The science of reporting climate change

We need media organisations prepared – in the public interest – to sacrifice the dramatic headline for the more nuanced analysis of risk. Of course there can be heated debate and opinion in coverage of these issues, but not at the cost of balanced, reasoned, evidence-based analysis.

This may be a big ask, given the commercial nature of most of our media. In that respect, the growth of online information sources can help break the hold of Big Media on what the public gets to hear about emerging risks to their health and safety.

Publications like this one should help too, by giving scientists a dedicated platform for the presentation of their work.

And then there’s the public. Is there anything the readers, viewers and listeners of news media can do to improve science journalism? We humans like to be scared witless, to be afraid of things that go bump in the night. Science news, from that perspective, is a bit like those cavemen and women who used to huddle round the fire in the darkness, sharing their stories of monsters and demons.

Fear and a sensitivity to risk are hard-wired into the human psyche, and there is part of us that relishes media images of looming apocalypse. We live in the healthiest, wealthiest, most peaceful era in human history, and that’s a measurable fact. But we are more anxious, less happy, than previous generations, including those who fought world wars and died on average in their 40s. Maybe those two trends are related.

Maybe it is unrealistic to expect news media not to play to our apparent fascination with disaster and calamity when covering the latest virus/disaster/extreme weather event/technological innovation.

In the short term, though – and the science is clear on this – the world IS warming. Former UK Tory minister John Gummer is in Australia, making the point that there is clear all-party consensus in Europe and the US around climate change, and that concern for the environment isn’t just for ‘warmists’ and woolly liberals. Australia, he argues, is dangerously behind the times in its apparent denial of the problem.

We DO, in Australia, need a rational debate about why climate change is happening, and what we can do to protect future generations from the consequences of the worst case scenario.

Only the media can provide us with an accessible public platform in which to have that debate, and from which the policy makers can draw guidance as they strive to govern.