I came across this clip from NBC news last week which is probably one of the most one-sided reports on climate change causing extreme weather I've seen in recent weeks. It doesn't even try to balance the argument, or even suggest "on the other hand", which is surprising for a major US news network. It devotes a full 2 and a half minutes to suggesting that extreme weather events will become more likely and are a result of climate change. The video concludes by saying "today, no one can deny that extreme weather is here to stay"!
After doing a bit of digging in some journal archives, I came across this interesting paper. It looks at how extreme weather event coverage on US national television has changed over the past 50 years, and assesses whether news coverage can be used almost as a proxy as to whether extreme events are becoming more discernible.
News archives between 1968 and 1996 were used to track records of heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and floods from ABC, CBS and NBC television networks. A control period was used in order to distinguish between 'climate science' and 'global warming' frenzies that hit news and media in the late 80s. Some of the key findings are displayed on the graphs below:
Annual coverage of heat waves on the network news.
Annual coverage of floods on the network news.
Annual coverage of hurricanes on the network news.
The results show a dramatic increase in the coverage of floods and hurricanes since the 1980s, however, it must be noted that the different types of extreme events do not receive equal coverage: for example, annual peaks for droughts contain about twice as many stories as the peaks for heat waves.
One of the key findings that the data revealed is that surprisingly there is no association between coverage of climate change and the overall coverage of extreme events. They also discovered that whilst total news coverage of extreme events in the US increases dramatically, coverage devoted to extreme events in other countries remains relatively constant (see image below).
Index of extreme weather coverage on the network news by all events and foreign events.
There are a variety of limitations with using a study such as this to show extreme events are linked to anthropogenic change. Media is always subjective and some news stories can be made at the expense of others. Some stories can often dominate the news, whilst others get left behind. Changes in technology, forecasting and the ability to track extreme weather events has also come a long way in the last 50 years and the ability to cover events and show footage will impact whether an event is covered.
Despite not a lot of concrete evidence coming out of reports such as these, it is pleasing that researchers are trying new and innovative ways of collating evidence for climate change.
This paper you read can be rather controversial in that it can be picked up by climate sceptics to be shown as proof that AGW is just hype (most of them are very good at isolating facts to be presented as a worldwide phenomenon). I feel that it inherently leads people to conclude that the majority of the extreme weather events reported in the US have been exaggerated and that these reports are just the networks wanting to hop on board the hottest topic to get more viewers.
ReplyDeletePerhaps a better control would be to analyse extreme weather TV reporting in other countries like Britian, Japan, France etc and to plot US against these other countries. It may help us to understand better if these US networks are over-reporting weather events or not.
Hi Wei,
ReplyDeleteYou are right about news channels - they want to show news stories that people are going to want to watch, and will inherently always result in biases. The paper however, does go about trying to counter the affects of 'natural hype' and biases. I suggest you look at the results section in more detail (p. 137-138)where it explains how political developments are used to establish intervals in which anthropogenic global warming is in 'hype' in the public domain, and when it becomes a political agenda.
But as I said in my above posts, there are huge limitations with this type of study. I wouldn't like to use it as concrete evidence for climate change causing extreme weather events, but is an interesting paper none the less.
Carrying out the study in other countries is a good idea and seeing comparisons would be interesting. However, you are still going to have to deal with biases and general news hype.