Black Triangle

The worst British newspaper in the UK for the reporting of science, after the Daily Mail and Daily “Diana” Express, is The Independent. When MMR vaccine was still a controversy, it was publishing articles about mothers who preferred homeopathy to vaccines and editorials suggesting a government cover-up and conspiracy to get Dr Andrew Wakefield. It always drew back from the more open lunacy over MMR vaccine that the Daily Mail still occasionally glories in, but it was never as level-headed as The Guardian or The Times.

Now, every other day The Independent seems to lead with a story about the end of the world because of climate change, mimicking the right-wing religious fundamentalists dreams of the end of days that The Independent froths about. On climate change they have become the polar opposite of the climate-change skeptical Daily Mail.

A review by the Institute for Public Policy Research has looked at media portrayal of the climate change debate, they are unimpressed:

Coverage breaks down, they concluded, into several distinct areas, including:

• Alarmism, characterised by images and words of catastrophe
• Settlerdom, in which “common sense” is used to argue against the scientific consensus
• Rhetorical scepticism, which argues the science is bad and the dangers hyped
• Techno-optimism, the argument that technology can solve the problem

Publications said often to take a “sceptical” line included the Daily Mail and Sunday Telegraph.

Into the “alarmist” camp the authors put articles published in newspapers such as the Independent, Financial Times and Sunday Times, as well as statements from environmental groups, academics including James Lovelock and Lord May, and some government programmes.

“It is appropriate to call [what some of these groups publish] ‘climate porn’, because on some level it is like a disaster movie,” Mr Retallack told the BBC News website.

This sort of thing does not help the development of good government policies. It creates a climate, excuse pun, in which politicians seek short-term ill-thought out solutions. The environmental lobby is also not helping matters. Mike Hume the Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has already been denounced for not being enough of a disaster-fanatic:

It seems that mere “climate change” was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be “catastrophic” to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term – and its bedfellow qualifiers “chaotic”, “irreversible”, “rapid” – has altered the public discourse around climate change.

This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as “climate change is worse than we thought”, that we are approaching “irreversible tipping in the Earth’s climate”, and that we are “at the point of no return”.

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.