No kidding, climate change debate gets sillier

A young girl holds up an SOS banner in The Domain ahead of a climate rally last week in Sydney. Picture: Getty Images

By rights, media treatment of global warming and climate change should be improving, surely.

The longer these issues run, you would expect journalists to learn more, grasp the details and focus on the quandaries, options and dilemmas before us.

But no. The debate remains almost entirely superficial, and pardon the pun, polarised.

We’ve seen evidence in recent days that the public debate might be getting even dumber.

The climate issue is routinely portrayed as a battle of feelings between the good people who want to save the planet from certain doom and the evil people who want to cook it to make money.

There are armies of alarmists and handfuls calling hoax if you want to deal only in the extremes.

Sadly this is what most media does, ignoring the sensible and, dare I say it, sceptical middle ground. Many journalists amplify the activists’ alarmist exaggerations as they demand we “believe in the science” without comprehending how this oxymoronic slogan gives their game away.

Belief has no place in this debate, only science matters. Yet it is belief and gesture that dominates media coverage and receives far too little interrogation from the journalists.

Television news coverage of the climate protests on Friday was neither insightful nor dispassionate. It was barracking.

We saw journalists and presenters looking to associate themselves with what they called a “movement” and applying precious little scrutiny to the claims and aims of the protesters.

On Nine News, Deb Knight introduced the story by declaring “Sydney was brought to a standstill by more than 80,000 people fired up over climate change” before reporter Lizzie Pearl called it an “extraordinary show of people power, their message deafening”.

Then, of course, we were treated to global policy solutions from the kids. “We think not enough things are being done and if no one will do anything then we have to protest,” said one. Pearl stood before the crowd and told us that while most of the protesters were “too young to vote” the “huge” turnout meant their voices would be “hard to ignore”.

That claim might be worth examining. Let us be generous and say there were 80,000 at the protest and 60,000 of them were school and university students.

Given there are about 1.5 million school and university students in NSW, they represented about 4 per cent of students.

And some of them are a long way off voting. On ABC TV News Friday night, Philippa McDonald included a comment from a student who looked and sounded about five years old and said he was protesting to “save the world”. Sounds like a good cause.

Channel 10’s Hugh Riminton interviewed a couple of boys aged 11 who said they were protesting against “ScoMo” and the Adani coalmine. “We don’t like ScoMo” one of the boys said, and they wanted the Prime Minister gone.

Now I don’t know about you but even though I took an interest in politics from an early age, I know two things about my 11-year-old self: I would have given anything to get out of the classroom for the day, and my view of the PM would have largely reflected those of my parents.

Riminton also ran comments from one of the student leaders, Daisy Jeffrey. “We are going to make things more and more difficult for them, until they secure a safe future for our generation and generations to come,” she said of the politicians.

On the ABC, Jeffrey said: “We are on the outskirts of the biggest catastrophe humanity has ever faced and our government is doing nothing.”

On Nine News she said: “We’ve listened to the science, we’ve learnt it at school, we’re out here today demanding action and our government is not taking it.”

Yet none of them mentioned that Jeffrey is the daughter of my former colleague here at The Australian, James Jeffrey, who is now the speechwriter to Anthony Albanese. My understanding is Daisy has been an activist for some time, predating her father’s move to the Opposition Leader’s office, but when a protest leader is a minor and is condemning the government I would have thought the parental connection to the Opposition Leader’s office might have warranted a mention.

Too many journalists seem to accept the wildly incorrect premises of much of the activist rhetoric, such as claims the Australian government is doing nothing or that the planet is doomed. In her Nine story, Pearl asked a student, “Do you think they’ll do something?”

Introducing the ABC coverage, newsreader Jeremy Fernandez said the protests were to “demand action on climate change”. Of the coverage I saw only Ten’s Riminton bother to mention that the demands of the protesters to phase out a host of industries would cost the nation $100bn in annual income.

And in none of the coverage mentioned above did reporters bother to point out the extensive climate actions and Paris targets already committed to in this country — renewable energy interventions, multi-billion-dollar subsidies, energy efficiency programs and the like — or that global emissions are rising by massively more than our reduction commitments so that nothing this country does alone can deliver any environmental benefit.

Instead of instilling facts and context, the coverage took false premises and alarmist claptrap, literally from the mouths of babes, and amplified them, often to the point of endorsement. And in trying to invest this protest with political momentum, they all ignored the fact that just four months ago we had a general election where voters rejected an alarmist and drastic approach to climate policy.

The good news, however, is that all this inanity might be overcome within a few decades thanks to science of a different kind. In Nine Media newspapers, Caitlin Fitzsimmons shared stories of young couples who were deciding not to have children because of their climate fears.

“My conscience says I can’t give this child what I’ve enjoyed, I can’t give them the certainty of a future where they can be all they can be … or have the things they should have, like breathable air and drinkable water,” said Morgan, whose partner Adam agrees that while they would love kids it isn’t worth the risk when the world is “heading blindfolded towards catastrophe”. Fitzsimmons quoted others of like mind, including Emma from Queensland who said she cried when the Coalition won, and realised she could not bring children into a world that might be “uninhabitable” in a few decades.

This is media feeding on the idiocy it has helped to create. The upside, however, is that if you understand the science of natural selection, this means we should end up with a more intelligent climate debate within a generation or two.