Mainstream media is doing much better on communicating the urgency of Climate Change, but local media coverage is still spotty. At the risk of sounding Trumpian (Fake News!) when criticizing the media, there’s reason to press the press on their role in this crisis. I’ve been pondering the role of mainstream media for some time now in a slew of essays, wondering why our mass media have been so hesitant to inform the public completely about this unprecedented crisis unfolding during our lifetime.

You’d think a quickly warming planet, not just any planet, but our planet, would garner more concern and action than it has. Even if we (miraculously) adhere to the Paris Accord, we are still going to reach over 3C by 2100. Our grandchildren will be fighting tooth and nail for their existence on a very hot world.   

Whatever one thinks of the media in these crazy political times, in the information age the public gets their sense of reality in the aggregate of information speeding around the world. That is to say, there are too many of us and too many things going on at any one time for anyone of us to trust our own limited perspective. We need to know the weather; sticking our heads out the window is no longer enough. We must have a sense of our economic health before we start spending our hard-earned money on major purchases—like a car, a house, or a college education. We need to know if there are health issues sweeping in from afar—heatwaves, infectious diseases, sewage overflows, you-name-it. 
We need to know the health of our life support system, our environment, for long term planning. We need to know a lot of more information than we can obtain from our own surroundings to live and thrive in our present world. We need a healthy, free press, uncluttered by ideology and anchored solidly in science. 

That a large portion of the public have closed their mind to the reality of Climate Change, refusing to attend to the few responsible media who are keeping us informed on this crisis, is more than sad. It’s suicidal.

But for the majority who understand the importance of science, it’s heartening to know that many of our mainstream media are catching up quickly on Climate Change, which seems simple at first but gets infinitely intricate as you contemplate the implications. Yes, manmade greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution are warming up our planet. Yes, our planet has warmed up before. But not as quickly with so many of us, and with so much of our infrastructure being critical to our survival.

Climate Change is very complicated and gets more complicated as new information, new studies, and new consequences (extreme weather) come in each day. So, it’s very good that our mainstream media, the largest and most influential media, have come around.

As we go further into the Climate Change Bottleneck, where our past environmental abuses get cooked on a warming planet, ecosystem changes may be more than we can handle. Here’s an example of mainstream media doing their job in a time of a quickly warming planet, our freaking planet:

Climate change could render many of Earth’s ecosystems unrecognizable After the end of the last ice age — as sea levels rose, glaciers receded and global average temperatures soared as much as seven degrees Celsius — the Earth’s ecosystems were utterly transformed. Forests grew up out of what was once barren, ice-covered ground. Dark, cool stands of pine were replaced by thickets of hickory and oak. Woodlands gave way to scrub, and savanna turned to desert. The more temperatures increased in a particular landscape, the more dramatic the ecological shifts. It’s about to happen again, researchers are reporting Thursday in the journal Science. A sweeping survey of global fossil and temperature records from the past 20,000 years suggests that Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems are at risk of another, even faster transformation unless aggressive action is taken against climate change. (August 30, 2018) The Washington Post [more on Climate Change in our area]

At the local level, media coverage of Climate Change is lackluster, timid, milquetoast, unremarkable, and almost invisible. Continually, our local media avoids connecting the dots with the consequences of Climate Change in our region—more heatwaves, more harmful algae blooms, more heavy rains with sewer overflows, and much more. Here’s an example: This is code for Climate Change: “the cost of these increasingly common very heavy rains.” There will be more washed out infrastructures if the public doesn’t understand and support efforts to adapt to Climate Change and we need our media to communicate this. Heavy precipitation events since 1958 is the major expression of Climate Change in our Northeast region. Yet this (public) media doesn’t even mention Climate Change:

 When it rains, it pours on county roads and bridges Erie County is learning the cost of these increasingly common very heavy rains. The water has to go somewhere and if there isn't drainage, it might wash away a road or cause some other problem. Erie County has 290 bridges and 420 culverts. Those are either the large circular pipes carrying water under a road or a regular road bridge shorter than 20 feet. The county is expanding the size of its culverts, to let more water flow through and prevent roads from flooding - or worse. "A lot of these culverts that we're replacing, some of them were designed in the early 1900s, 1920-1930," said Public Works Commissioner Bill Geary, "so you can imagine what used to be just a little farm road that may now be a major thoroughfare or a feeder stream that is getting a lot of runoff from some new developments or things of that nature, and then the cycle of weather patterns we've been seeing the last five years or so." (August 22, 2018) WBFO Buffalo's NPR New Station [more on Climate Change in our area]

Local media outlets are where locals get a lot of their perspective on their environment. When locals get a survey call about what issues are most important to them, they don’t put Climate Change on their list at all because their local media doesn’t. Public officials have trouble getting the public to come learn about our climate vulnerabilities because local media doesn’t bother to inform. We missed the Rochester media recently at the City’s CLIMATE VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT PUBLIC INPUT SESSION, where the public was informed about how Climate Change will impact our community. (If you missed this event and want to help shape local climate adaption you can still make comment on this project here.)

It would be nice if our local media was engaged on our City’s efforts to address Climate Change so that all the public, not just a few, would get involved.

From my perspective gained over the last couple of decades, mainstream media is changing for the better on Climate Change but not quickly enough. Local media needs constant prodding by local environmentalists before they will use their medium to inform the public.

If the media had been doing their job on Climate Change, we would not have elected climate deniers into high and local public offices.  (And yeah it matters: “Climate change: local efforts won't be enough to undo Trump's inaction, study says”) 

The fossil fuel industry didn’t just hold back and misinform about their industries’ contributions to the rapid rise in greenhouse gas emissions, they did so in a vacuum of comprehensive Climate Change media coverage with science at the core.    

Time passes.