This real journalistic failing is not the sort of climate reporting that seems to exercise the Media Watch program each Monday night. ABC journalists are regularly guilty of:
● Failing to report any inconvenient truths about countries increasing their use of coal, such as a November 20 Bloomberg report China is adding 148 gigawatts annually in coal-fired power, an increase greater than the size of the entire European system. Yet on the ABC coal is a “stranded asset”, as Hamish McDonald said on RN Mornings again last week.
● Not accurately reporting Australia now has among the highest penetrations of renewable energy usage anywhere or that our total emissions are rising mainly because of increased LNG exports that are offsetting emissions-intensive fuels in China and Japan.
● Refusing to acknowledge the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear for more than a decade that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. Even bushfires. Nor does the ABC acknowledge the IPCC has regularly revised down forecasts for temperature and sea level rise.
● Failing to report problems with energy storage and renewables. Energy regulators say Australia needs to pause its renewables rollout until technology gives the nation access to viable dispatchable power. And why give an open platform to renewables investors John Hewson and Simon Holmes a Court without acknowledging their financial interest? Why no reports of last year’s slowing in wind and solar in China and the developing world?
● Deliberately misreporting the ability of Australia to take any action whatsoever that would reduce atmospheric CO2 effects on fires or the Great Barrier Reef.
READ MORE: Chris Kenny — Bushfires blind alarmists in media to climate reality | Paul Kelly — Politics of climate change fan the flames of deepening division | ‘Inside’ the ABC’s climate group |
ABC managers should be worried about staff’s social media posts after Scott Morrison’s statement on November 21 of the self-evident truth: Australia alone cannot affect the temperature of the planet. Even Guardian editor Lenore Taylor, a long-time climate campaigner, had to admit on Insiders last Sunday week that Morrison was correct: with only 1.3 per cent of global emissions, no action Australia takes can affect the climate.
Said Taylor: “ So in the narrowest possible way, yes, he is right … but to look at it that way risks really missing the point. Looking at it that way … weakens our ability to argue for tougher action on the global stage.” So, in effect, we should lead the way even if it will make no difference because then the big global CO2 emitters might listen to us. Really?
Yet this is The Guardian’s position. Check its podcast with Taylor and Katharine Murphy interviewing former PM Malcolm Turnbull on November 23. All agree Australia can’t do anything to change the climate, but then argue we should behave as if we can to shame the biggest nations into doing more.
Editors should insist ABC reporters query such thinking to see if there is any evidence that moving ahead of our Paris climate commitments would shame any nation into anything. Editors should ask staff to examine whether shutting down our most valuable export industry — coal — would do anything but make Australians poorer, encourage substitution with dirtier coal sourced elsewhere and send electricity-intensive industries offshore to countries with lower environmental standards.
Media Watch does not care such a serious approach to a complex problem is not attempted by warmist media. It hides behind claims climate reporting cannot be balanced because that would imply equating the views of climate scientists with those of non-scientist sceptics. It ignores left media failure to scrutinise policy responses, the economics of such responses, the role of innovation other than renewables and examination of false claims, such as the many by non-climate scientist Tim Flannery a decade ago.
Media Watch favours a kind of fevered reporting that plays into public fear. Witness its disgraceful smearing of SkyNews’ Peta Credlin in June this year for her interview with Adani CEO Gautam Adani. Pointing out hundreds of millions of Indians have no access to electricity and their health is affected by the burning of wood and dung for cooking and light in unventilated homes was the sort of public interest reporting the corporation usually loves.
Last Monday Media Watch used Rupert Murdoch’s statement at News Corp’s AGM in New York that there were no climate deniers at News to ridicule commentary from several writers. ABC journalists appear incapable of engaging with the thoughts of non-left journalists. For instance, this newspaper was regularly criticised by the ABC for its position on climate even though it supported John Howard’s ETS in 2007. Its position was based on the correct idea that Australia should never get ahead of the rest of the world on climate action lest it export jobs and industry to countries with lower standards for no net benefit to the planet. The Oz was adamant, again correctly, that governments should only support least-cost abatement. Media Watch for years attacked this as denialism.
Andrew Bolt told his viewers on Tuesday night that he had again complained to the ABC about the latest Media Watch segment. If you follow Bolt’s many writings about climate it is obvious he does accept the temperature is rising. It has risen one degree since the start of the 20th century.
But Bolt also reports scientists from other disciplines who question parts of the science. Many say climate models are not yet sophisticated enough to account for the effective regulation of atmospheric CO2 by the deep oceans, forests and soils. Bolt and others criticised by Media Watch often point to effects from solar activity. Many writers, like many climate scientists, say CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas, pointing to water vapour and methane. These are all facts.
Media Watch host Paul Barry last week thought News Corp’s columnists should have given more credence to the views of firefighters on climate change, which seems at odds with his program’s view that only scientists should speak on the issue. Neither the fire chiefs Barry quoted nor the program’s script acknowledged Scott Morrison’s point that Australia cannot change the world’s temperature.
But there are lessons for journalists from the fires. My wife and I own properties in the NSW fire zone between Port Macquarie and Crowdy Head. Many Greens-voting Landcare volunteers in the area say the local council and the state government need to clear dead trees from forest floors.
We also need more and better firefighting equipment. We need to learn from the royal commission into the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria a decade ago in which 173 people died and 2133 houses were destroyed. It recommended “bushfire risk be accounted for in the application of controls on clearing native vegetation … and houses be restricted on high-risk blocks too small to allow a defendable space to be created …”
It might also help if the media sometimes did what ABC critic Chris Kenny did: look at records over the past two centuries showing fires much worse than those of the past month.
Pro-Israel lobbyists fail in contempt bid over Lattouf case
A group of pro-Israel lobbyists who campaigned for Antoinette Lattouf’s dismissal from the ABC have failed in their bid to have the Nine newspapers prosecuted for contempt of court.
ABC’s frequent flyer: Chairman’s booming travel bill revealed
Kim Williams spent almost eight times as much in his first 14 months in the top job as his predecessor Ita Buttrose did in over two-and-a-half years, it has emerged.
The ABC’s board should insist editorial managers address their reporters’ particular brand of “climate denialism”.