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The latest United Nations climate report was another reminder that climate change’s insidious effects are already pervasive. Most news coverage dwells on seemingly irrepressible impacts—acidic oceans, floods, wildfires, and monster storms.But there’s more to the climate story than destruction porn, and we have more control over climate change than most coverage suggests.We can curb global warming by reducing fossil fuel burning. Most countries now have laws that limit fossil fuel use and support cleaner energy. And we can manage global warming’s effects on our lives. Efforts are underway from Wisconsin’s Dane County to the European Union to refashion cities, farms, and spending priorities to help cope with changes in the weather. President Obama wants to spend $1 billion next year on climate adaptation.Nearly nine out of every 10 stories that discussed climate change’s impacts failed to mention any actions we can take against the problem.Much more action is needed to slow the effects and adapt to them. But building that momentum—the kind needed to pressure governments to end fossil fuel subsidies and to rebuild coastal ecosystems to buffer floods—is more difficult when a sense of helplessness pervades.“Media coverage of the most recent [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report generally discusses the significant threat that climate change poses—while suggesting that, due to political conflict and other barriers, it’s unlikely that effective action can be taken,” says Sol Hart, an assistant professor of communication studies and the environment at the University of Michigan.It’s not that network news totally ignores renewable energy advances or other ways of tackling climate change. It’s that those actions are rarely discussed in the same stories that focus on climate change’s impacts.Hart led a study that examined climate-related coverage by U.S. network news from 2005 to mid-2011, including 152 reports from ABC, 102 from CBS, and 186 from NBC. Nearly nine out of every 10 stories that discussed climate change’s impacts failed to mention any actions we can take against the problem. The findings were published online in February by Science Communication:Overall, 59.3% of network news broadcasts [dealing with climate] mentioned impacts from climate change. A nearly equal percentage of broadcasts, 59.1%, discussed actions that could be taken to address climate change. However, impacts and actions were more likely to be discussed in separate broadcasts than in the same broadcast: Just 39.8% of broadcasts that discussed actions also discussed impacts, whereas 87.3% of broadcasts that did not mention actions discussed impacts.“If an individual is reading multiple climate change stories this probably does not matter as much,” Hart says. “However, climate coverage in the news is still very scant. When coverage is offered, individuals are likely to only read a single story on the issue—if at all.”Senior Democratic lawmakers and Senator Bernie Sanders suggested in a frustrated letter to network bosses in January that fossil fuel industry advertising was causing them to avoid climate coverage. Hart’s findings suggest that the problem is more nuanced than that. Even when networks do cover climate change, they’re helping polluters by paralyzing us with a false sense of dread

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What Sort of a Story is Climate Change? Tue 3 Dec 2013, 6:30pm Free Word Lecture Theatre

Image via kcdsTM through Flickr Commons Climate change is described by many as one of the most urgent and important stories of our time, but it can also seem difficult, confusing - even boring. The last great surge of media attention occurred in the late-2000s, after which the dominant narrative came under bitter and sustained attack. Are there other ways of telling stories about climate change that support a better quality of understanding and debate? Join us for a panel and audience discussion about what kinds of stories are being told, and could be told, about climate change. The panel will include Nick Drake, the poet and screenwriter, and Caspar Henderson, journalist and author of the acclaimed Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Kate Fletcher, leading author on fashion and sustainability, based at the London College of Fashion and Zoe Svendsen, theatre director and Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge. This event has been organised by the Mediating Change group (based at the Open University), the Ashden Trust and Free Word. It is part of a wider series of discussions, podcasts and publications exploring the relationship between culture and climate change. The first publication, Culture and Climate Change: Recordings, came out in 2011. The second volume will be published in Spring 2014 and addresses different types of climate-change narratives. This event will feed ideas into the second publication, and will also be available as a podcast. Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on printMore Sharing Services5 Tags

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A Skeptic’s Guide To Global Climate Change By popular request, find out why scientists think climate is changing and how we know global warming is real and human caused; examine a summary of the evidence and discover what’s behind the debate on climate change. This booklet has 28 pages at 8.5 × 11 inches.

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Foreword by Michael Shermer: “Confessions of a Former Environmental Skeptic” Skepticism v. Denialism The Scientific Background and Evidence Answers to 25 Classic Climate Denier Arguments Are We the Cause? Doubt is Our Product: The Forces Behind Science Denialism A Skeptical Scientist Looks at Climate Data Consequences

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Listen to a panel and audience discuss the different narratives we can use to talk about our changing environment. Climate change is described by many as one of the most urgent and important stories of our time, but it can also seem difficult, confusing -

even boring. The last great surge of media attention occurred in the late2000s, after which the dominant narrative came under bitter and sustained attack. But are there other ways of telling stories about climate change that support a better quality of understanding and debate? In this podcast, an informed panel and audience discuss the different ways we can tell stories about our environment, in an event hosted at Free Word Centre, organised by the Mediating Change group (based at the Open University), the Ashden Trust and Free Word.

The report from the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded that climate change was already having effects in real time – melting sea ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic, killing off coral reefs in the oceans, and leading to heat waves, heavy rains and megadisasters. And the worst was yet to come. Climate change posed a threat to global food stocks, and to human security, the blockbuster report said. “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC. Monday's report was the most sobering so far from the UN climate panel and, scientists said, the most definitive. The report – a three year joint effort by more than 300 scientists – grew to 2,600 pages and 32 volumes. The volume of scientific literature on the effects of climate change has doubled since the last report, and the findings make an increasingly detailed picture of how climate change – in tandem with existing fault lines such as poverty and inequality – poses a much more direct threat to life and livelihood. This was reflected in the language. The summary mentioned the word “risk” more than 230 times, compared to just over 40 mentions seven years ago, according to a count by the Red Cross. At the forefront of those risks was the potential for humanitarian crisis. The report catalogued some of the disasters that have been visited around the planet since 2000: killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in Australia, and deadly floods in Pakistan. “We are now in an era where climate change isn't some kind of future hypothetical,” said Chris Field, one of the two main authors of the report. Those extreme weather events would take a disproportionate toll on poor, weak and elderly people. The scientists said governments did not have systems in place to protect those populations. “This would really be a severe challenge for some of the poorest communities and poorest

countries in the world,” said Maggie Opondo, a geographer from the University of Nairobi and one of the authors. The warning signs about climate change and extreme weather events have been accumulating over time. But this report struck out on relatively new ground by drawing a clear line connecting climate change to food scarcity, and conflict. The report said climate change had already cut into the global food supply. Global crop yields were beginning to decline – especially for wheat – raising doubts as to whether production could keep up with population growth. “It has now become evident in some parts of the world that the green revolution has reached a plateau,” Pachauri said. The future looks even more grim. Under some scenarios, climate change could lead to dramatic drops in global wheat production as well as reductions in maize. "Climate change is acting as a brake. We need yields to grow to meet growing demand, but already climate change is slowing those yields," said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and an author of the report. Other food sources are also under threat. Fish catches in some areas of the tropics are projected to fall by between 40% and 60%, according to the report. The report also connected climate change to rising food prices and political instability, for instance the riots in Asia and Africa after food price shocks in 2008. "The impacts are already evident in many places in the world. It is not something that is [only] going to happen in the future," said David Lobell, a professor at Stanford University's centre for food security, who devised the models. "Almost everywhere you see the warming effects have a negative affect on wheat and there is a similar story for corn as well. These are not yet enormous effects but they show clearly that the trends are big enough to be important," Lobell said. The report acknowledged that there were a few isolated areas where a longer growing season had been good for farming. But it played down the idea that there may be advantages to climate change as far as food production is concerned.

Overall, the report said, "Negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts." Scientists and campaigners pointed to the finding as a defining feature of the report. The report also warned for the first time that climate change, combined with poverty and economic shocks, could lead to war and drive people to leave their homes. With the catalogue of risks, the scientists said they hoped to persuade governments and the public that it was past time to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to plan for sea walls and other infrastructure that offer some protection for climate change. “The one message that comes out of this is the world has to adapt and the world has to mitigate,” said Pachauri.

It's an unmistakable taste of things to come. The floods that have deluged Britain may be small beer on a global scale. Compared with thecyclone that killed thousands in the Philippines last autumn, the deadly inundations in Brazil or the destruction of agricultural land and hunger in Africa, the south of England has got off lightly. But the message has started to get through. This is exactly the kind of disaster predicted to become ever more frequent and extreme as greenhouse gas-driven climate change heats up the planet at a potentially catastrophic rate. And it's exposed the David Cameron who wanted to "get rid of all the green crap" and who slashed flood defence spending by £100m a year as weak and reckless to his own supporters. Of course there have been plenty of floods in the past, and it's impossible to identify any particular weather event as directly caused by global warming. But as the Met Office's chief scientist Julia Slingo put it, "all the evidence suggests that climate change has a role to play in it". With 4% more moisture over the oceans than in the 1970s and sea levels rising, how could it be otherwise? If it weren't for the misery for the people at the sharp end, you might even imagine there was some divine justice in the fact that the areas hit hardest, from the Somerset Levels to the Thames valley are all Tory heartlands. It's the same with the shale gas fracking plans the government is so keen on: the fossil fuel drilling and mining so long kept away from the affluent is now turning up on their Sussex doorstep. How do the locals feel that their government cut flood defences for the areas now swimming in water in the name of austerity, while one in four environment agency staff is being axed and the environment

secretary,Owen Paterson, slashed his department's budget for adaptation to global warming by 40%? Not too impressed, to judge by the polling. But then, paradoxically,Paterson is in fact a climate change denier in what was supposed to be "the greenest government ever", a man who refused to accept a briefing from the chief scientific adviser at the energy and climate change department, reckons there are benefits to global warming and thinks "we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries". Of course he's not alone among Conservatives in being what one of his cabinet colleagues called "climate stupid". The basic physics may be unanswerable, 97% of climate scientists agree that carbon emissions are dangerously heating up the planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn it's 95% likely that most of the temperature rise since 1950 is due to greenhouse gases and deforestation, the risk of a global temperature rise tipping above 1.5–2C be catastrophic for humanity. But the climate flat-earthers are having none of it. As a result, what should be a pressing debate about how to head off global calamity has been reframed in the media as a discussion about whether industrialdriven climate change is in fact taking place at all – as if it were a matter of opinion rather than science. The impact of this phoney controversy during an economic crisis has been dramatic: in the US, the proportion of the population accepting burning fossil fuels drives climate change dropped from 71% to 44% between 2007 and 2011. In Britain, the numbers who believe the climate isn't changing at all rose from 4% to 19% between 2005 and 2013 (though the floods seem to be correcting that). The problem is at its worst in the Anglo-Saxon world – which has also historically made the largest contribution to pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Take Australia, which is afflicted by longer and hotter heatwaves, drought and bushfires. Nevertheless, its rightwing prime minister Tony Abbott dismisses any link with climate change, which he described as crap, and has pledged to repeal a carbon tax on the country's 300 biggest polluters. The move was hailed by his political soulmate, the Canadian prime minister and tar sands champion Stephen Harper, as an important message to the world. And in the US, climate change denial now has the Republican party in its grip. What lies behind the political right's growing refusal to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus? There's certainly a strong tendency, especially in the US, for conservative white men to refuse to accept climate change is caused by human beings. But there shouldn't be any inherent reason why people who believe in social hierarchies,

individualism and inequality should care less about the threat of floods, drought, starvation and mass migrations than anyone else. After all, rightwing people have children too. Part of the answer is in the influence of some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world: the oil, gas and mining companies that have strained every nerve to head off the threat of effective action to halt the growth of carbon emissions, buying legislators, government ministers, scientists and thinktanks in the process. In the US, hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate and billionaires' cash (including from the oil and gas brothers Koch) has been used to rubbish climate change science. That is also happening on a smaller scale elsewhere, including Britain. But climate change denial is also about ideology. Many deniers have come to the conclusion that climate change is some kind of leftwing conspiracy – because the scale of the international public intervention necessary to cut carbon emissions in the time demanded by the science simply cannot be accommodated within the market-first, private enterprise framework they revere. As Joseph Bast, the president of the conservative US Heartland Institute told the writer and campaigner Naomi Klein: for the left, climate change is "the perfect thing", a justification for doing everything it "wanted to do anyway". When it comes to the incompatibility of effective action of averting climate disaster with their own neoliberal ideology, the deniers are absolutely right. In the words of Nicholas Stern's 2006 report, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen". The intervention, regulation, taxation, social ownership, redistribution and global co-operation needed to slash carbon emissions and build a sustainable economy for the future is clearly incompatible with a broken economic model based on untrammelled self-interest and the corporate free-for-all that created the crisis in the first place. Given the scale of the threat, the choice for the rest of us could not be more obvious. Twitter: @SeumasMilne • This article was amended on February 20. The third sentence of the ninth paragraph originally stated that Tony Abbott, Australia's prime minister, had repealed a carbon tax on the country's 300 biggest polluters. This has now been corrected to read "has pledged to repeal". One of the planet's top dipsticks is in trouble. The "Keeling curve," the most famous measurement of the world's rising levels of carbon dioxide for the past six decades, is in jeopardy from funding shortfalls.

The Keeling curve, run by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, is the longest continuous record of carbon dioxide measurements on the planet. The measurements were begun in 1958 by Scripps climate scientist Charles David Keeling and are taken near the top of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. Keeling died in 2005, and his son, Ralph, is now the keeper of the "curve." A physicist himself, he says the ongoing measurements at Mauna Loa are on the "cutting edge of discovering what we're doing to the planet." Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the greenhouse gas responsible for most of the warming attributable to such gases, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Earth System Research Lab, which also measures carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa and other locations. Increasing amounts of CO2 and other gases caused by the burning of the oil, gas and coal that power our world are enhancing the natural "greenhouse effect," causing the planet to warm to levels that climate scientists say can't be linked to natural forces. Carbon dioxide levels were around 280 "parts per million" (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution, when humans first began releasing large amounts into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. They're now near 400 ppm. "The programs have been supported over the years almost entirely through a bundle of federal grants, typically each lasting three years or so, with several grants running at one time," Keeling said on the Scripps blog. Calling the process "haphazard," he added that the past year was especially difficult because several grants expired. A recent crowdsourcing appeal has brought in some money, he said, but more will be needed to keep the $1 million per year project going. Increased awareness of the funding issues, brought about by the crowdsourcing request, has spurred new funding opportunities from private sources.

"The situation is still very uncertain, but more hopeful," Keeling said. "Still, we don't know yet how these are going to turn out, and the immediate funding situation is still very urgent." All of this comes against the backdrop of last week's CO2 rise above 400 ppm at Mauna Loa for the second straight year. (CO2 levels peak in the spring when plants come alive, then decrease when the plants die in the autumn.) Keeling says that within the next two to three years, the measurement will stay above 400 ppm permanently. "It's just a matter of time before it stays over 400 forever," he said. Consistent levels above 400 ppm haven't been seen in human history and perhaps as long as millions of years. The latest United Nations climate report was another reminder that climate change’s insidious effects are already pervasive. Most news coverage dwells on seemingly irrepressible impacts—acidic oceans, floods, wildfires, and monster storms. But there’s more to the climate story than destruction porn, and we have more control over climate change than most coverage suggests. We can curb global warming by reducing fossil fuel burning. Most countries now have laws that limit fossil fuel use and support cleaner energy. And we can manage global warming’s effects on our lives. Efforts are underway from Wisconsin’s Dane County to theEuropean Union to refashion cities, farms, and spending priorities to help cope with changes in the weather. President Obama wants to spend $1 billion next year on climate adaptation. Nearly nine out of every 10 stories that discussed climate change’s impacts failed to mention any actions we can take against the problem. Much more action is needed to slow the effects and adapt to them. But building that momentum—the kind needed to pressure governments to end fossil fuel subsidies and to rebuild coastal ecosystems to buffer floods—is more difficult when a sense of helplessness pervades.

“Media coverage of the most recent [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report generally discusses the significant threat that climate change poses—while suggesting that, due to political conflict and other barriers, it’s unlikely that effective action can be taken,” says Sol Hart, an assistant professor of communication studies and the environment at the University of Michigan. It’s not that network news totally ignores renewable energy advances or other ways of tackling climate change. It’s that those actions are rarely discussed in the same stories that focus on climate change’s impacts. Hart led a study that examined climate-related coverage by U.S. network news from 2005 to mid-2011, including 152 reports from ABC, 102 from CBS, and 186 from NBC. Nearly nine out of every 10 stories that discussed climate change’s impacts failed to mention any actions we can take against the problem. The findings werepublished online in February by Science Communication: Overall, 59.3% of network news broadcasts [dealing with climate] mentioned impacts from climate change. A nearly equal percentage of broadcasts, 59.1%, discussed actions that could be taken to address climate change. However, impacts and actions were more likely to be discussed in separate broadcasts than in the same broadcast: Just 39.8% of broadcasts that discussed actions also discussed impacts, whereas 87.3% of broadcasts that did not mention actions discussed impacts. “If an individual is reading multiple climate change stories this probably does not matter as much,” Hart says. “However, climate coverage in the news is still very scant. When coverage is offered, individuals are likely to only read a single story on the issue—if at all.” Senior Democratic lawmakers and Senator Bernie Sanders suggested in a frustrated letter to network bosses in January that fossil fuel industry advertising was causing them to avoid climate coverage. Hart’s findings suggest that the problem is more nuanced than that. Even when networks do cover climate change, they’re helping polluters by paralyzing us with a false sense of dread

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