[Vision2020] Institute for Public Accuracy: "Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees"

[Ted Moffett]

Institute for Public Accuracy
980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa at accuracy.org
___________________________________________________

        Tuesday, July 3, 2012

        Extreme Weather and Global Warming: "Media Miss the Forest for the
Burning Trees"

NEIL deMAUSE, neil at demause.net, http://twitter.com/#!/neildemause
    Neil deMause is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written extensively
about climate change coverage for FAIR's magazine Extra! -- including the
article "The Fires This Time: In coverage of extreme weather, media
downplay climate change." http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4366

    He said today: "Despite overwhelming evidence that climate change is
causing dramatic changes in weather patterns -- from increasingly deadly
heat waves and wildfires to hurricanes and tornadoes -- media coverage has
bent over backwards to avoid making the connection between extreme weather
events and the warming climate. Instead, reporters have largely hidden
behind the truism that there's no way to say that any given event was
caused by climate change. Yes, in the same way that it's hard to show that
any given person wouldn't have gotten cancer without smoking cigarettes --
but that doesn't mean that journalists should avoid reporting that smoking
kills."

JOE ROMM, jromm at americanprogress.org,
http://ClimateProgress.org<http://climateprogress.org/>
    Romm is a senior fellow at American Progress, edits Climate Progress
and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He recently wrote the piece "Hell
And High Water Strikes, Media Miss the Forest for the Burning Trees."
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/27/507119/hell-and-high-water-strikes-media-miss-the-forest-for-the-burning-trees

    Romm said today: "It is a basic conclusion of climate science that as
the average temperature gets warmer, heat waves -- which are extremes on
top of the average -- will get more intense. For the same reason, heat
waves will last longer and cover a larger region. Recent research further
links Arctic warming, and especially the loss of Arctic ice, to more
extreme, prolonged weather events 'such as drought, flooding, cold spells
and heat waves.'

    "Since droughts are made more intense by higher temperatures, which dry
out the soil, and by earlier snowmelt, more intense droughts have long been
predicted to occur as the planet warms. Since wildfires are worsened by
drought and heat waves and earlier snowmelt, longer wildfire seasons and
more intense firestorms has been another basic prediction.

    "We also know that as we warm the oceans, we end up with more water
vapor in the atmosphere -- 4 percent more than was in the atmosphere just a
few decades ago. That is why another basic prediction of climate science
has been more intense deluges and floods.

    "Scientists have already begun to document stronger heatwaves,
worsening drought, longer widlfire seasons, and more intense downpours.
Global warming has 'juiced' the climate, as if it were on steroids. The
question is not whether you can blame a specific weather event on global
warming. As Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis
Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research told the New York
Times, 'It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is
due to global warming, or is it natural variability. Nowadays, there’s
always an element of both.'"

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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