Sunny Hostin of “The View” had a theory about Monday’s solar eclipse, which coincided with a rare East Coast earthquake. “Either climate change exists, or something is really going on,” she told her co-hosts, who tried multiple times to jump in and stop her from progressing down that perilously illogical path.
Not all of the media’s coverage of climate change is this blatantly stupid. But it does seem to be almost entirely based around a single hysterical narrative. Yes — the climate is changing, and humans are contributing to that change. But there’s so much we don’t know, and yet the mainstream coverage we see is positioned with such certainty, and such condescension.
That’s not by accident. Dr. Ryan Maue is a meteorologist who previously worked as the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He now runs a popular Substack on weather and climate called Weather Trader. He is critical of the climate alarmism or “doomerism” he sees in the wider press, which he says mischaracterizes the state of the problem and paints with a broad brush about solutions.
“The corporate media is 100 percent invested in rabid decarbonization,” he told me. “Rapid decarbonization at any cost, and there’s no consideration of tradeoffs or how it affects geopolitics, national security, economics. It’s almost like a religious goal. If you are not in furtherance of that goal, wind and solar, not talking about nuclear or all of the above, then you’re considered a ‘denier’ or a ‘delayer,’ pushing ‘disinformation.’”
The reasons for this are plentiful. There are NGOs and philanthropies that contribute to the media financially and press shops that “launder into the public discourse” their preferred talking points. There’s also the simple fact that most journalists don’t have the necessary background or expertise to ask the critical questions, and are disincentivized from going against the consensus.
“If they deviate from the script, they’re going to have a mob descend on them, and get called out,” Maue told me.
Climate change is an important issue in our world. A curious, interested institutional media could pursue rich and varying perspectives on the topic, giving the audience a deep look at the matter. What are the pros and cons of nuclear? How about wind and solar? But instead, what we have is near universal, bland sameness — all aimed in the alarmism direction.
“The same stories are reported across various media outlets, with the same sources, repeated ad nauseum, with very little variety, very little deep thought into the policy implications,” Maue said.
We saw a great example of painfully smug climate coverage late last month, when the BBC’s Stephen Sackur sat down with Dr. Irfaan Ali, the president of Guyana, in an interview that went viral. The BBC host pressed the South American leader about the “oil and gas” drilling that was about to take place in the country, and the “billions” of carbon emissions that would be released as a result.
Ali stopped him in his tracks, pointing to the fact that the forest in Guyana that has been preserved “is the size of England and Scotland combined.”
“We have kept this forest alive that stores 19.5 gigatons of carbon, that you enjoy, that the world enjoys, that you don’t pay us for,” he said.
And he’s right — while there has been rapid deforestation in the Amazon, Guyana is a rare outlier.
Maue pointed out that this was an “extremely hypocritical” and “immoral” exchange. The Western world needs to meet the “carbon budget” that was agreed upon at the Paris Climate Accords. But the budget is spoken for already by the Western world alone. “They cannot afford for countries like Guyana or Kenya or developing nations to start developing fossil fuels. It would blow the carbon budget,” Maue told me, noting the implication was “neo-colonialist.”
“He doesn’t know that what he’s saying is extremely condescending to the vast majority of the world,” Maue said. “That’s how the climate movement speaks down to the entire world.”
This combination of ignorance and arrogance often presents itself in the U.S. media climate coverage about how you, the everyday American, can “do your part.” You get New York Times headlines urging you to “Save the Planet, Put Down that Hamburger” or CNN telling you to replace your old thermostat and lightbulbs.
“It’s completely inconsequential — it’s just virtue signaling,” Maue told me. “But it’s a way to form a consensus on the issues. Climate action requires forming a consensus in order to achieve a goal.” The goal is to stay in “crisis mode,” so that “every time there’s a weather event, they have to connect it to climate change, to keep the fear factor up.”
Because if we really wanted the media to shift the focus to the issues that matter when it comes to the climate, we’d have a whole lot more coverage of China. China’s global emissions stands around 27 percent, according to estimates — more than the entire developed world combined. (The U.S. comes in second place, at 11 percent). But we get far more coverage of hamburger consumption in America than what’s happening in Asia.
“There hasn’t been a discussion about China’s carbon footprint mainly because the Western world outsourced all its industry to China, and rely upon China for so many things,” Maue told me. “Our emissions are going down, and China is going up, because we’re offshoring our industry, Europe is offshoring their industry, to them.”
That overreliance on China leads to other complications for America. Just this week, the U.S. and the E.U. are pushing China to pay up as part of the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, which they are exempt from. China has all the leverage. “China is able to use enormous climate emissions as a bargaining chip,” said Maue.
Americans are told over and over by the mainstream press that climate change is a crisis, and yet there has been little effort to make the case through nuanced, precise journalism. We have patronizing hysteria in place of fact-based, contextualized coverage.
A CNN article published late last year documented a “surprising phenomenon” that scientists discovered in the Himalayas. The scientists detailed how warmer temperatures were creating more cold wind, thus offsetting the effect of an overall rising temperature and slowing the effects of climate change. It was a brief, fleeting moment of the media highlighting a fascinating discovery that could have major ramifications. And then it was gone.
There’s so much we still don’t know. Yet our media conveys this important topic with such unyielding confidence, while also maintaining a posture of unscientific laziness — all with a heaping dose of pomposity.
If climate change was really as big a deal as the press tells us, shouldn’t they take it a bit more seriously?
Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.