Mike Hulme in Nature on UK Media Coverage of the IPCC
February 21st, 2007Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Nature published a letter in its current issue on media coverage of the recent IPCC report. The book he refers to is co-edited by our own Lisa Dilling. Here is an excerpt from the letter:
Nature 445, 818 (22 February 2007) | doi:10.1038/445818b; Published online 21 February 2007
Newspaper scare headlines can be counter-productive
Mike Hulme
Tyndall Centre, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK. . . Communicating science to wider, public audiences, however — in this case on matters of important public policy — is an art that requires careful message management and tone setting. It seems that confident and salient science, as presented by the IPCC, may be received by the public in non-productive ways, depending on the intervening media.
With this in mind, I examined the coverage of the IPCC report in the ten main national UK newspapers for Saturday 3 February, the day after the report was released. Only one newspaper failed to run at least one story on the report (one newspaper ran seven stories), but what was most striking was the tone.
The four UK ‘quality’ newspapers all ran front-page headlines conveying a message of rising anxiety: “Final warning”, “Worse than we thought”, “New fears on climate raise heat on leaders” and “Only man can stop climate disaster”. And all nine newspapers introduced one or more of the adjectives “catastrophic”, “shocking”, “terrifying” or “devastating” in their various qualifications of climate change. Yet none of these words exist in the report, nor were they used in the scientists’ presentations in Paris. Added to the front-page vocabulary of “final”, “fears”, “worse” and “disaster”, they offer an insight into the likely response of the 20 million Britons who read these newspapers.
In contrast, an online search of some leading newspapers in the United States suggests a different media discourse. Thus, on the same day, one finds these headlines: “UN climate panel says warming is man-made”, “New tack on global warming”, “Warming report builds support for action” and “The basics: ever firmer statements on global warming”. This suggests a more neutral representation in the United States of the IPCC’s key message, and a tone that facilitates a less loaded or frenzied debate about options for action.
Campaigners, media and some scientists seem to be appealing to fear in order to generate a sense of urgency. If they want to engage the public in responding to climate change, this is unreliable at best and counter-productive at worst. As Susanne Moser and Lisa Dilling point out in Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), such appeals often lead to denial, paralysis, apathy or even perverse reactive behaviour.
The journey from producing confident assessments of scientific knowledge to a destination of induced social change is a tortuous one, fraught with dangers and many blind alleys. The challenging policy choices that lie ahead will not be well served by the type of loaded reporting of science seen in the UK media described above.
February 21st, 2007 at 8:32 pm
“The challenging policy choices that lie ahead will not be well served by the type of loaded reporting of science seen in the UK media described above.”
Probably Mike Hulme is right, but isn’t the chief purpose of the alarmist tone in the UK to stiffen the spine of British politicians in their efforts to get the US and China to move? And aren’t we in fact seeing greater pressure from the UK? Everyone there seems to know that the only way to have effective climate change policy is to have the most significant emitters agree to do something.
One may also ask whether the more moderate tone of US reporting on AR/4 and more generally has been helpful in getting citizens and policy makers to confront those so-called “challenging policy choices”.
February 21st, 2007 at 11:53 pm
TokyoTom:
Do you think that the Chinese are more convinced by a politician in a state of panic, or by one that has a well-founded case and workable solutions?
February 22nd, 2007 at 5:26 am
Some definitions from the Collins English dictionary
Catastrophic: a sudden, extensive disaster or misfortune
Shocking: Causing shock
Terrifying: extremely frightening
Devastating: to confound or overwhelm
Can anyone explain to me why any of those are inappropriate for a report than said human society will ‘most likely’ raise temperatures by 4C by 2100 unless it takes drastic action (my words, but how else would you desribe a complete overhaul of the lifestyles of millions, if not billions of people) to cut emissions?
here’s another:
news: interesting or important information not previously known.
attacking newspapers for picking out the bits of the report that appear to take the debate forwards (the effects of carbon cycle feedbacks for example, which only seem to be shifting the estimates in one direction) is as pointless and idiotic as complaining that a library won’t sell you fish.
does the 2006 report not paint a picture that is “worse” than the 2001 report?
again, to the dictionary:
worse: the comparative of bad
Mike accuses us of “appealling to fear to generate a sense of urgency”
Guilty as charged. Is it not frightening? Is it not urgent?
David Adam
Environment correspondent
The Guardian
Alarmist and proud of it
(Alarm: to fill with apprehension; to warn about danger, alert)
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:55 am
As long as the vast majority of climate scientists believe that media hype and scare-mongering will enhance rather than jeopardise their careers, funding and political standing, there is simply no way to halt the flood of scare stories and “shock-horror” headlines.
I expect that the whole climate debate will only become more level-headed once governments realise that knee-jerk policies based on alarmist counsel simply won’t work.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Dear David,
I felt that i should address a couple of the points you raised in your comment about communicating climate change on Prometheus.
First off, note I write about ‘Communicating Climate Change’ not about ‘Climate Change’, this is important because by and large your defense of alarmism is based on the fact that this position is better labelled ‘realistic’. In other words, I agree with what you are saying about climate change but think that it misses a very important point.
This depends somewhat on how you wish to see the role of yourself and the media as a whole. The assumption would be that as someone who is concerned about climate change you would not see value in an educated public that sat passively by as the world came to an end?
Knowledge is not enough for action and in fact can be–and this is the scary part–not meerly ineffective but counter productive.
For many reasons, that are covered in the book about which you where commenting, people generally respond to alarming (if not alarmist) tone by doing a range of things, none of which are productive. You will be aware of the notion of tipping points? Well, try this idea on for size, there are 12 regional tipping points of natural origin, one example is arctic ice melt leading to more arctic ice melt. There is a thirteenth tipping point, this is represented by a refusal to engage…despair.
According to empirical research fear can act as an effective motivator when:
1.An individual fears for there personal safety.
2.They have very specific methods to avoid this risk.
3. They positively appraise there abilities to carry out these measures.
4.They beleive these measueres will work.
5. They see the investment (financial/effort/time) for these measures as small or achiveable.
6. They see the loss from taking these measures and not carrying on as usuall as small.
7. They consider all of this in a ‘Central’ pathway i.e they are sitting down thinking rationally not percieving these peripherally.