans. Then, presumably to achieve balance, there was an interview with a climate sceptic who, when asked if the “pause” diminished the urgency of doing something to prevent global warming, replied that “it has already diminished it.”
This “pause”, as it turns out, never existed. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a paper in 2015 that revised the construction of a dataset to account for a “cold bias” in how scientists measured global temperature. The results indicated that atmospheric warming had not actually slowed down, let alone stopped.
2013: Misleading balance on opinion pages
“USA Today” pairs its editorial columns on “controversial” topics with articles expressing opposing views. In October 2013, this methodology meant the widely read newspaper published an editorial on climate change while simultaneously publishing, on the other side, the view of Joseph Bast, president of the “Heartland” Institute, who has received funding from fossil fuel companies. In his article, Bast falsely claimed that no warming had occurred for 15 years and that it was now time to listen to “other voices in the debate” rather than the IPCC.
2017: Bret Stephens
In late April, “The New York Times” hired Bret Stephens, a former “The Wall Street Journal” journalist who had already described climate change as an “imaginary enemy” and believes that in the perspective of the century, the temperature will be “about the same.” When Stephens questioned climate models predicting significant future warming in his first “The Times” column, there was an immediate reaction. “No topic since the election has managed to generate such resentment against 'The Times',” wrote the paper’s public editor at the time, Liz Spayd. A few days later, “NBC” joined in by hiring a well-known
climate change disinformation agent (see above), George Will, as a contributor. Last week, the channel completed the circle by also hiring Stephens. His view contradicts “NBC” news reports that the world’s leading scientists agree that “unless the world changes course quickly and dramatically, the fundamental systems supporting human civilisation are at risk.”
And what will be the summary for 2018, 2019, 2020...?
