From the “say anything” department, comes this email where the League of Conservation Voters asks Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta to “…help us pressure the evening news programs at CBS, NBC, and ABC to make climate science central to their extreme weather coverage this year?”.
The second half of the email is a form letter, and it says:
This is ridiculous.
From record-breaking heat waves and massive wildfires to historic droughts and Superstorm Sandy, we’ve seen with our own eyes the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events this past year. Yet in reporting on these disastrous events, the nightly news programs at the major broadcast networks have largely ignored what is fueling this extreme weather – climate change.
As the effects of climate change cause hardship for families across America, we need better coverage if we want people to connect the dots and demand real action to curb global warming pollution.
I agree with the ridiculous part, though not in the way they want. For example, “global warming pollution”. WTF? It is unknown if Podesta took the bait or not, but I do know the link in the email to generate what looks like a letter from Podesta is still active at LCV. I followed it, and it generated this:
Apparently “global warming pollution” was too stupid to include in that letter. And it seems to not have worked, because in January 2014, Media Matters lamented that TV coverage still hadn’t met what happened in 2009, the year “ClimateGate” and the CopenHagen Climate Conference occured:
A Media Matters analysis reveals that news coverage of climate change on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX picked up in 2013 over the previous year, but remained lower than a 2009 high. Furthermore, while one Sunday show interviewed scientists about climate change, distinguishing itself as the first such program to do so in five years, these shows continued to rely largely on media figures and Republicans to dictate the conversation around global warming.
Media Offered Tepid Coverage Despite Major Report, Presidential Speech, And Scientific Milestone On Climate Change. In 2013, top international climate scientists released a major report on the state of climate science, following up on a 2007 report. The report found that the science on climate change has only gotten stronger during those six years, determining with 95 percent certainty that human activities are the “dominant cause” of global warming. Additionally, President Barack Obama delivered a major speech entirely focused on climate change, which former Vice President Al Gore hailed as the “best address on climate by any president ever.” The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important heat-trapping gas driving climate change, also surpassed a long-feared milestone of 400 parts per million — an amount never seen before in human history. And extreme weather events made more likely or worsened by climate change also drew widespread coverage, even as the climate connection was ignored: near-record floodwaters washed over the Midwest, devastating wildfires swept the western United States, and the worst cyclone to make landfall on record struck the Philippines, wiping out entire communities and killing thousands of people. Despite all this, broadcast news’ climate coverage remained relatively low.
It isn’t hard to see why this attempt at linking severe weather and climate failed. It simply isn’t true.
Both the IPCC and the journal Nature didn’t see any significant climate to weather connections then:
Pielke Jr. Agrees – ‘Extreme weather to climate connection’ is a dead issue
Nature editorial dashes alarmist hopes of linking extreme weather events to global warming
And then there’s the news media problem itself:
