Ebb and flow of climate coverage

Remember when soil erosion was going to be the next disaster? Stephen Matchett and Helen Trinca report

COPENHAGEN has had a language all its own this past fortnight as delegates battled the minutiae of draft agreements. The obscure acronyms of the summit went over the heads of most of us, but it set us thinking about the way some words related to the environment and green issues are now commonplace.

Think about the big one, climate change. A decade ago, it was scarcely used in news reports: this year, it has been hard to escape. In 2000, The Weekend Australian and The Australian published just 128 stories that mentioned climate change. In the year until December 14 this year, the figure was just shy of 3300. That's an average of more than 10 references each day.

It was not always so. Climate change was level pegging with "global warming" until 2005 but the following year it took off as the phrase of choice when talking about what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd likes to call the "moral challenge of our times", overtaking global warming, which this past year was mentioned 899 times.

We ran the computer over a number of other words, looking at their usage each year in the noughties, curious to see which words had become embedded in the language and which had fallen out of use.

Our analysis is admittedly crude, checking the number of times a word shows up in the

library archives of the newspaper. But it is revealing in its own way, the citations signalling the ups and downs of the climate change debate (there we go again).

In 2000, for example, nobody was much interested in carbon emissions (17 mentions) but this year we are (765). And while the idea of an emissions trading scheme was around in the middle of the decade it only took off in 2008, when it jumped from eight citations in 2007 to 314. It has tripled this year, not bad for a scheme that nobody seems to understand.

Eco-warriors are fickle folk, regularly changing the environmental disasters du jour.

Issues we were once assured were central to human survival no longer rate a mention. The hole in the ozone layer was once a big deal, with 64 references in 2000. In the past 10 years, activists drifted away, in part because the hole began to shrink, so that this year, the references are just 36.

And pity the scientists who bet their careers on addressing erosion. This was a huge issue in the 1990s, with activists assuring us that Australia's topsoil was blowing out to sea.

But this year it rated just 16 stories. Some issues are simply not sexy enough to be stayers. Ethanol was the fuel for the future (233 stories in 2007) but ran out of gas this year, with just one-quarter of the coverage it received in 2007.

Clean coal seems to already be fading, more than halving from its peak of 424 stories in 2007. Wind power too, seems not to have flown in media coverage, with about 120 stories each year since 2006.

Activists with a better nose for a winner will have climbed on board the rising sea level raft.

In 2000 The Australian wrote about it just 42 times but by 2009 the figure was up by more than 400 per cent.

Sometimes, the vaguer the concept the better. "Sustainability" is a star example, increasing close to sevenfold across the decade.

After the avalanche of coverage from Copenhagen, it's hard to believe the green "industry" has

peaked. Yet our tables show that the three most recognisable phrases of the environmental movement -- climate change, global warming; and greenhouse gas, were all cited more frequently in 2007 -- the federal election year when Labor ran hard on the issue -- than in 2009.

As for the green capital itself, Copenhagen's role in saving the planet went from a couple of references in 2000 to about 1000 this year.

In contrast the most famous Australian ever to stay in the city, Mary Donaldson, only made it into the paper 16 times. Kevin Rudd will improve on that.