Is Mass Media 'Getting' Global Warming? Does It Matter?

In the past couple of weeks, it seems, global warming has gotten hot (so to speak). This week's TIME magazine cover story depicts a forlorn (and probably doomed) polar bear on a tiny ice floe as a symbol, perhaps, of where we all are when it comes to global warming. Stuck, isolated, alone, feeling helpless to really do anything. ABC News is running a week-long series on "World News Tonight." CBS' "60 Minutes" had a long piece on Bush administration censorship of global warming warnings. And Elizabeth Kolbert as well as other authors are out on the stump with new books.

At first glance, it should be encouraging that mainstream media are finally telling the awful truth. But there are two big problems here.

First, media (and even authors like Kolbert) basically are describing a frightful state. "Be Worried. Be VERY Worried" states TIME's cover. Kolbert's book title talks about a "catastrophe." And nearly every other major treatment I see on global warming takes a similar approach: Be scared out of your wits because the day of reckoning isn't somewhere down the road, it's now.

Fair enough. After years of dithering with "fair and balanced" reporting on global warming, quoting ostriches and nay-sayers with a political axe to grind and no solid evidence next to world-class scientists with years of data and research to back up their complete accord on impending disaster — and pretty much imparting the impression that each side cancels the other out — media may have indeed turned a corner. Maybe during the next Katrina we won't have to sit through endless talking head patter about "no evidence this is related to global warming." The latest verdict on hurricanes, cited by Kolbert in a recent New Yorker piece, moved the science a step further. During Katrina meteorologists were saying that global warming, while it may make some few hurricanes more severe, would not cause an increase in the number of hurricanes. Well, toss that one out the window. The numbers are going up as well.

The parabolic curve of global warming also is steepening. By that I mean that after we cross the point of no return (which may already have happened; we just cannot be sure yet), the metrics will accelerate beyond what was predicted. Which means that even us boomers, who thought the whole problem would be fobbed off on our children and grandchildren, may live to see the death of the planet.

The other problem with mass media jumping on the global warming bandwagon is this: Next week they'll totally forget everything they wrote and be onto special issues on the building boom, or the coming Iranian invasion, or China's industrialization or some other topic that they will handle with equal breathless hand-waving as though it, too, is something we should all pay attention to. And all of that coverage will act as though global warming does not exist, and earth has a real future while building bigger highways and taller buildings and more fast-food joints.

If the mass media are really going to DO anything about global warming, they will have to 1) integrate the issue into all daily/weekly reporting, so that a story on downtown high-rise development talks about it in terms of the Kyoto Protocol, say, and a story on a new highway discusses it in terms of carbon and greenhouse gases, and 2) they will have to start telling the more urgent story of what individuals and, more importantly, society can do about global warming. The last point is the hardest for a media conditioned to dishing out terror and gloom as their bread and butter.

The latter point is what we're about here at GreenForGood. Because the more you think about what you can do on a daily basis, the easier it is for you to change. Fear is not enough.

— Paul Andrews, GreenForGood

Summary of TIME piece

Full TIME article

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