Memo to ABC: on climate, stick to the facts

This week Paul Barry studiously ignored the ABC’s catastrophism and was dismissive of what we are doing to our children. We should explain to our kids they will not face an unliveable planet.

In recent weeks we have seen how the ABC fuels climate hysteria, generates climate anxiety among our kids, then seeks to deny or dismiss the problem, writes Chris Kenny. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

If there is one area where the public broadcaster needs to focus on facts rather than ideology, it is global warming.

In recent weeks we have seen how the ABC fuels climate hysteria, generates climate anxiety among our kids, then seeks to deny or dismiss the problem. It is reckless. This is a publicly funded organisation acting against its charter by eschewing objectivity in favour of a political posturing.

In these pages last month I wrote about the growing incidence of children’s mental health issues being caused by hysterical climate change reporting and rhetoric.

My column cited examples of misleadingly alarmist reporting and quoted an expert psychiatrist and psychologist with first-hand experience of surging childhood anxiety in their practices.

Yet on his Media Watch program this week, a supercilious Paul Barry studiously ignored the ABC’s catastrophism and was dismissive of what we are doing to our children. Barry ran an alarmist climate spiel, quoted my line that climate catastrophism is calculated community child abuse, then commented: “Child abuse? It really does beggar belief.”

Indeed, it does. The idea that we would deliberately and unnecessarily try to convince our children they face a bleak, even deadly, future is unfathomable. But this is a pursuit many in the media and politics have been indulging in for years.

ABC Media Watch host Paul Barry.

Ironically, the ABC children’s program I have called out for putting the fear of Gaia into our young people, Behind the News or BTN, recently focused on the psychological impact of climate change on children. The segment began with a clip of ABC News telling viewers about “Earth’s hottest month on record”, US President Joe Biden talking about the “existential threat” of climate change and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warning “climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning”.

What a way to reassure and inspire children about their future. The program presenter, Amelia Moseley, said climate talk was “pretty much everywhere all the time and sometimes all this bad news can really start to get to us”. You can say that again. Moseley continued: “In fact, experts have a name for this, it’s known as climate anxiety.”

The ABC then showed social scientist Blanche Verlie from the University of Wollongong talking about people’s “painful feelings” and “worry about the future”, while psychiatric epidemiologist and health services researcher Fiona Charlson of the University of Queensland said the images of bushfires and floods were “very distressing”.

Then we heard from schoolchildren, seemingly in their early teens. “What I’m mainly worried about is what would happen in the future,” said one boy. “When I hear about climate change it does make me feel scared,” said a girl, before another added: “I don’t want our home to be destroyed”, and a third said: “In the future it’s going to be even worse, Earth is not going to be liveable for us.”

So why bother with your homework?

While younger children are the ones we should be most worried about, BTN cited an international study of 16 to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including Australia that found 59 per cent were “very or extremely worried about climate change”, with almost half saying this concern affected their daily lives and 75 per cent thinking the “future is frightening”.

The program included comments from Rupert Saunders, of the Headspace youth mental health service, about seeing young clients “concerned about the climate and experiencing anxiety”. Saunders suggested one remedy was for young people to take a break from the news and social media – perhaps he should have added especially the ABC and BTN, given their appetite for endless doomsday fare.

But BTN was not self-critical, preferring to suggest children would be less anxious if they knew more government action was being taken. So even this report about “climate anxiety” was used to push the political agenda.

For primary schoolchildren and younger, surely this unconstrained catastrophism cannot be justified. When media, schools and politicians teach children the future is terrifying and the planet will be unliveable or destroyed, how do we expect them to react?

Child psychologist Clare Rowe.

Child and adolescent psychologist Clare Rowe (who I interview regularly on television and was quoted in the column Media Watch criticised) reaffirmed the harm she sees in children.

She was astonished by the ABC’s attitude: “That’s absurd to me, when they say that climate anxiety is a real thing and yet they are responsible for having a huge part in creating that.”

Rowe has been calling for “a return to the sanctity of childhood” by ensuring there is separation between the adult world and child’s world. “If we think that we’re raising globally conscious citizens by overexposing them to adult concerns and concepts we’re wrong,” she says. “Because all we’re doing is creating very depressed children, very anxious children, and they’re not mobilised to fix these problems, even if they do exist. They are paralysed by it because they don’t think they’re going to get to adulthood.”

Psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed draws a distinction with teen­agers, who need to learn about the science and the issues. “I think with the abuse thing, where I don’t like it is where there is this real pessimism, and what I call learned helplessness,” Ahmed says.

“When it is framed as this metaphysical judgment on the species, and they get this apocalyptic dimension that they can’t do anything about it, and then they have this kind of global sense of exactly that, of helplessness, of pessimism about humans in general, that’s the bit I don’t like.”

In my “child abuse” column I used examples from literature – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Peter Goldsworthy’s Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam – to underline how, when there is true bleakness and real hopelessness, parents protect young people from it rather than fuel panic and insecurity. With climate, a greater emphasis on the facts, rather than hype, would be reassuring.

When it comes to global warming, any rational assessment of the facts tells us the hysteria about extreme climate change is grossly overegged. First, on what is happening, we have yet to experience a weather event that has not happened before, so we should stop pretending every natural disaster is unprecedented or heralds a new living hell.

Second, if eliminating carbon dioxide emissions is the answer, we know the world could do this relatively simply within a few decades through the deployment of two technologies – nuclear energy and that amazing carbon pollution reduction machine, the tree. All the fiddling with wind turbines and solar farms (displacing vegetation along the way) proves we are not seized with urgency.

We should level with our kids rather than torment them. We should explain that they will not face an unliveable planet, their forebears have all survived the same natural disasters we are seeing now, and that if weather extremes do gradually increase, we have the technology and where-with-all to get close to zero emissions just as soon as we decide the benefits outweigh the costs.

The ABC needs to understand the interplay between science, engineering and politics, and endeavour to take emotion out of the equation instead of feeding anxiety. Instead, we get BTN in 2019 showing reporter Martin Dougan melting away in his wheelchair as he tells kids about new maximum temperature records (without mentioning they relied on earlier records being revised downwards).

Former editor in chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell. Picture: Cathy Rushton

The same year, BTN reported glowingly on Greta Thunberg’s antics at the UN, and told us about how Venus, now the solar system’s hottest planet at more than 400C, was once very different. “A few billion years ago Venus might have been way cooler, like a balmy 20 to 50 degrees on average and may have even been habitable,” the reporter says, with the obvious inference that we might be taking Earth in the Venus direction.

Last year BTN’s climate special told kids it all sounded “pretty grim” and focused on the “controversial fuel” of coal. They showed children in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu suggesting they were facing an existential threat from global warming already, and we heard schoolchildren saying things like “if we want a future for Earth” we need to step up.

In these pages four years ago Chris Mitchell, The Australian’s former editor-in-chief, called out the media strategy behind all this. “The word climate is clickbait to the ABC and Guardian Australia in the way the word sex is to the Daily Mail,” Mitchell noted at a time some news organisations had decided to officially adopt the new term “climate emergency”.

“Why on earth would adult voters stoke the irrational fears of children?” asked Mitchell. “Do climate change alarmist editors really think adults make decisions about jobs and employment based on children’s nightmares?”

It beggars belief.