A New Narrative is Born
Over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, I ask
how reporters and bloggers can most responsibly handle the climate/weather connections while the evidence is still being gathered and interpreted.
Check it out and offer your suggestions over there.
I wonder if any thing has changed since this article January 2010..
From a moderate voice. Richard Betts, Met Office, Head of Climate Impacts (IPCC AR5 lead author)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8451756.stm
Richard Betts:
The focus on climate change is now so huge that everybody seems to need to have some link to climate change if they are to attract attention and funding.
Hence the increasing tendency to link everything to climate change – whether scientifically proven or not.
The question is: do climate scientists do enough to counter this? Or are we guilty of turning a blind eye to these things because we think they are on “our side” against the climate sceptics?
It’s easy to blame the media and I don’t intend to make generalisations here, but I have quite literally had journalists phone me up during an unusually warm spell of weather and ask “is this a result of global warming?”
When I say “no, not really, it is just weather”, they’ve thanked me very much and then phoned somebody else, and kept trying until they got someone to say yes it was.