Liverpool media researcher Neil Gavin doesn’t think so.
Our research suggests that the media is not treating these issues with the seriousness that scientists would say they deserve. The research company lpsos-MORI found that 50% of people think the jury is still out on the causes of global warming. The limited amount of media coverage – which tends to be restricted to the broadsheets – means that this statistic is unlikely to alter in the short-term.
Bit of a rant: Isn’t “climate change” just a weasel term for global warming? And, regrettable thouhg it is to see newspapers dying, could it be that one reason is that they’re not doing a very good job?
[Image: Fox News host Glenn Beck in 2007 (his low-rated show was on CNN then) by The Rocketeer]
Here we go again *slaps head*
I love the premise of the article, that Global Warming (AGW?) is a fact.
The researcher might be careful what he wishes for. It may be that coverage of AGW issues is not as prevalent as coverage for health issues…but the AGW coverage we get is horrendously one sided in favour of AGW.
Given there has been no warming in the last 10 years…contrary to AGW orthodoxy, perhaps a little more AGW coverage is just what we need?
The media tends to make “climate change” = “global warming”, but “climate change” is best described as a series of trends and global warming is technically one of the mechanisms that creates said trends. Both happen without human intervention but it is assumed that climate change, and the effects of global warming (large amounts of CO2, H2O and CH4 among others in the atmosphere) are usually slower without our help.
So they say 😀
Deny, cherry-pick facts or just make ’em up, repeat corporate and right-wing talking points, and pretend you’re the bravest and most persecuted heretic since Galileo.
Never gets old.
No one is stating that climate change doesn’t occur, but there is much debate as to the source of the change. Media is biased for the most part to paret man-made global warming, but fails to provide valid alternative views. The main reason is due to the political bias inserted into the man-made global warming science (read: Dr. Al Gore).
I would enjoy a balanced view of these issues in the media, but don’t expect it to happen.
That “much debate” is not accurate, and the reason anybody thinks so is part of the lousy job the media does.
The vast majority of scientists on one side shares equal time (sometimes not even that) with a few outliers.
Why waste time arguing with me? Go argue with these alarmists. Show me a refutation I can believe in from somebody other than Dr. Rush Limbaugh.
I don’t like global warming either, but truthiness, or the pose of faux-skepticism, is not helpful and frankly rather embarrassing on the part of a skiffy audience.
And don’t forget to attack Al Gore. That never gets old either. He’s fat, flies in jets, talks funny, and is an otherwise imperfect person. So he obviously can’t be right about this.
And learn how to spell “parrot,” fer cry-eye…
A-and yes, I do need a nap! I don’t need you people telling me I need a nap! I know when I need a nap, and that time is now!
It shouldn’t really matter whether the mess is anthropogenic or not. The reasonable argument to make about anthropogenic global warming is that we were on a massive warming cycle anyways and might have accelerated things by, oh, a few hundred years.
We can continue to argue about mpg and recycling as a hobby vs. active climactic influencer or we can start discussing how the ice caps are going to melt and flooding will kill millions unless the world governments get their acts together and start planning mass evacuations and (for the US at least) how to cope with massive immigration influxes (whether we like it or not, we trashed our military capabilities abroad and can’t even secure the border against narco-terrorists to the south, much less the peaceful immigrants in orders of magnitude larger numbers).
There are two schools of thought about climate change (and CC isn’t a weasel word, it implies that the climate is going to change dramatically and unpredictably, where Global Warming is inaccurate at best, easily used as a rhetorical device by change-deniers and downright misleading at worst): one of these schools of thought believes that we all have to hold hands and recycle while singing kumbaya. The other school of thought says that we ought to regulate the shit out of our polluters, reforest our manmade savannahs (I’m looking at you, Flyover States) and develop multi-layered ecologies of food production in place of monocultures
The approach to mitigating the damage from catastrophic climate change that has the most promise for the long-term survival of not merely the *Homo* series of humanoids but the rest of the ecosphere as well actively threatens the business models of many very wealthy institutions who would lose epic amounts of money if we started taking the risks seriously.
I think your last point is the one that gives so many people problems and is at the root of so much of the denial.
Doesn’t make it a good excuse for suborning the future of the planet to the corporatocracy.
@Tom : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming