Collide-a-scape

He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times.

Guess who?

So it’s not surprising that lots of people got peeved with the way the BEST story played out in the media. People who feel strongly about climate issues are invariably disappointed with climate media coverage.

Hence the perpetual effort to shape the climate narrative. It was perceived by some that Muller overplayed the BEST results and that a dominant narrative flowed from that. Roger Pielke Sr. and Judith Curry have sought to dent that storyline.  My analysis of their efforts can be read over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.

Last week, the New York Times put out a special section on energy that didn’t pass muster with Joe Romm. He declared:

I think it is safe to cancel your subscriptions to the one-time paper of record. While there are 1 or 2 reporters at the New York Times who get climate and energy, it’s obvious that most don’t and, more importantly, the editorial staff simply don’t know what they’re doing.

This is typical hyperbole from Romm that largely gets ignored by climate media watchers. But this particular rant caught Charlie Petit’s eye at the Tracker. As he noted, Romm was upset

because the section is full of news on fossil fuel industry expansion but not enough, not much at all actually, on why it’d be much better to look forward to a future with no fossils fuels at all and a stabilized atmospheric concentration of CO2.

Petit then says something that gives a clue as to why Romm gets a free pass for his heavy-handed attacks on journalists:

Romm’s energy sensibilities are on the side of the angels. We got an emergency unfolding and governments and their populaces are, most of them, pulling pillows over their heads so they can sleep.

But then Petit’s better journalistic angel takes over (my emphasis):

Would the  [Times] section have been better to have run a significant feature on the consequences to the planet if the growth curves of fossil fuel use implied by what industry and policy experts expect were to occur (not the same as what’s best)? Sure, why not. It is gut-wrenching to read, amid a few pieces on the struggles of the clean-energy business, how bullish analysts are on petroleum and natural gas. But cancel the paper? Romm seems to be temperamentally skating close to the mentality of police state censors: as in China when nothing in the news about policy matters could be printed without reference to Mao, as in the Soviet Union when it was ditto for Stalin (or, today, to the Dear Leader or whatever they call the monomaniac in charge of N. Korea). Not that I’d equate, at all, the edifice of climate science with the intellectual bankruptcies of various dictators. But to demand only one angle on news stories, an angle that has been given extensive coverage and is therefore not news anymore except when things come along to advance the ball, is to be delusional about that a news medium’s job is.

It’s not often that Romm gets called out by media watchdogs for his rhetorical excesses, so this one time was worth noting.

Many climate skeptics perturbed about the BEST results are complaining that the media has gleefully hyped the story. There is certainly evidence of widespread coverage in newspapers and the blogosphere.

But the story has been virtually ignored by cable TV and mainstream broadcast outlets. Last night, Jon Stewart had some fun comparing that dearth with all the play given a certain climate news event two years ago.

This story in yesterday’s NYT, titled “What happened to global warming?” has stirred some discussion over why a sizable bloc of Americans aren’t taking climate change seriously. Brad Plumer in the Washington Post says it’s a “great piece,” while Joe Romm grits his teeth at what he considers a big omission.

I offer my take on the premise of the NYT story at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.

“Is climate fatigue setting in?” I ask. Let me know over there what you think.

In recent years, some influential writers have been making noises about the staleness of the green movement. At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I take stock of an emergent narrative that challenges foundational environmentalist precepts.

Will it take hold? Let me know what you think over there.

If Ken Burns lives long enough, he should be able to do a documentary on what life was like before cable TV and the Internet. Meanwhile, here’s what he thinks:

Burns says the proliferation of cheap production and distribution technologies for creative expression is a cause for optimisim but worries about audience fragmentation. “When I grew up, there were four or five channels and people basically shared a common canon of knowledge….Now people can seek their own self-satisfying sources of knowledge [which] is hugely dangerous.”

As a famous news anchor used to say, “And that’s the way it is…”

At the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I survey the landscape beyond mind-deadening gloom and doom.

A media scholar surveys an emerging science journalism trend:

The dominant way of thinking about the role of science journalists historically was to view them as translators, or transmitters, of information. Now, however, a powerful metaphor for understanding their work as science critics is to see them as cartographers and guides, mapping scientific knowledge for readers, showing them paths through vast amounts of information, evaluating and pointing out the most important stops along the way.

The question is, can they they do a better job than your average New York City double-decker bus tour guide? That all depends on who your guide is.

Do your web habits and political leanings make for an online diet that reinforce your biases? Probably not, if you’re a regular reader of this blog.

Well, actually, such intellectual cocooning is something we all need to watch out for, as I discuss in my latest post for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. If you’re inclined, please tell me over there how you avoid this pitfall.