Stokingfear a fool’s game in climate change reporting
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/stoking-fear-a-fools-game-in-climate-change-reporting/news-story/0d169cc23d0b9928a6bd028…1/4
THE AUSTRALIAN
Stoking fear a fool’s game inclimate change reporting
CHRIS MITCHELLOnce-sober media organisations that distinguished themselvesfrom racy tabloid television and
newspapers now prefer panic to accurate and sceptical reporting.
Sceptical is not a popular word among young, activist journalistswho should have been social
workers. But it was a quality that news editors, sub-editors andexecutive producers used to bring
to the craft. Now it’s the reverse at what were once consideredup-market publishers such as the
old Fairfax papers and the ABC.
Panic is most obvious in reporting about climate change, whereour ABC never misses an
opportunity to publish wild claims no serious scientistbelieves. But the bias towards panic is
ubiquitous: it was obvious at the start of the COVID-19 pandemicwhen claims of 150,000 dead
here and emergency ICU wards overflowing within weeks werepumped out across the Fairfax
papers and the ABC.
The trend towards “panic journalism” follows the empowerment ofyoung reporters who have
seen little of life and are no longer protected by editingprocesses that have been cut to save
money. This column has argued publishers embrace this collapsein standards because they see it
as a marketing tool in a fragmented media landscape. People whoare disposed to moral panic
about race, climate or capitalism love to consume media thatconfirms their bias. But it is a fool’s
game. Mainstream media is just surrendering its trust advantageto social media extremism. The
facts will eventually become clear, and there are early signsthis is beginning to happen.
While journalists who bother to read scientific reports forthemselves always knew much of the
reporting at left-wing media was wildly exaggerated, even someclimate activists are now seeing
through the lies of Extinction Rebellion, the linking of CO2emissions to individual bushfire and
storm events and other claims not supported by science.
By CHRIS MITCHELL, COLUMNIST
7:46AM JULY 6, 2020 •H 192 COMMENTS
7/6/2020Stoking fear a fool’s game in climate change reporting
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/stoking-fear-a-fools-game-in-climate-change-reporting/news-story/0d169cc23d0b9928a6bd028…2/4
The propagandist filmmaker Michael Moore kicked this off with afilm showing the downside of
renewables — Planet of the Humans. The film would have beenlargely unnoticed but for
demands by warming zealots that it be banned. People decided towatch 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 areexpensive and only viable with
government subsidy. And they are beloved by rich bankers becausethey provide high taxpayersubsidised
rates of return.
As this paper revealed at the time of the launch of hybrid carsin Australia, even motor vehicle
renewable technologies have enormous carbon footprints in theirmanufacturing, in mining for
the rare metals they rely on and in the case of electric cars inthe baseload power they need to
recharge. They are a con. Environment writers at Fairfax, theGuardian and the ABC won’t call
the facts out.
Last week readers of this newspaper were told about a new bookby US environmental activist
Michael Shellenberger, Apocalypse Never: Why EnvironmentalAlarmism Hurts Us All.
Shellenberger admits he was part of a movement that knew it wasgrossly exaggerating the facts,
and much of what he tells readers has been reported by thisnewspaper for 20 years.
For him, the scaring of children around the world with falsefacts was too much. Yet when this
column and other journalists at News Corp papers have told thetruth about the RCP8.5 scenario
used to justify false claims of a 2030 climate emergency theyhave been either ignored or
ridiculed in the left media, most prominently by ABC Media Watchhost Paul Barry.
As this column has explained before, RCP8.5 is not a seriousscenario but the top-end outlier of
four different IPCC scenarios. It is not where the IPCC says theworld 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. Itis at odds with the facts already.
Australians are less familiar with another climate panicdefection. Zion Lights, the 34-year-old
former spokeswoman for the UK Extinction Rebellion group sobeloved by Guardian Australia,
was so appalled by the movement’s misleading approach to scienceshe quit late last month to
become a lobbyist for nuclear energy. After reading up on thebenefits of zero emissions nuclear
power she said: “The facts don’t really change, but once Iunderstood them I did change my
mind.”
7/6/2020Stoking fear a fool’s game in climate change reporting
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/stoking-fear-a-fools-game-in-climate-change-reporting/news-story/0d169cc23d0b9928a6bd028…3/4
Journalism’s litany of environmental lies extends far beyondbogus extinction stories, the failure
to analyse renewable power accurately, blind hatred of fossilfuels and childish enthusiasm for
hybrid cars. Dozens of false claims about the state of planetEarth 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 theGreenland ice sheet was melting
and global sea levels could rise by 7m. Since then Greenland’stemperatures have returned to
1930s levels and Greenland’s glaciers stopped retreating sevenyears ago. Not much reporting of
that.
● As this column said last year, most of the world’scoral islands, especially those of the South
Pacific, are not sinking, according to research from theUniversity of Auckland. Now a new study
led by the University of Plymouth and reported in ScienceAdvances shows wave action on reefs
off such islands actually builds up sediment levels and helps toraise island surfaces.
● A new paper in the journal Science, “The internalorigin of the east-west asymmetry of
Antarctic climate change”, suggests “the current asymmetry ofAntarctic surface climate change
is undoubtedly of natural origin because no external factors (egorbital or anthropogenic factors)
contribute to the asymmetric mode”. Data from historic samplessuggests climate fluctuations in
the tropics such as El Nino and the Southern Oscillation Indexare a factor in different rates of
warming.
● Despite years of credulous media claims that India andChina are moving away from fossil fuel,
the opposite is true. Last month Indian Prime Minister NarendraModi said India, with the fourth
largest coal reserves in the world, was launching commercialauctions to unlock coal reserves
from “years of lockdown”. Bloomberg analyst Michelle Leung saidshe expected China’s next fiveyear
plan to target 1300 gigawatts of coal capacity, up from 1050 today.China is also expanding
construction of coal-fired power plants. After adding 29.9gWlast year Bloomberg said
construction already under way in May would account for an extra46gW. But every ABC
business journalist I ever hear insists coal is a “strandedasset”.
Shellenberger attributes climate panic to Malthusian fear.Thomas Malthus wrote in the 18th
century that food production would not keep pace with populationgrowth. He did not foresee
population rises would slow as societies got richer and failedto account for human improvement
in agricultural production. Fear in the face of difficultproblems is easier for the media to sell
than understanding.
7/6/2020Stoking fear a fool’s game in climate change reporting
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CHRIS MITCHELL, COLUMNIST
Chris Mitchell began his career in late 1973 in Brisbane on theafternoon daily, The Telegraph.
He worked on the Townsville Daily Bulletin, the Daily TelegraphSydney and the Australian
FinancialReview before ... Readmore
