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Photo courtesy Sara Shipley Hiles |
Note: This post is by Sara Shipley Hiles, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Missouri. She is also a freelance journalist and longtime environmental reporter and member of the Society of Environmental Journalists. While at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she wrote a series of stories about extensive development of floodplains that were underwater in the Great Flood of 1993. Her academic research looks at media coverage of climate change.
While we’re all making New Year’s resolutions about eating
less and exercising more, let me suggest something more important we can add to
our collective to-do list for 2013. This one’s big. It will take courage. It
will take political will and compromise. It will take personal commitment.
I’m not talking about gun control, or even the fiscal cliff.
I’m talking about facing the
climate cliff. Climate change is the
biggest long-term threat facing our economy and our society, yet we find plenty
of ways to avoid facing it, despite mounting evidence.
2012 was the hottest year on record for Missouri and 18
other states, and the continental United States as a whole, according to a
recent report from the National
Climatic Data Center. The ninth straight year of record-breaking heat was
also an historic year for extreme weather, from severe drought to super-storm
Sandy.
Media Matters, a
progressive media research center, found that
climate
change coverage on network TV remained low last year, despite the weather
extremes. The report singled out Sunday shows for spending just 8 minutes on
climate change, down from more than an hour in 2009, and not quoting a single
scientist on climate change in four years.
I don’t blame my fellow environmental journalists, many of
whom have fallen victim to newsroom cuts. We are pushing hard to cover what we
see as the
Story
of the Century. And some publications have actually increased climate
coverage, but even they can fall prey to industry pressures.
It’s not just about saving polar bears, as some
cynics would say. Just last year alone, The United States saw 11
weather-related disasters pass the $1-billion cost mark. While scientists are
loath to attribute individual events to climate change, a warming world tilts
the system toward chaos – very expensive chaos. (For a helpful analogy, see the
clever
video explaining how greenhouse gases are the “steroids” of weather, much
like steroids in baseball.)
The
World
Bank released a report warning that the world must take steps to avoid
warming 4 degrees, as is predicted by the end of the century without radical
policy change. The report threatened devastating consequences, including the
inundation of coastal cities, higher rates of starvation, increased water
scarcity and more high-intensity tropical storms.
If these events come to pass, we will be very sorry we didn’t address climate change when we had the chance.
So let’s do something that’s good for us this year. Eat more
kale, and don’t be afraid to talk about climate change.
Labels: climate, climate change, climate cliff, media, New York Times, news, Sara Shipley Hiles