Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
reporting news stories. This norm was breached spectacularly in Britain during the
'noughties' when journalists and investigators employed by Rupert Murdoch's tabloid
News of the World
were found to have invaded the privacy of various celebrities and
ordinary people in their desire to be news leaders.
11
In these three respects, the contrast with the 'hole' in the atmospheric ozone layer
discovered in the late 1970s is instructive. This hole was perceptible in the present
and could be traced with some certainty to the effects of chlorofluorocarbons in the
upper atmosphere. Technically, it was a relatively 'easy' problem to solve and led to
rapid and concerted intergovernmental action by 1987.
12
I agree with Julie Doyle (2011) that, as well as 'nature' being seen as something sepa-
rate from humanity, we in the West cleave
time
too, regarding the future as separate -
an 'elsewhere' that is somehow too big and indeterminate to try to anticipate or shape.
Relatedly, I concur with philosopher Michelle Bastian (2012), who argues that West-
erners have come to regard the Earth ('universal nature') as a
stable
background that
supports our endeavours as essentially unchanging - meaning that the immediate
future
of the Earth will be
more of the same
, and thus not something we're causally
connected to or should worry much about. For a recent summary of the research
into the difficulties of communicating global climate change to publics effectively,
see Susanne Moser's (2010) essay 'Communicating climate change'.
13
I mean this in
both
a descriptive and an evaluative sense. For instance, where, using
the rhetoric of truth, climate scientists seek to represent the 'fact' of climate change
via their discourses and images, environmentalists urge us to react to the 'fact' in
particular value-laden ways. Mike Hulme's (2009) engaging book
Why we disagree about
climate change
is predicated on the idea that climate change is not simply a set of
physical changes but a concept that is founded upon scientific discourse and which is
inciting further technical, moral and political discourse. He shows that it is a complex
and contested idea, especially when one examines the various answers to the question
'what should we
do
about climate change?'
14
In their work on the news media during the 1970s and 1980s, Stuart Hall and
colleagues talked about 'primary definers' - sources whose versions of an 'issue', 'prob-
lem' or 'opportunity' were reported in the media on a consistent and continuous basis.
Though a great many potential sources barely have access to the news media (they are
'underaccessed' by journalists), some can win the battle for access with time, luck
and effort - left-leaning environmentalists being an example since the mid-1970s.
Especially vocal and innovative sources are sometimes called 'issue entrepreneurs'
because they bring a new subject to journalistic attention or significantly reframe
understandings of a known subject.
15
I draw here upon Boykoff and Boykoff (2004, 2007) and Boykoff (2011).
16
I say 'even still today' because surveys of public opinion in the United States and
United Kingdom indicate relatively large numbers of people who believe that cli-
mate change is not anthropogenic in origin, with a small number believing that the
global climate is not changing. As recently as 2007, reports of new scientific evi-
dence that questioned the actuality of anthropogenic climate change garnered a lot
of attention. For instance, in late 2007, a British writer and journalist posted a fake
story on the Internet about a newly published scientific research paper that claimed
to challenge the idea that humans were causing global climate change. The 4,000-
word paper was entitled 'Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death
of manmade global warming theory?' and was said to have been published in the
Japanese peer review
Journal of Geoclimatic Studies
which was created by Okinawa Uni-
versity's Institute for Geoclimatic Studies. The paper's authors were said to be Daniel
Klein and Mandeep J. Gupta of the University of Arizona, and Philip Cooper and
Arne F. R. Jansson of the University of Gothenburg. The paper's claim that deep
water bacteria were creating large volumes of CO
2
was quickly reported on electronic
mailing lists maintained by several climate change sceptics in the United Kingdom
and United States, and right-wing television host Rush Limbaugh also reported the
paper's findings; however, within a few hours the paper was revealed to be a hoax.
