Steering the Climate Change Coverage By Insider Staff ****Read the comments from Quadrant
All the news that’s fit to ignore
Problems always loom larger when close at hand, so there is perverse reassurance to be drawn from the fact that The Age, SMH and ABC have not been alone in surrendering their news and opinion pages to ideologues and the moral arrogance of green-left activism. On the other side of the world it seems The New York Times, which fancies itself as a journal of record, is every bit as prey to close-minded arrogance as its antipodean counterparts.
Here is the Times latest environmental editor, Adam Bryant, explaining that it will be a long time between drinks before he allows climate sceptics to make their case in any story that he oversees:
“Claims that the entire field of climate science is some kind of giant hoax do not hold water, and we have made a conscious decision that we are not going to take that point of view seriously.”
That doesn’t mean he is opposed to debates of the approved, science-is-settled variety:
“…there is a huge amount of legitimate debate and uncertainty within mainstream science. Scientists are pretty open about not being sure how bad things will get, or how quickly.”
That would seem a case of dumb arrogance, rather than blinkered bias, if not for Timesman Bryant’s cited example of what, exactly, represents respectable, solid, unimpeachable science: Australia’s very own catastropharian David Karoly!
If Bryant was on the ball as a reporter, rather than a bawler of warmist refrains in the climate-catastrophe chorus, he might have come across the odd mention of Karoly-style settled science — settled, that is, in that it his paper claiming Australia has never been hotter in the past 1000 years had to be withdrawn and has since sunk without trace, along with the $300,000 of taxpayer money that paid for it.
Bryant’s views on the way, ahem, serious journalism must report warmism and other topics can be read via the link below.
Few topics fuel as much reader attention as climate change. Adam Bryant recently became editor of The Times’s expanded team covering the environment. We asked him how he is approaching the position.
How did this job come about for you?
When I met with Dean Baquet, our executive editor, in August, he said he wanted to beef up The Times’s coverage of climate change and the environment, and asked me if I would be interested in overseeing an expanded team of reporters. I had just come off a long project – I was part of the team that worked on the Innovation Report – and I jumped at the opportunity.
It’s a fascinating and important topic, full of nuance and complexity (example here), and I get to work with an amazing group of reporters. It’s also a subject that touches on so many different aspects – science, politics, policy, population growth, agriculture, history. The list goes on and on.
It is a sprawling topic. What is your strategy for covering it?
There’s no simple playbook, but here are a few thoughts. Part of The Times’s role is to separate the signal from the noise. There are a lot of reports and papers and studies published every day, and Times readers rely on us to choose carefully which ones we’re going to cover.
We also want to cover this story on all fronts – including threats, causes and potential solutions. We want to focus on what’s happening now (examples here and here), as well as what may happen in the future (examples here and here). I also want to make sure we give readers guidance about the relative importance and impact of different causes and potential solutions – for example, how do emissions from coal plants compare to tailpipe emissions from cars?
One challenge about the coverage is that many people may have a sense that the story line is somewhat fixed – they believe climate change is a problem, or perhaps they don’t. So we’ll look for opportunities to connect dots in new ways, or frame stories based on “good dumb questions,” as journalists like to call them.
Is the equivalency issue dead? To what extent should we feel obligated to include the views of climate change skeptics?
Claims that the entire field of climate science is some kind of giant hoax do not hold water, and we have made a conscious decision that we are not going to take that point of view seriously. At the same time, there is a huge amount of legitimate debate and uncertainty within mainstream science. Scientists are pretty open about not being sure how bad things will get, or how quickly. These are the valid scientific issues and uncertainties that we want to cover.
A recent front-page piece by Justin Gillis — Scientists Trace Extreme Heat in Australia to Climate Change – provides a good example of providing informed second opinions on a topic. In his piece, Justin quoted an expert who has often been skeptical of claimed links between weather events and global warming in the past. But in this new study we were reporting on, he said the evidence was strong. That insight is more useful to readers than quoting someone who believes the entire field of study is built on a pillar of sand.
There’s so much bad news and warnings that have been reported in recent years. How do you keep a certain numbness from setting in on the part of readers?
The grim news can be overwhelming – droughts, fires, flooding, deforestation, etc. But there is a lot happening around the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. Germany is on track to get close to 30 percent of its energy from renewables this year, for example, as we reported in a recent front-page article. The cost of wind and solar energy is dropping fast around the world.
You’ve worked as an editor on the national desk and in features, but you’ve spent most of your career as a reporter and editor covering business. Do you have a background in science?
I don’t have a background in science, though I’ve always been curious about how our world is changing, the forces at work, how big decisions are made, and the people who make them (in that regard, I’ll be continuing with my Corner Office interviews in the Sunday Business section, though I’ve dropped the Friday installment to concentrate on my new job). I’m going to have a steep learning curve, but many of the reporters on my team have breathtakingly deep knowledge on a range of subjects. My job as editor will be to help choose the topics that are most important, then to make sure the stories are told in a clear, understandable, watertight and compelling way.
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