2 October 2017, Think Progress, Courts back climate scientists, but right-wing attacks are disrupting research. Right-wing groups inappropriately using open records requests has had a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. People play dirty when they can’t win by playing fair. This is, more or less, the story of climate change denial in the United States. Scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans are altering the climate, reaping changes with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climate deniers can’t dispute the data. They can’t win on facts. Instead, they impugn the credibility of scientists, a tactic which has proved both ugly and effective. Right-wing groups are using open records laws to obtain scientists’ emails — and then misrepresenting the content of those emails to question the integrity of researchers and cast doubt on their findings, all of which has a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. But scientists have earned powerful allies in the fight to protect their research — including, by a strange set of circumstances, the Trump administration. Read More here
Category Archives: Communication
26 September 2017, The Conversation, How TV weather presenters can improve public understanding of climate change. A recent Monash University study of TV weather presenters has found a strong interest from free-to-air presenters in including climate change information in their bulletins. The strongest trends in the survey, which had a 46% response rate, included: + 97% of respondents thought climate change is happening; + 97% of respondents believed viewers had either “strong trust” or “moderate trust” in them as a reliable source of weather information; + 91% of respondents were comfortable with presenting local historical climate statistics, and just under 70% were comfortable with future local climate projections; and + 97% of respondents thought their audiences would be interested in learning about the impacts of climate change. According to several analyses of where Australians get their news, in the age of ubiquitous social media TV is still the single largest news source. These three factors – trust, the impartial nature of weather, and Australian’s enthusiasm for the weather – puts TV presenters in an ideal position to present climate information. Such has been the experience in the US, where the Centre for Climate Change Communication together with Climate Matters have partnered with more than 350 TV weathercasters to present simple, easy-to-process factual climate information. In the US it is about mainstreaming climate information as factual content delivered by trusted sources. The Climate Matters program found TV audiences value climate information the more locally based it was. Read More here
11 September 2017, The Conversation, Fake news and god’s wrath: extreme hurricane politics in the US. The devastating scenes of destruction and flooding in the Bahamas and the southern states of the US have captivated the world for many weeks now. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, with Hurricane Jose soon to follow, have stolen headlines around the world, as they break records and provide a deluge of spectacle and image: the main ingredients for tabloid reporting. As far as the fatalities they have caused – now into the hundreds – they have not been as dangerous as the under-reported monsoons that devastated India, Nepal and Bangladesh a few weeks ago, with death tolls into the thousands. But, in the oligopolised world of the news wires of AFP, Reuters and AP, threats to developed nations push well ahead of tragedy in the third world, an imperialist bias that reflects the global hierarchy of nation-states as defined by news services. But is also true that hurricanes (typhoons and cyclones) command more attention because they have a strong visual identity. Unlike monsoonal rains, they are also endowed with a personality. Read More here
5 September 2017, Reuters, ANALYSIS-Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath could see pioneering climate lawsuits. After disasters in the United States like Hurricane Harvey, lawyers get busy with lawsuits seeking to apportion blame and claim damages. This time, a new kind of litigation is likely to appear, they say – relating to climate change. That’s because rapid scientific advances are making it possible to precisely measure what portion of a disaster such as Harvey can be attributed to the planet’s changing climate. Such evidence could well feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “As extreme weather events and related damages and other impacts increase in severity … courts will increasingly be called upon to seek redress for damages suffered,” said Lindene Patton, a risk-management lawyer with the Earth & Water Group, a Washington-based specialty law firm.Hurricane Harvey last week brought unprecedented destruction as incessant rain and winds of up to 130 miles per hour caused catastrophic damage, making large swathes of Texas and Louisiana uninhabitable for weeks or months. Images of soldiers and police in helicopters and special high-water trucks rescuing Texans stranded by floodwater brought back painful memories of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana a decade ago. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rejected a contention by scientists and the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization that the historic rainfall from Harvey was linked to climate change. Still, the dramatic scenes rekindled questions about the extent to which climate change can be blamed for such a monster hurricane, beyond broad predictions that global warming will increase the frequency of freak weather events. This time around, scientists are increasingly confident they can come up with answers.Their tool is a new science, known as event attribution, which determines what proportion of a specific extreme weather event can be blamed on climate change. Read More here