The AP stretches quite a bit to imply the shrinking of the shallow Aral Sea was due to climate change. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the incoming rivers to agriculture and the Sea immediately began shrinking.
How not to do climate communications.
The spin began with “deadly”, “life threatening”, “catastrophic” speculation, then followed that afterwards with “It wasn’t that bad”, and stories saying the tropical storm was 100% caused by the Global Boiling ClimateCrisis, and then a few adding historical context of past tropical storms and even a hurricane.
Should climate change be re-branded as a public health issue?
In July, the national news reported about smoke from Canada wild fires impacting east coast cities. Why the AQI was over 100! Oh my! In the past few days, the AQI at my town has exceeded 500. It’s not even worth a news story in my state, outside the County.
We are all going to die, Really Soon Now. Your dose of The Daily Doomer.
When the air temperature is hot, but not unusually hot, switch to reporting on the summertime ground surface temperature (80C/180F) – it’s a bigger and scarier number than the air temperature so go for it! But it, alas, it is actually a normal summertime land surface temperature and has been for years and years. But the Doomers at parody news site The Guardian know that their readers don’t know that.
Rather than stick with facts, logic and reasoned arguments, the media has gone full yellow journalism, using exaggeration and hyperbole to sell eyeballs to advertisers. They’ve dived so far into nonsense territory as to render their climate reporting pointless, resulting in their message being tuned out.
Attribution studies attempt to connect individual weather events to climate change. But the ability to do that is so limited that the results are not meaningful. Repeated exaggeration and misreporting leads to skepticism – and serves no useful purpose.
The Guardian invents a new term for climate topics: climate-wrecking emissions. They’ve invented many new terms that were never used by scientists or policy makers. Rather than report the news and let the facts speak for themselves, and let you think for yourself, The Guardian views its role and telling you what to think. See inside for a link to more examples of media invented terminology.