17 ms·

Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds

161 points by hhs 6y ago

rsa25519 6y ago
> “Journalists seem to feel that they always have to include opposing voices when they report on climate change,” Wetts said. “But sometimes they give those opposing voices so much weight, they lead readers to believe that climate denial is more than a fringe stance.” Interesting. I agree that false equivalency should be avoided. But in all honesty, humans love novelty, so disproportionately covering things like this makes sense, even if wrong
- hannob 6y ago
  There is really nothing novel about climate denial.
  - rsa25519 6y ago
    "Novel" as in less-ordinary compared to what my filter bubble shows me, not as in new
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    If a large portion of the population thinks climate denial is not a good thing climate denial is also an outrage prompter, prompting outrage is good business in 2020.
    - pstuart 6y ago
      > prompting outrage is good business in 2020 Yes, in the social media sense. But there's plenty to be outraged about regardless of that.
  - Udik 6y ago
    I don't know if this is a US thing. Here in Europe, and as an avid reader of the news and various reporting, I can assure you that climate change activism is as mainstream as it can be (also because it easily inserted itself over a generic green, new age-ish movement that was there much before climate change became the focus of attention). And I don't know how niche HN is (not much, I'd say, although it's certainly not a generalist forum either) but also here you can see that any comment that can be construed as the vaguest criticism of climate change action is promptly downvoted.
    - hannob 6y ago
      > Here in Europe, and as an avid reader of the news and various reporting, I can assure you that climate change activism is as mainstream as it can be I'm from Germany, and certainly the situation is different from the US. However I'd argue in large parts we just have a different flavor of climate denial. I.e. "yeah climate change is happening, but [something unrelated that changes nothing about climate change]... let's not do too much". I mean no european country is on a trajectory of acting on climate change with the speed needed to fulfil even the goals that every country already agreed to.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    "climate denial" is a purely polemic, derogatory term with no meaning and sole intent to put skeptics in the same corner as Holocaust deniers.
    - smolder 6y ago
      What makes them different apart from the subject? People saying anthropogenic climate change isn't real are ignoring overwhelming historical evidence, as with Holocaust deniers.
      - lazyjones 6y ago
        First of all, Holocaust deniers deny that the Holocaust happened, when the Holocaust is an indisputable historical fact with thousands of survivors and millions of relatives of victims and denying that is offensive and malicious. So-called "climate deniers" deny neither the existence of climate, nor climate change, nor anthropogenic climate change (most of them anyway), they are simply not convinced that the magnitude of the effect of human carbon dioxide emissions is represented correctly in the alleged "consensus" (which it provably isn't) of climate scientists. Especially after climate scientists were caught in the act of tampering with data in order to hide past warming periods. So there is a difference regarding the malicious intent, the moral dimension and the legitimacy of claims. As anyone who tries to debate it with an open mind and honest arguments would know.
        smolder 6y ago
        Ah, I generally don't consider doubts of that nature (merely the magnitude of our effect being questionable) to qualify someone as a "climate denier", at least personally. I reserve it for the ones who call it a hoax, or say that warming trends are completely natural, or one of the many other easily refutable claims.
        imtringued 6y ago
        Well, I don't know what to tell you but CO2 emissions from fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere. There is this weird thing happening that since 1960 the CO2 content in the atmosphere has risen from 300ppm to 400ppm. It's up to you to believe whether that is a coincidence. Random googling tells me we emit 36 billion tonnes per co2 per year. Even more random googling tells me there are 3 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's not hard to put them together and conclude that humanity responsible for growing the CO2 in the atmosphere by 1% every year right now. Now lets say these numbers are complete garbage and inaccurate (which they certainly are) and say they are off by 70% (which they certainly are not) and the a highly conservative number is closer to 0.3%. After 30 years 9% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man made assuming we start off with 0% man made CO2 (obviously not true). The point of this comment is not to prove that there is a certain percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere because I don't have accurate numbers. The point is that humanity is powerful enough to reach an arbitrarily high percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere and it is certainly possible for 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere to be of human origin if we wait long enough and do nothing.
- mc32 6y ago
  The reason to include alternative views isn’t for when you’re right (as in climate change), it’s for when you’re wrong (Iraq, Libya). You cannot know in absolute terms when you’re right or wrong, so you have to allow for dissenting views. It makes things more muddied and complicated, but the alternative leads to top down authoritarianism “because we said so!”
  - manuelabeledo 6y ago
    I fail to see how freedom of speech applies to academia.
    - mc32 6y ago
      What? It’s just as important here. Let’s say we’re looking for a vaccine for a pandemic disease. Do you want people to censor what’s allowed to be published before we know what works and doesn’t?
      - manuelabeledo 6y ago
        That is not quite how it works. In fact, major science journals would review submissions and decide which ones are publishable. Should anybody be able to publish anything, even if it is wrong or outright false, in the same platforms used to spread actual, verifiable, knowledge? I don't think so.
        jjk166 6y ago
        Science journals review articles based on the quality of their methods, not their accuracy. If I do an experiment and find neutrinos moving faster than light, it's almost certainly incorrect, but if none of the reviewers can find an actual issue with the methods, it's still very much publishable. They can't stop something from being published just because they don't like what its saying.
        manuelabeledo 6y ago
tafurnace 6y ago
After reading this article, my mind simplified the findings as: organizations that have more money get more press than those that have less. Seems pretty obvious when framed in this manner.
- Udik 6y ago
  If two very reliable scientific studies come out about the same subject, one confirming what everyone already knows about it, and the other one finding some basic flaw in the accepted science that entirely challenges our understanding of it- in that case, which one do you think would have more press? It seems only natural to me that the more interesting one is the one challenging our knowledge: its (potential) information content is higher, simply because it is less probable. In other words, in the current world an article pushing for climate change activism might be the classic "dog bites man" while the opposite is "man bites dog".
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    I agree with your premise, but nobody is finding basic flaws in climate science that challenge our understanding of it.
    - citizenkeen 6y ago
      But you don't know that unless you read the article, right?
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      Warning: light hyperbole in this first paragraph: We don't really know because anything that could challenge it sadly get summarily downvoted without an explanation. I believe in it but it is sad to see that we are so scared of it that we cannot even bother to explain why something is wrong and instead have to opt for - name calling - appeal to authority - strawmen every time. Again: I don't work for big oil. I don't fly and haven't for years. I reduce, reuse and recycle and do all the right things. But there are still a number of questions I have that I cannot get answers for because if I ask them before anyone who knows has a chance to answer someone will summarily downvote and/or flag it and say I am a JAQ-ing shill. (JAQ = Just Asking Questions is a known bad tactic, but it is incredibly frustrating to be accused of that when I just want to know the answer.)
0-O-0 6y ago
> Approximately 14% of press releases opposing climate action or denying the science behind climate change received major national news coverage, she found, compared to about 7% of press releases with pro-climate action messages. There might be a very simple explanation: there are significantly more pro-climate change press releases, than anti. Comparing percentages without correcting for that seems to be dishonest.
- acqq 6y ago
  It's in The very Fine Article: "While just 10% of the press releases Wetts found featured anti-climate action messaging, those rarer releases were twice as likely to get coverage as pro-climate action press releases" "Wetts said the results seem to support the popular opinion that mainstream news organizations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence."
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    news organizations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence. News organizations used to filter out the cranks. Some still do, but more have buckled to the pressure to shove out metric assloads of low-quality content in order to satiate people who only get their news by scrolling. (It's called "feeding the beast.") And those that still do filter out the low-quality garbage are attacked on social media for being left-wing or right-wing, or whatever wing the social media megaphones decide is bad at that particular nanosecond.
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      When heads of state of Western nations are pushing the crank theories it's hard to blame the media for not filtering them.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
topkai22 6y ago
90% of press releases were pro-climate action, only 10% were anti-climate action. That’s makes it less newsworthy if an org is pro climate action. Let’s also talk about scale in the study- it looked at 1,794 press releases. Only 10% of those were anti climate action, and only 14% of those were cited, so we are talking about 25 press releases over 20 years, as opposed to 113 pro-climate press releases. That means that 81% of covered PRs are pro climate action instead of 90% of press releases- readers would still get the impression that an overwhelming majority of orgs are pro climate action. I have other quibbles here (climate consensus has changed over the last 35 years), but I definitely didn’t come away agreeing that there is something fundamentally wrong with journalistic standards as the article and abstract imply.
- vkou 6y ago
  Murders are rare and newsworthy, but while they get news coverage, it's rare for a killer to get favourable news coverage. It's not rare for liar-liar-pants-on-fire level of climate denialism to get favourable news coverage.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  90% of press releases were pro-climate action, only 10% were anti-climate action. That’s makes it less newsworthy if an org is pro climate action. "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  What do you mean, climate consensus has changed?
  - topkai22 6y ago
    To be clear, I'm talking about views and understanding in broader society, not the scientific community. 35 years is a long time- roughly half the humans in the US weren't alive 35 years ago. It'd be surprising if nothing had changed. (edit: although maybe things have not changed as much as my lived experience tells me: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx)
tengbretson 6y ago
> When organizations take a stand against actions to combat climate change, they get more news coverage than their pro-climate action peers Could it be that news organizations are doing this as a way of publicly shaming? In which case the discrepancy makes perfect sense.
human3047628272 6y ago
Any article about impending catastrophes that may well end up wiping us all from the Planet are a bit hard to tolerate. When we are confronted to them our brain automatically trigger its best protection mechanism, which is denial. We immediately think of thousands of reasons convincing us that the article is wrong, misinformed, etc. Another article with any explanation of why the first one is wrong is therefore much more pleasant to our brain. That's why denial articles get more coverage. That's also why we don't clearly see the reality and why we do nothing to prevent our impending doom.
- andrewprock 6y ago
  Yet post-apocalyptic entertainment media is a thriving niche.
  - HankB99 6y ago
    Would that be for the same reason automobile traffic slows to a crawl when there is a traffic accident to view? (Not talking about traffic in the same direction which is subject to lane closure and slowed down for safety of responders but traffic in the opposite direction.)
- goatlover 6y ago
  Or they're sensationalistic worst-case scenarios that get views. There's a big difference between climate change being an ongoing challenge for civilization and we're all doomed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JackFr 6y ago
Clickbait generates clicks, study finds.
- DudeInBasement 6y ago
  Clickbait study finds clickbait generates clicks.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    New study discovers one weird marketing trick you'll never believe!
acidburnNSA 6y ago
Debate on climate is now much more interesting than whether or not climate change is real or caused by humans. Those things are pretty well established. Now people are debating what the appropriate actions are, and it's much more nuanced. For example, we have the "eco-pragmatists" like Michael Shellenberger publishing "Apocalypse Never" that involves some really interesting interviews and points about how economic development can be more important for people living on the edge of the Amazon rainforest or alongside Virunga National Park in the Congo from the perspective of climate resilience. In other words, having modern electricity and infrastructure seems more likely to help people in these situations than rapid decarbonization, especially given our slow progress in decarbonization and that fact that the world today is still >80% fossil fueled. He also suggested a merit order of fuels that went: biomass < coal < natural gas < nuclear. Moving from left to right is good, but moving from right to left is bad, he argues. He published this with a pretty abrasive blog post featuring undersupported controversial points and basically got blacklisted and deplatformed by the major media outlets. Yes, he seems to have cherry-picked a bit to support his narrative, but that's something all authors do. And we have the Michael Moore produced doco on Youtube (Planet of the Humans) that criticized the mainstream green energy narrative and also got temporarily deplatformed due to outcry. I have found interesting insight in these people even though I've considered climate change one of the major challenges of our time for 20 years now. It's certainly interesting times.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
  >And we have the Michael Moore produced doco on Youtube (Planet of the Humans) that criticized the mainstream green energy narrative and also got temporarily deplatformed due to outcry. That pseudo-documentary was so dishonest, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a... As Dana Nucitelli said: "The film's case is akin to arguing that because fruit contains sugar, eating strawberries is no healthier than eating a cheesecake."
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    That section lists very weak criticism. Some solar farms are lower efficiency than others. So what? That doesn't go against any of the points made in the film. They did not say that all solar farms have lower-than-average capacity factors. The fact that you can get deplatformed for this really surprises me. This level of technical criticism is not even remotely proportional to the massive negative backlash it got. Clearly there's a higher-level battle being fought. A lot of what it had to say about the combustion of renewable biofuels (air pollution, carbon emissions) was pretty right-on though, and is not very well known. The fact that there are indeed actual externalities to renewable energy is a conversation that needs to be had. I think a lot of people are hoping they won't be too bad at scale.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Alcohol has positive health benefit articles get far more shares than alcohol has negative health benefit articles. People/companies like to share things that support their views and advertising dollars.
akimball 6y ago
Broadly speaking, the press loves the nutters. They make a sensational story and draw eyeballs. This is fine, but then both-sidesing leads to the normalization of nuttery. Fact checking is hard work, and not adequately compensated. It's a public good problem, a failure of capitalist incentives to protect the public interest. Often the impulse is to use regulation to circumscribe such damages, but in the case of the press, doing so has unconscionable consequences as well. It will take a simple act of genius, restructuring the markets for public information (supply side), and/or a leap in public education and conscience (demand side) to address such a wicked problem.
the3b 6y ago
Reading the linked article, and not the full text of the article, I do not see what the criteria was for determining what constitutes a position "opposing climate action." Is it defined more in the full article? Opposing climate action can be defined on a broad spectrum, which will cross political and other boundaries. For instance, if a company or group opposed Green New Deal legislation, that is a big difference from opposing implementation of any action.
blackbrokkoli 6y ago
1922 Walter Lippmann kickstarted the idea of "news value" which lists criteria predicting whether an event or narrative is worth printing. He proposed the following, and we can apply them here to compare the two types of news: Oddity: anti-climate wins Sensationalism: anti-climate wins Damage: anti-climate wins Establishment, Duration, Structure, Relevancy, Use, Prominency, Proximity: about equal (Translations mine, couldn't find good English ones) Thus, the result is little surprising. Still a good study, the obvious should also be proved!
Proven 6y ago
that's simply because taxpayers are sick and tired of the eternal theft through subsidies, fake news and massively failed climatist predictions.

161 points by hhs 6y ago

> “Journalists seem to feel that they always have to include opposing voices when they report on climate change,” Wetts said. “But sometimes they give those opposing voices so much weight, they lead readers to believe that climate denial is more than a fringe stance.” Interesting. I agree that false equivalency should be avoided. But in all honesty, humans love novelty, so disproportionately covering things like this makes sense, even if wrong

hannob 6y ago
There is really nothing novel about climate denial.
- rsa25519 6y ago
  "Novel" as in less-ordinary compared to what my filter bubble shows me, not as in new
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  If a large portion of the population thinks climate denial is not a good thing climate denial is also an outrage prompter, prompting outrage is good business in 2020.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    > prompting outrage is good business in 2020 Yes, in the social media sense. But there's plenty to be outraged about regardless of that.
- Udik 6y ago
  I don't know if this is a US thing. Here in Europe, and as an avid reader of the news and various reporting, I can assure you that climate change activism is as mainstream as it can be (also because it easily inserted itself over a generic green, new age-ish movement that was there much before climate change became the focus of attention). And I don't know how niche HN is (not much, I'd say, although it's certainly not a generalist forum either) but also here you can see that any comment that can be construed as the vaguest criticism of climate change action is promptly downvoted.
  - hannob 6y ago
    > Here in Europe, and as an avid reader of the news and various reporting, I can assure you that climate change activism is as mainstream as it can be I'm from Germany, and certainly the situation is different from the US. However I'd argue in large parts we just have a different flavor of climate denial. I.e. "yeah climate change is happening, but [something unrelated that changes nothing about climate change]... let's not do too much". I mean no european country is on a trajectory of acting on climate change with the speed needed to fulfil even the goals that every country already agreed to.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  "climate denial" is a purely polemic, derogatory term with no meaning and sole intent to put skeptics in the same corner as Holocaust deniers.
  - smolder 6y ago
    What makes them different apart from the subject? People saying anthropogenic climate change isn't real are ignoring overwhelming historical evidence, as with Holocaust deniers.
    - lazyjones 6y ago
      First of all, Holocaust deniers deny that the Holocaust happened, when the Holocaust is an indisputable historical fact with thousands of survivors and millions of relatives of victims and denying that is offensive and malicious. So-called "climate deniers" deny neither the existence of climate, nor climate change, nor anthropogenic climate change (most of them anyway), they are simply not convinced that the magnitude of the effect of human carbon dioxide emissions is represented correctly in the alleged "consensus" (which it provably isn't) of climate scientists. Especially after climate scientists were caught in the act of tampering with data in order to hide past warming periods. So there is a difference regarding the malicious intent, the moral dimension and the legitimacy of claims. As anyone who tries to debate it with an open mind and honest arguments would know.
      - smolder 6y ago
        Ah, I generally don't consider doubts of that nature (merely the magnitude of our effect being questionable) to qualify someone as a "climate denier", at least personally. I reserve it for the ones who call it a hoax, or say that warming trends are completely natural, or one of the many other easily refutable claims.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        Well, I don't know what to tell you but CO2 emissions from fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere. There is this weird thing happening that since 1960 the CO2 content in the atmosphere has risen from 300ppm to 400ppm. It's up to you to believe whether that is a coincidence. Random googling tells me we emit 36 billion tonnes per co2 per year. Even more random googling tells me there are 3 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's not hard to put them together and conclude that humanity responsible for growing the CO2 in the atmosphere by 1% every year right now. Now lets say these numbers are complete garbage and inaccurate (which they certainly are) and say they are off by 70% (which they certainly are not) and the a highly conservative number is closer to 0.3%. After 30 years 9% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man made assuming we start off with 0% man made CO2 (obviously not true). The point of this comment is not to prove that there is a certain percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere because I don't have accurate numbers. The point is that humanity is powerful enough to reach an arbitrarily high percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere and it is certainly possible for 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere to be of human origin if we wait long enough and do nothing.
mc32 6y ago
The reason to include alternative views isn’t for when you’re right (as in climate change), it’s for when you’re wrong (Iraq, Libya). You cannot know in absolute terms when you’re right or wrong, so you have to allow for dissenting views. It makes things more muddied and complicated, but the alternative leads to top down authoritarianism “because we said so!”
- manuelabeledo 6y ago
  I fail to see how freedom of speech applies to academia.
  - mc32 6y ago
    What? It’s just as important here. Let’s say we’re looking for a vaccine for a pandemic disease. Do you want people to censor what’s allowed to be published before we know what works and doesn’t?
    - manuelabeledo 6y ago
      That is not quite how it works. In fact, major science journals would review submissions and decide which ones are publishable. Should anybody be able to publish anything, even if it is wrong or outright false, in the same platforms used to spread actual, verifiable, knowledge? I don't think so.
      - jjk166 6y ago
        Science journals review articles based on the quality of their methods, not their accuracy. If I do an experiment and find neutrinos moving faster than light, it's almost certainly incorrect, but if none of the reviewers can find an actual issue with the methods, it's still very much publishable. They can't stop something from being published just because they don't like what its saying.
        manuelabeledo 6y ago

tafurnace 6y ago

After reading this article, my mind simplified the findings as: organizations that have more money get more press than those that have less. Seems pretty obvious when framed in this manner.

Udik 6y ago
If two very reliable scientific studies come out about the same subject, one confirming what everyone already knows about it, and the other one finding some basic flaw in the accepted science that entirely challenges our understanding of it- in that case, which one do you think would have more press? It seems only natural to me that the more interesting one is the one challenging our knowledge: its (potential) information content is higher, simply because it is less probable. In other words, in the current world an article pushing for climate change activism might be the classic "dog bites man" while the opposite is "man bites dog".
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  I agree with your premise, but nobody is finding basic flaws in climate science that challenge our understanding of it.
  - citizenkeen 6y ago
    But you don't know that unless you read the article, right?
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    Warning: light hyperbole in this first paragraph: We don't really know because anything that could challenge it sadly get summarily downvoted without an explanation. I believe in it but it is sad to see that we are so scared of it that we cannot even bother to explain why something is wrong and instead have to opt for - name calling - appeal to authority - strawmen every time. Again: I don't work for big oil. I don't fly and haven't for years. I reduce, reuse and recycle and do all the right things. But there are still a number of questions I have that I cannot get answers for because if I ask them before anyone who knows has a chance to answer someone will summarily downvote and/or flag it and say I am a JAQ-ing shill. (JAQ = Just Asking Questions is a known bad tactic, but it is incredibly frustrating to be accused of that when I just want to know the answer.)

0-O-0 6y ago

> Approximately 14% of press releases opposing climate action or denying the science behind climate change received major national news coverage, she found, compared to about 7% of press releases with pro-climate action messages. There might be a very simple explanation: there are significantly more pro-climate change press releases, than anti. Comparing percentages without correcting for that seems to be dishonest.

acqq 6y ago
It's in The very Fine Article: "While just 10% of the press releases Wetts found featured anti-climate action messaging, those rarer releases were twice as likely to get coverage as pro-climate action press releases" "Wetts said the results seem to support the popular opinion that mainstream news organizations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence."
- reaperducer 6y ago
  news organizations often mislead readers by giving equal weight to two sides of an argument, even when one side isn’t as widely believed or lacks scientific evidence. News organizations used to filter out the cranks. Some still do, but more have buckled to the pressure to shove out metric assloads of low-quality content in order to satiate people who only get their news by scrolling. (It's called "feeding the beast.") And those that still do filter out the low-quality garbage are attacked on social media for being left-wing or right-wing, or whatever wing the social media megaphones decide is bad at that particular nanosecond.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    When heads of state of Western nations are pushing the crank theories it's hard to blame the media for not filtering them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

topkai22 6y ago

90% of press releases were pro-climate action, only 10% were anti-climate action. That’s makes it less newsworthy if an org is pro climate action. Let’s also talk about scale in the study- it looked at 1,794 press releases. Only 10% of those were anti climate action, and only 14% of those were cited, so we are talking about 25 press releases over 20 years, as opposed to 113 pro-climate press releases. That means that 81% of covered PRs are pro climate action instead of 90% of press releases- readers would still get the impression that an overwhelming majority of orgs are pro climate action. I have other quibbles here (climate consensus has changed over the last 35 years), but I definitely didn’t come away agreeing that there is something fundamentally wrong with journalistic standards as the article and abstract imply.

vkou 6y ago
Murders are rare and newsworthy, but while they get news coverage, it's rare for a killer to get favourable news coverage. It's not rare for liar-liar-pants-on-fire level of climate denialism to get favourable news coverage.
reaperducer 6y ago
90% of press releases were pro-climate action, only 10% were anti-climate action. That’s makes it less newsworthy if an org is pro climate action. "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
DangitBobby 6y ago
What do you mean, climate consensus has changed?
- topkai22 6y ago
  To be clear, I'm talking about views and understanding in broader society, not the scientific community. 35 years is a long time- roughly half the humans in the US weren't alive 35 years ago. It'd be surprising if nothing had changed. (edit: although maybe things have not changed as much as my lived experience tells me: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1615/environment.aspx)

tengbretson 6y ago

> When organizations take a stand against actions to combat climate change, they get more news coverage than their pro-climate action peers Could it be that news organizations are doing this as a way of publicly shaming? In which case the discrepancy makes perfect sense.

human3047628272 6y ago

Any article about impending catastrophes that may well end up wiping us all from the Planet are a bit hard to tolerate. When we are confronted to them our brain automatically trigger its best protection mechanism, which is denial. We immediately think of thousands of reasons convincing us that the article is wrong, misinformed, etc. Another article with any explanation of why the first one is wrong is therefore much more pleasant to our brain. That's why denial articles get more coverage. That's also why we don't clearly see the reality and why we do nothing to prevent our impending doom.

andrewprock 6y ago
Yet post-apocalyptic entertainment media is a thriving niche.
- HankB99 6y ago
  Would that be for the same reason automobile traffic slows to a crawl when there is a traffic accident to view? (Not talking about traffic in the same direction which is subject to lane closure and slowed down for safety of responders but traffic in the opposite direction.)
goatlover 6y ago
Or they're sensationalistic worst-case scenarios that get views. There's a big difference between climate change being an ongoing challenge for civilization and we're all doomed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

JackFr 6y ago

Clickbait generates clicks, study finds.

DudeInBasement 6y ago
Clickbait study finds clickbait generates clicks.
- kube-system 6y ago
  New study discovers one weird marketing trick you'll never believe!

acidburnNSA 6y ago

Debate on climate is now much more interesting than whether or not climate change is real or caused by humans. Those things are pretty well established. Now people are debating what the appropriate actions are, and it's much more nuanced. For example, we have the "eco-pragmatists" like Michael Shellenberger publishing "Apocalypse Never" that involves some really interesting interviews and points about how economic development can be more important for people living on the edge of the Amazon rainforest or alongside Virunga National Park in the Congo from the perspective of climate resilience. In other words, having modern electricity and infrastructure seems more likely to help people in these situations than rapid decarbonization, especially given our slow progress in decarbonization and that fact that the world today is still >80% fossil fueled. He also suggested a merit order of fuels that went: biomass < coal < natural gas < nuclear. Moving from left to right is good, but moving from right to left is bad, he argues. He published this with a pretty abrasive blog post featuring undersupported controversial points and basically got blacklisted and deplatformed by the major media outlets. Yes, he seems to have cherry-picked a bit to support his narrative, but that's something all authors do. And we have the Michael Moore produced doco on Youtube (Planet of the Humans) that criticized the mainstream green energy narrative and also got temporarily deplatformed due to outcry. I have found interesting insight in these people even though I've considered climate change one of the major challenges of our time for 20 years now. It's certainly interesting times.

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
>And we have the Michael Moore produced doco on Youtube (Planet of the Humans) that criticized the mainstream green energy narrative and also got temporarily deplatformed due to outcry. That pseudo-documentary was so dishonest, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a... As Dana Nucitelli said: "The film's case is akin to arguing that because fruit contains sugar, eating strawberries is no healthier than eating a cheesecake."
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  That section lists very weak criticism. Some solar farms are lower efficiency than others. So what? That doesn't go against any of the points made in the film. They did not say that all solar farms have lower-than-average capacity factors. The fact that you can get deplatformed for this really surprises me. This level of technical criticism is not even remotely proportional to the massive negative backlash it got. Clearly there's a higher-level battle being fought. A lot of what it had to say about the combustion of renewable biofuels (air pollution, carbon emissions) was pretty right-on though, and is not very well known. The fact that there are indeed actual externalities to renewable energy is a conversation that needs to be had. I think a lot of people are hoping they won't be too bad at scale.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

Alcohol has positive health benefit articles get far more shares than alcohol has negative health benefit articles. People/companies like to share things that support their views and advertising dollars.

akimball 6y ago

Broadly speaking, the press loves the nutters. They make a sensational story and draw eyeballs. This is fine, but then both-sidesing leads to the normalization of nuttery. Fact checking is hard work, and not adequately compensated. It's a public good problem, a failure of capitalist incentives to protect the public interest. Often the impulse is to use regulation to circumscribe such damages, but in the case of the press, doing so has unconscionable consequences as well. It will take a simple act of genius, restructuring the markets for public information (supply side), and/or a leap in public education and conscience (demand side) to address such a wicked problem.

the3b 6y ago

Reading the linked article, and not the full text of the article, I do not see what the criteria was for determining what constitutes a position "opposing climate action." Is it defined more in the full article? Opposing climate action can be defined on a broad spectrum, which will cross political and other boundaries. For instance, if a company or group opposed Green New Deal legislation, that is a big difference from opposing implementation of any action.

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

1922 Walter Lippmann kickstarted the idea of "news value" which lists criteria predicting whether an event or narrative is worth printing. He proposed the following, and we can apply them here to compare the two types of news: Oddity: anti-climate wins Sensationalism: anti-climate wins Damage: anti-climate wins Establishment, Duration, Structure, Relevancy, Use, Prominency, Proximity: about equal (Translations mine, couldn't find good English ones) Thus, the result is little surprising. Still a good study, the obvious should also be proved!

Proven 6y ago

that's simply because taxpayers are sick and tired of the eternal theft through subsidies, fake news and massively failed climatist predictions.