The year’s not over, but the United States has already suffered a record 24 weather disasters that have cost at least $1 billion in damage. When counting billion-dollar disasters, there was an average of 8.1 of them between 1980 and 2022. And there was an average of 18 such billion-dollar disasters between 2018 and 2022. This year there’s been hail and out-of-season tornadoes in the middle of the country, floods and cold snaps in the Northeast, Hurricane Idalia in Florida and deadly wildfires in Maui. And, as one climate expert told The Associated Press, many of these events were “very unusual and in some cases unprecedented.”
The year’s not over, but the United States has already suffered a record 24 weather disasters that have cost at least $1 billion in damage
According to a September Associated Press-NORC poll, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say they’ve experienced extreme heat in the last five years has shot up to 74%, and nearly 9 in 10 people in the U.S. say they’ve gone through at least one extreme weather event within the last five years.
W. Craig Fugate, who led the Federal Emergency Management Agecy during President Barack Obama’s administration, said last month that the climate has already changed so much that “neither the built environment nor the response systems are keeping up with the change.”
None of this has yet snapped us into a national commitment to halt the source of climate change. The United States remains the world’s biggest producer and consumer of oil, and, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Rick Spinrad, global greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continues “to rise at an alarming rate.”
A lack of understanding among Americans isn’t the issue. According to a spring report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, clear majorities believe that climate change is affecting extreme heat, rising sea levels, wildfires, droughts, flooding, water shortages, hurricanes, air pollution, tornadoes and reduced snowpack. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland Climate poll shows that clear majorities say they’d be comfortable living near fields of solar panels or wind turbines. And despite the historical dominance of automobiles in U.S. culture, clear majorities say they’d be comfortable with more bike lanes on roads and more bus service.
The issue is that majority sentiment is constantly undercut by minority opinion. And undercut by a party that represents a minority of the American people.
That September AP-NORC poll found that only 48% of Republicans think climate change contributes to extreme weather, compared to 93% of Democrats. The Washington Post found similar partisan divides. There are racial divides, too. While between 65% and 70 % of Hispanic Americans, African Americans and Asian Americans see climate change as a “critical threat” to the vital interests of the United States (hugely because they disproportionately breathe in fossil fuel pollution), only 47% of white Americans feel the same, according to a poll this year by the Chicago Council on global Affairs and New America.
It would be easy here to blame America’s inaction on loud right-wing climate deniers in Congress, who are often beholden to the lobbying of the fossil fuel industry. But the media deserve blame, too. As much as clear majorities of Americans know what’s happening and support renewable energy, there likely would be even larger majorities clamoring for change if news outlets didn’t give disproportionate attention to skeptics with no scientific data backing their skepticism. The same newsrooms also tend to focus on studies that have the effect of lowering the public’s urgency to deal with climate change.
For instance, in a study published this spring in the journal Global Environmental Change about media practices worldwide, Swiss researchers found an over-reporting of large-scale and end-of-the-century consequences for climate change create both an emotional and psychological distance by keeping climate change in the public mind “far away in space and sometime into the future.”
Conversely, the study found “that the local consequences of climate change, which could make feel people more concerned. . . are virtually absent in the media.” It also said that coverage that makes it seem that climate solutions can come only through “national and international policies,” may result in inaction “because the task ahead appears overwhelming to a single individual.”
A 2019 study found that the visibility of climate change “contrarians” was 49% higher than the visibility of climate change scientists across all media.
Then there’s the issue of false equivalency. In a 2019 study in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of California Merced found that the visibility of climate change “contrarians” was 49% higher than the visibility of climate change scientists across all media and “remarkably on par” in the mainstream media.
“It’s not just false balance; the numbers show that the media are ‘balancing’ experts — who represent the overwhelming majority of reputable scientists — with the views of a relative handful of non-experts,” study co-author LeRoy Westerling said. “Most of the contrarians are not scientists, and the ones who are, have very thin credentials. They are not in the same league with top scientists. They aren’t even in the league of the average career climate scientist.”
On top of that, a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today were twice as likely to give media coverage to news releases opposing climate action than to news releases urging action. Study author Rachel Wetts of Brown University found “no indication that this disproportionate coverage of messages opposing climate action has declined or reversed since the mid-2000s.”
Wetts said the findings are significant because that disproportionate coverage can “lead to a dampening of political will to act on climate.”
There is hope, though. In lab experiments published last year in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, researchers from UCLA and Northwestern found that the effect of arguments by climate contrarians can be offset if media coverage contains a “weight-of-evidence” statement pointing out broad scientific consensus that there is human-caused climate change.
“Climate change is a great case study of the false balance problem, because the scientific consensus is nearly unanimous,” said study co-author David Rapp, a Northwestern psychology professor. “If 99 doctors said you needed surgery to save your life, but one disagreed, chances are you’d listen to the 99. But we often see one climate scientist pitted against one climate denier or down player, as if it’s a 50-50 split.”
It's time for the media to stop misleading the public under the guise of “balanced” coverage.
After another year of record-setting, climate-driven weather disasters, it's time for the media to stop misleading the public under the guise of “balanced” coverage. According to Media Matters, only 5% of major television network news segments covering this summer’s record heat wave in Texas mentioned climate change. And meteorologists brave enough to mention climate change have faced harassment and threats.
The future of Earth as we know it hangs in the balance, and more than 99% of peer-reviewed scientific literature agrees that human activities are causing climate change. All the evidence says we must drastically cut fossil fuels to save our lives. Thwarting that action are a band of industrial and political forces — infinitesimal as individuals but with a near infinite amount of resources — spreading disinformation and influencing inaction.
ExxonMobil is the poster child of this problem. As the journal Science reminded readers this year, its scientists began predicting more than 40 years ago, with the accuracy of climate scientists, that the burning of its fossil fuel products could have “dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.” The public never knew that as the company sowed public doubt about the existence of climate change.
Newsrooms need to acknowledge the “weight-of-evidence” disparity and adjust their reporting accordingly. Forget balance. The scales of coverage, as it regards global warming, should be so unbalanced that the deniers are left high up in the air and exposed as having no foundation of science under their dangling feet.