Media and climate change

The battle over climate change has played out publicly in the media. Skeptics, particularly among conservatives, charge the media with bias against questioning anthropogenic climate change. Liberals point out that there is a scientific consensus and consider the media irresponsible to portray the issue as subject to debate.

Background

Modern media climate coverage dates to the 1890s. In the late nineteenth century, The New York Times warned of a possible return to an ice age. That coverage continued until the 1920s and 1930s, when media outlets cautioned about a warming trend. The coverage again shifted in the 1950s to global cooling, which lasted in some form into the 1990s. The global warming focus, though, began in the 1960s and escalated with publication of Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance (1992). Since the release of Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the warming debate has become a politicized argument, in which media coverage is scrutinized as much as climate science.

Media Coverage History

As far back as February 24, 1895, The New York Times was warning of the return of an ice age. The paper pointed to scientific concerns about a second glacial period following increases in northern glaciers. Fear spread through the print media over the next three decades. On October 7, 1912, both The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times cited the worries of Cornell University professor Nathaniel Schmidt about a new ice age. Arctic expeditions added to media coverage and public concern about a cooling climate, but by the time The Atlantic was reporting on cooling in 1932, many other outlets had started reporting a warming trend.

The Post discussed a warming Earth in 1930. The New York Times told readers in 1933 that America was experiencing the longest warming spell since 1776. Both the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society and Monthly Weather Review printed articles about humankind having a role in making the planet warmer. Major news media continued coverage of warming into the 1950s, when the trend shifted again.

In 1954, Fortune magazine reported that the Earth was growing colder. Science News described cooling as a major threat in 1969 and again six years later. The 1975 magazine cover depicted a city in a snow globe, as the magazine ranked the threat of a new ice age as high as nuclear war for potentially harming human life.

The New York Times wrote about global warming in 1969, but there was still little coverage of the topic in the 1970s in major news media. Toward the end of the decade, global warming and the greenhouse effect began appearing in print more than a dozen times in the top newspapers. In the 1980s, that number increased to more than one thousand stories on global warming. The Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today all told readers of a looming threat from a warming Earth.

That trend continued through the 1990s. By the end of 1999, The New York Times alone had published more than sixteen hundred stories on global warming and The Post had published more than thirteen hundred. Throughout the decade, other outlets also devoted broadcast time or pages to the issue. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS), Newsweek, and others depicted global warming as an issue of national concern.

Climate reporting continued to gain momentum into the new millennium, but the coverage began to change significantly. More and more, the news stories were criticized for either including or excluding scientists who disputed some aspect of anthropogenic climate change. Reporting on the issue increased in virtually all major news outlets.

Gore and warming appeared everywhere from People magazine to Saturday Night Live when An Inconvenient Truth opened in theaters in 2006. The added attention focused the debate not just on the science but on whether a debate even existed. That trend continued, as television networks from the Cable News Network (CNN) to Fox News to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) focused their efforts on daily coverage as well as news specials about climate. More than two hundred stories on the issue appeared on the Big Three broadcast networks in just the second half of 2007. Into the third decade of the twenty-first century, media interest in climate change and the climate change debate increased exponentially. Print sources featuring climate change headlines and peer-reviewed journal articles were accompanied by reports from online new outlets and social media. The debate over global climate change, its existence as a problem, its causes, and its implications continued.

Spinning the Debate

The two primary sides of the global warming debate agree that the issue is spun by the media, but they do not agree in what way. Environmental groups and liberal media critics claim that the traditional view of journalist as neutral observer has muddled the debate. They embrace an argument often repeated by Gore that there is near-universal scientific consensus and that the debate is over. Conservatives, along with climate deniers, point to examples of activist journalism ignoring scientific disagreement. They complain that reporters hype weather stories as climate change and call for expensive global warming solutions without giving any time to the opposition.

Mainstream Media

News outlets are the primary source of information about climate. Newspapers have lost their dominance as the primary news source, but newspaper websites have gained in popularity at the same time. Thus, newspapers have joined television news and the Internet, including social media, as the major news media in the early twenty-first century.

Discussion of climate change became easy to find in major news outlets. It was featured repeatedly on the cover of Time magazine, on the front page of newspapers, and as the lead story of national network news broadcasts. In most cases, it was reported as an imminent crisis with potentially devastating results. Hurricanes, floods, drought, and a host of minor threats were linked in the press to global warming.

Skeptical scientists and public policy groups roundly criticized what they perceived as media bias in these stories. Journalists who covered the topic, from ABC’s Bill Blakemore to The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, were often criticized for bias in their reporting. Prominent media watchdog groups and individual bloggers analyzed reporting, while scientists would dissect scientific claims in major news stories.

Other critics attacked any journalist who disseminated stories about climate change skeptics. Beginning in 2009, an annual conference organized by the Heartland Institute has brought together skeptical scientists and public policy experts who raised questions about climate consensus. The event has been a metaphor for the debate. It receives little coverage, and what coverage it does receive is often critical. CNN, for example, compared those who were skeptical to flat-earthers after the world was discovered to be round. The fifteenth International Conference on Climate Change, organized by the Heartland Institute, took place in 2023.

Mainstream broadcast television news coverage of climate change remained prevalent until the administration of Donald Trump. Separate analyses by Media Matters and the University of Colorado at Boulder indicate that television and print news coverage of climate change dropped precipitously during and after the presidential campaign of 2016. However, on January 20, 2020, President Joe Biden signed papers to bring the United States once again into the Paris Agreement, an unprecedented framework for global action in the face of climate change. Climate change, and its related debates, once again became a major media topic in both mainstream and alternative media sources.

Alternative Media

The alternative media—including talk radio, social media, and nonmainstream websites—have had a field day with climate change. Bloggers focus much of their effort on monitoring the news media coverage of the climate. Numerous individuals and groups on the Left and the Right maintain media blogs, and much of their focus has been on environmental coverage. One of the most recognized of these, the Drudge Report, regularly links to climate stories. Whether the topic is snowfall during a global warming hearing in Washington or Gore’s own carbon footprint, Drudge and others have driven a significant news agenda. The biggest of such stories can cross over into the mainstream media. Al Gore's nonprofit group, The Climate Reality Project, regularly provides links to the most popular blog posts on climate change.

Think tanks, environmental groups, and politicians have all participated in the news media debate on climate change. The ability to link from one to another helped further blur the lines of traditional journalism, as advocacy organizations targeted the other side’s positions. The diverse voices also allowed readers and viewers to self-select the information they received. That caused ordinary information consumers to harden positions along ideological lines.

Talk radio also has a significant hand in the global warming debate. In 2008, much of private talk radio remained conservative. Criticism of Gore or climate science was commonplace. Often, talk radio would highlight a story made popular by bloggers such as Matt Drudge or would address a topic that, in turn, would drive the blogosphere. Liberal talk radio, including National Public Radio and Air America, took an opposite approach; environment and climate stories were prime topics of concern for hosts and listeners alike. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, podcasts about climate change became another avenue in alternative media to discuss climate change. Popular climate change podcasts included How to Save a Planet and Costing the Earth.

Entertainment Media

Film and television played a big role in the climate debate. With the rise of global warming as an issue in the 1980s, Turner Broadcasting responded with a cartoon called Captain Planet. The cartoon’s superheroes protected the Earth from evils such as pollution and global warming.

Several popular movies featuring global warming themes followed. The made-for-television movie The Fire Next Time aired in 1993. Kevin Costner’s 1995 disaster picture Waterworld depicted a world awash in a flood caused by warming. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) was one of the most controversial of these films. When it opened, the climate debate was in full force. The movie’s title was reminiscent of that of the antinuclear made-for-television film The Day After (1983), and it depicted a climate apocalypse brought on by global warming. In the film, the changing climate results in a rapid cooling of the Earth and the onset of a new ice age. The movie was criticized by conservatives for characterizations of a president and vice president similar to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It also showed Americans fleeing the freeze being stopped at the Mexican border as illegal immigrants.

Also in 2004, science-fiction thriller author Michael Crichton released a novel critical of the environmental movement. State of Fear portrayed murderous environmentalists altering the Earth’s climate to force humans into ecofriendly behavior. The novel also included extensive footnotes to raise objections to the idea of anthropogenic global warming. Crichton’s book was criticized by scientists such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s James E. Hansen and praised in Congress by Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

Film and television portrayals of climate change began escalating in 2006. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth became one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time. The movie version of his PowerPoint presentation was lauded by environmentalists and widely criticized by conservatives. Either way, it prompted widespread discussion of the topic. The film was shown widely in school systems, but a British court ruled that it contained nine significant errors.

A string of climate documentaries followed Gore’s film in 2007 and 2008. They included actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s Eleventh Hour, Arctic Tale, The Great Global Warming Swindle, and Everything’s Cool. Each drew predictable criticism from opponents. Even the SciFi network included global warming as one of ten potentially lethal threats to humankind in its Countdown to Doomsday in 2007.

Among the most notable climate-change documentaries of the 2010s were DiCaprio's Before the Flood (2016), which shows the effects of climate change in various places, and Gore's return in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017), an update on the state of climate science and technology since his original film. Hollywood also continued to produce fictional climate dystopias, with such films as Interstellar (2014) and Geostorm (2017). In 2020, renowned conservationist David Attenborough released, in partnership with streaming platform Netflix, what he called his witness statement to the devastating changes Earth has experienced in his lifetime. His film was titled David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet.

Later climate change movies included Don't Look Up (2020), Eating Our Way to Extinction (2020), and The Climate According to AI Al Gore (2024). In Don't Look Up, a professor, portrayed by DiCaprio, and his student discover a speeding comet heading for Earth and will likely decimate the planet upon impact. When they try to warn others, however, no one believes them or cares. The comet is a metaphor for climate change, making the point that the public and politicians do not take climate change seriously enough. In the documentary Eating Our Way to Extinction, actor Kate Winslet discusses how the global food industry is quickening climate change. In The Climate According to AI Al Gore, an AI-generated version of Al Gore is asked questions about his life, in particular, his earlier warnings about climate change.

Context

Polls show a significant number of Americans remain skeptical both about media coverage and about climate science, largely split along partisan lines. Because of this, media coverage is a major topic of concern. Environmentalists continue to criticize skeptical scientists and climate deniers and challenge the media to disregard such voices and to more clearly link extreme weather events to climate change. Climate skeptics and deniers challenge the climate consensus, arguing that the science is unsettled or that environmental change is natural. Each side tends to complain about the tenor of media coverage of both themselves and their interlocutors.

Key Concepts

• bloggers: people who publish information or commentary known as blogs on websites
• mainstream media: a term for major journalistic media outlets, including major television networks and newspapers
• media bias: valuations made or endorsed by information sources that are supposed to strive for objectivity

Bibliography

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