Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Climate change and the media
The other reason for the emergence of climate change as a major global issue was the in-
tense media interest throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. This is because climate change is
perfect for the media: a dramatic story about the end of the world as we know it, with signi-
ficant controversy about whether it was even true. Anabela Carvalho, now at the University
of Minho (Braga, Portugal), undertook a fascinating study of the British quality (broad-
sheet) press coverage of the global warming issue between 1985 and 1997. She concen-
trated particularly on the
Guardian
and
The Times
, and found throughout this period that
they promoted very different worldviews. Interestingly, despite their differing views, the
number of articles published per year by the British quality papers followed a similar pat-
tern and peaked when key IPCC reports were published or international conferences on cli-
mate change were held (see
Figure 6
). But it is the nature of these articles that shows how
the global warming debate was constructed in the media. From the late 1980s,
The Times
,
which published most articles on global warming in 1989, 1990, and 1992, cast doubt on
the claims of climate change. There was a recurrent attempt to promote mistrust in science,
through strategies of generalization, of disagreement within the scientific community, and,
most importantly, discrediting scientists and scientific institutions. A very similar view-
point was taken by the majority of the American media throughout much of the 1990s. In
fact, it has been claimed that this approach in the American media has led to a barrier
between scientists and the public in the USA.
In the UK, the
Guardian
newspaper took the opposite approach to that of
The Times
. Al-
though the
Guardian
gave space to the technical side of the debate, it soon started to dis-
cuss scientific claims in the wider context. As scientific uncertainty regarding the enhanced
greenhouse effect decreased during the 1990s, the
Guardian
coherently advanced a strategy
of building confidence in science, with an emphasis on consensus as a means of enhancing
the reliability of knowledge. This was because the
Guardian
understood and promoted one
of the fundamental bases of science, which is that a theory, such as global warming, can
only be accepted or rejected by the weight of evidence. So, as evidence from many differ-
ent areas of science continues to support the theory of global warming, so correspondingly
our confidence in the theory should increase. Far from painting science as 'pure' or 'cor-
rect', instead the
Guardian
politicized it to demonstrate the bias that is inherent in all scien-
ce. This clearly showed that many of the climate change claims were being eroded by lob-
bying pressure, mainly associated with the fossil-fuel industry. This politicizing of science
allowed the
Guardian
to strengthen its readers' confidence in science.
