Why won't anyone ask why?
Last week, millions of Coloradans experienced a heatwave unlike any theyd ever seen. The record-breaking event, exacerbated by climate change, was part of a larger stretch of unprecedented hot, dry weather in the American West. The extreme heat was covered extensively by Colorado journalists, who took a variety of angles on the story. They explored economic impacts, health risks, and meteorological firsts. Chase Woodruff, an environmental policy reporter for Colorado Newsline, decided to see for himself. For a few hours a day, he looked up as much Colorado-based coverage of the heatwave he could find, and logged in a spreadsheet whether it referenced climate change. Chase Woodruff @dcwoodruff docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d Chase Woodruff @dcwoodruff If youre a Colorado journalist covering this weeks dangerous, record-shattering heat wave, theres simply no excuse for you not to familiarize yourself with basic climate science and place the story within the vitally important context of man-made global warming. If youre a Colorado journalist covering this weeks dangerous, record-shattering heat wave, theres simply no excuse for you not to familiarize yourself with basic climate science and place the story within the vitally important context of man-made global warming. Chases final tally, which you can view in this Google spreadsheet, saw 149 local news stories written about the unprecedented hot temperatures, part of a larger heat wave that affected more than 50 million people across the U.S. last week. Only 6 of those stories mentioned climate change. Put another way, only 4 percent of Colorado journalists covering the dangerous extreme weather in their communities told readers why it was happening. The other 96 percent covered it as if it were an act of God. The systemic failure of news outlets to inform their readers about the climate crisis in real time is not new, nor exclusive to Colorado. During the deadly global heatwave of 2018, Media Matters analyzed 127 national cable news segments about it and found that only one explained its connection to climate change. National print and radio outlets did a bit better, but not much; NPR, for example, aired at least three stories in July 2018 mentioning the abnormal nature of extreme weather events across the country without explaining why. I posed this question to Chase in our interview, which Ill send exclusively to paid subscribers tomorrow. Im also in the process of sending e-mails to the reporters and editors of the Colorado coverage to ask them directly. Hopefully well get some bites. If we do get bites, though, I dont imagine theyll be much different than what Ive seen and heard before. I asked NPR science editor Geoff Brumfiel, for example, about his desks climate omissions back in 2018. He said the reasons were based on journalistic caution. Heres our exchange as I wrote it in The New Republic:  You dont just want to be throwing around, This is due to climate change, that is due to climate change. I suggested that journalists dont need to determine whether an event was caused by climate change to make a climate connectiona journalist could merely say climate change makes extreme events such as these more likely. Its an interesting question if there should be boilerplate language [in extreme weather stories], Brumfiel replied. But for now, he said, NPR reporters must interview climate scientists before referencing the phenomenon, which is often not possible with breaking news. Youre looking at the first-round reporting, he said, noting that general assignment reporters or regional reportersnot science reportersare usually the ones covering breaking weather events. We dont assume everything that happens is climate change, and you can make statements, but we take our reporting duties seriously.  Its possible NPRs policy of requiring reporters to interview climate scientists before making basic scientific statements has changed in the last three years. (Ill send Geoff a message and try to find out). But this over-abundance of journalistic caution is likely one reason why so many news outlets are still ignoring climate in extreme weather stories. And though noble in principle, its a wholly illegitimate excuse in 2021. Literally hundreds, if not thousands of peer-reviewed studies say deadly heat waves are becoming more frequent as the climate warms. The unprecedented temperatures sweeping the American West are consistent with those studies. You dont need a climate scientist to connect those dots. You just need a journalist. Other than scientific illiteracy, the only other reason I am personally aware of for not including climate information in an extreme weather story in 2021 is fear. I will never forget, when I started this career, the backlash I used to get for mentioning an extreme weather event was made more likely by climate change. Id be bombarded with accusations of insensitivity (Nows not the time for politics!) and mischaracterizations of what Id written (This girl says climate change caused the hurricane!). Their anger made me feel like I had done something really wrong. I never wanted to write a climate-focused weather story again. I understand now that those reactions were merely symptoms of the fossil fuel industrys decades-long climate denial campaigna campaign to make climate science too poisonous to touch. Youre saying fossil fuels cause suffering and death. The industry cannot afford to have that printed in every newspaper in America, even if it happens to be the truth. But journalism, as the saying goes, is about printing what someone else does not want printed. And right now, news outlets in Colorado are printing exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants. Theyre probably doing it elsewhere too; Chases analysis is merely a microcosm of that much larger problem. But unlike climate change, its not a problem that has to get worse before it gets better. We all wanted a hot girl summer, but this is going to be a hot world summer; potentially one of the worst weve seen. It will be that way because of climate change. Imagine if every journalist in America were unafraid to state that fact. And now for some related and relevant tweets  Catch of the Day:  If you liked yesterdays article and want to know more about the shady climate behavior of electric utilities, Fish recommends you read this book by Leah Stokes. 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