The climate emergency is exploding in various parts of the world this week,

but climate silence inexcusably continues to rein in much of the United States
media.

Hurricane Ida has left more than a million people in Louisiana without
running water, electricity or air conditioning amid a heat index topping 100F.
The Caldor fire destroyed hundreds of houses and forced mass evacuations
around Lake Tahoe in California. Abroad, vast swaths of Siberia were ablaze
while drought-parched Madagascar suffered what a United Nations official
called the first famine caused entirely by climate change.

Painstaking scientific research has established that the climate crisis escalates
these kinds of extreme weather. In other words, people can now watch the
emergency unfold in real time on their TV and cellphone screens.

The vast majority of news coverage instead chose climate silence

The problem is that most viewers won’t make that connection, because most
stories don’t contain the words “climate change”. Six of the biggest
commercial TV networks in the US – ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and MSNBC
– ran 774 stories about Ida from 27 to 30 August, an analysis by the watchdog
group Media Matters found. Only 34 of those stories, barely 4%, mentioned
climate change.

My own survey of the coverage confirmed the trend. Viewers were shown
powerful images – roofs torn off, block after block of houses submerged in
floodwaters, first responders pulling weeping victims to safety. They heard
plenty of numbers: Ida was a category 4 hurricane with wind speeds of 172
miles an hour and storm surges of 7ft to 11ft. But almost never were they told
what was behind all this destruction.

It’s not as if making the climate connection is scientifically controversial or

journalistically difficult, as a handful of exemplary stories demonstrated.

On NPR, the reporter Rebecca Hersher said that “climate change is basically
super-charging this storm … As the Earth gets hotter because of climate
change, the water on the surface of the ocean – it also gets hotter. So there’s
more energy for storms like Ida to get really big and really powerful.”
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On CBS This Morning, atop a graphic reading “Massive, fast-growing storms

like Ida highlight climate crisis”, the meteorologist Jeff Berardelli pointed out
that a hotter planet also means “you evaporate more moisture, the ground gets
drier – we’re having the worst drought in 1,200 years in the west.”

In the Washington Post, the reporter Sarah Kaplan called Ida a “poster child
for a climate change-driven disaster” and quoted the hurricane specialist
Kerry Emmanuel of MIT saying: “This is exactly the kind of thing we’re going
to have to get used to as the planet warms.”

The vast majority of news coverage instead chose climate silence.

This amounts to nothing less than media malpractice. Scientifically accurate

reporting would not only link this extreme weather to the climate crisis, it
would note that climate change is caused primarily by burning oil, gas and
coal. ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies have been lying for 40 years
about their products causing dangerous climate change. Responsible
journalism should tell the truth about what’s driving these terrible storms,
fires and famine.
Broadcast television’s failure is especially egregious in that it’s still the leading
news source for most people. (About 45% of Americans get most of their news
from television, while 18% rely primarily on social media, according to the
Pew Research Center.) And it repeats the mistake TV news made while
covering the extreme weather events of 2020. In the face of unprecedented
fires in Australia and California (remember the orange skies over San
Francisco?) and kindred calamities, only 0.4% of commercial TV stories
mentioned the climate crisis, Media Matters found.

This kind of journalism leaves the public not just uninformed but misinformed.
It gives the impression that these storms and fires are not only terrible (which,
of course, is true) but also – to use a phrase that climate breakdown has made
obsolete – they’re simply “natural” disasters.

They are not. Of course, hurricanes and wildfires were happening long before
human-caused climate change emerged. The climate crisis, however, makes
them significantly worse. As a Weather Channel segment on Ida explained, it’s
not that “climate change caused the storm, but … that a warming world made
Hurricane Ida more powerful”.

What’s odd is that plenty of journalists at big US news outlets know the
climate crisis is an important story. And climate coverage had been improving.
During the heatwave that scorched the Pacific Northwest in July, 38% of
broadcast and cable news segments made the climate connection, Media
Matters reported, as did about 30% of this summer’s wildfires coverage. So
newsrooms have the ability to make the point when they choose to.

In two months, world leaders will gather in Glasgow for one of the most
important diplomatic meetings in history. The Cop26 summit will go a long
way toward deciding whether humanity preserves a livable climate on this
planet. From now to the summit and beyond, journalism has got to do better.

This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of

news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.

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