Stoking fear a fool’s game in climate change reporting

Panic is most obvious in reporting about climate change. Picture: AFP

Once-sober media organisations that distinguished themselves from racy tabloid television and newspapers now prefer panic to accurate and sceptical reporting.

Sceptical is not a popular word among young, activist journalists who should have been social workers. But it was a quality that news editors, sub-editors and executive producers used to bring to the craft. Now it’s the reverse at what were once considered up-market publishers such as the old Fairfax papers and the ABC.

Panic is most obvious in reporting about climate change, where our ABC never misses an opportunity to publish wild claims no serious scientist believes. But the bias towards panic is ubiquitous: it was obvious at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when claims of 150,000 dead here and emergency ICU wards overflowing within weeks were pumped out across the Fairfax papers and the ABC.

The trend towards “panic journalism” follows the empowerment of young reporters who have seen little of life and are no longer protected by editing processes that have been cut to save money. This column has argued publishers embrace this collapse in standards because they see it as a marketing tool in a fragmented media landscape. People who are disposed to moral panic about race, climate or capitalism love to consume media that confirms their bias. But it is a fool’s game. Mainstream media is just surrendering its trust advantage to social media extremism. The facts will eventually become clear, and there are early signs this is beginning to happen.

While journalists who bother to read scientific reports for themselves always knew much of the reporting at left-wing media was wildly exaggerated, even some climate activists are now seeing through the lies of Extinction Rebellion, the linking of CO2 emissions to individual bushfire and storm events and other claims not supported by science.

The propagandist filmmaker Michael Moore kicked this off with a film showing the downside of renewables — Planet of the Humans. The film would have been largely unnoticed but for demands by warming zealots that it be banned. People decided to watch it for themselves.

The film shows pretty much what this newspaper has been saying, correctly, for two decades. Renewables do not provide reliable baseload power. They are expensive and only viable with government subsidy. And they are beloved by rich bankers because they provide high taxpayer-subsidised rates of return.

As this paper revealed at the time of the launch of hybrid cars in Australia, even motor vehicle renewable technologies have enormous carbon footprints in their manufacturing, in mining for the rare metals they rely on and in the case of electric cars in the baseload power they need to recharge. They are a con. Environment writers at Fairfax, the Guardian and the ABC won’t call the facts out.

Last week readers of this newspaper were told about a new book by US environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Shellenberger admits he was part of a movement that knew it was grossly exaggerating the facts, and much of what he tells readers has been reported by this newspaper for 20 years.

For him, the scaring of children around the world with false facts was too much. Yet when this column and other journalists at News Corp papers have told the truth about the RCP8.5 scenario used to justify false claims of a 2030 climate emergency they have been either ignored or ridiculed in the left media, most prominently by ABC Media Watch host Paul Barry.

As this column has explained before, RCP8.5 is not a serious scenario but the top-end outlier of four different IPCC scenarios. It is not where the IPCC says the world is tracking. It assumes coal use will increase by almost 400 per cent by 2070 and no nuclear, renewable or gas power generation will be brought on stream to mitigate emissions. It is at odds with the facts already.

Australians are less familiar with another climate panic defection. Zion Lights, the 34-year-old former spokeswoman for the UK Extinction Rebellion group so beloved by Guardian Australia, was so appalled by the movement’s misleading approach to science she quit late last month to become a lobbyist for nuclear energy. After reading up on the benefits of zero emissions nuclear power she said: “The facts don’t really change, but once I understood them I did change my mind.”

Journalism’s litany of environmental lies extends far beyond bogus extinction stories, the failure to analyse renewable power accurately, blind hatred of fossil fuels and childish enthusiasm for hybrid cars. Dozens of false claims about the state of planet Earth have been run, but not corrected when they prove false.

Some truths not in Shellenberger’s piece here last week:

● The Guardian reported to enormous publicity in 2010 the Greenland ice sheet was melting and global sea levels could rise by 7m. Since then Greenland’s temperatures have returned to 1930s levels and Greenland’s glaciers stopped retreating seven years ago. Not much reporting of that.

● As this column said last year, most of the world’s coral islands, especially those of the South Pacific, are not sinking, according to research from the University of Auckland. Now a new study led by the University of Plymouth and reported in Science Advances shows wave action on reefs off such islands actually builds up sediment levels and helps to raise island surfaces.

● A new paper in the journal Science, “The internal origin of the east-west asymmetry of Antarctic climate change”, suggests “the current asymmetry of Antarctic surface climate change is undoubtedly of natural origin because no external factors (eg orbital or anthropogenic factors) contribute to the asymmetric mode”. Data from historic samples suggests climate fluctuations in the tropics such as El Nino and the Southern Oscillation Index are a factor in different rates of warming.

● Despite years of credulous media claims that India and China are moving away from fossil fuel, the opposite is true. Last month Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India, with the fourth largest coal reserves in the world, was launching commercial auctions to unlock coal reserves from “years of lockdown”. Bloomberg analyst Michelle Leung said she expected China’s next five-year plan to target 1300 gigawatts of coal capacity, up from 1050 today. China is also expanding construction of coal-fired power plants. After adding 29.9gW last year Bloomberg said construction already under way in May would account for an extra 46gW. But every ABC business journalist I ever hear insists coal is a “stranded asset”.

Shellenberger attributes climate panic to Malthusian fear. Thomas Malthus wrote in the 18th century that food production would not keep pace with population growth. He did not foresee population rises would slow as societies got richer and failed to account for human improvement in agricultural production. Fear in the face of difficult problems is easier for the media to sell than understanding.