Media Breakdown

George Monbiot points out that reporting on hurricanes ignores the human contribution to the natural disaster.

To claim there is no link between climate breakdown and the severity of Hurricane Harvey is like claiming there is no link between the warm summer we have experienced and the end of the last ice age. Every aspect of our weather is affected by the fact that global temperatures rose by about 4C between the ice age and the 19th century. And every aspect of our weather is affected by the 1C of global warming caused by human activities. While no weather event can be blamed solely on human-driven warming, none is unaffected by it.

Hurricane Harvey offers a glimpse of a likely global future; a future whose average temperatures are as different from ours as ours are from those of the last ice age. It is a future in which emergency becomes the norm, and no state has the capacity to respond. It is a future in which, as a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters notes, disasters like Houston’s occur in some cities several times a year. It is a future that, for people in countries such as Bangladesh, has already arrived, almost unremarked on by the rich world’s media. It is the act of not talking that makes this nightmare likely to materialise.

Such reporting would question "not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire political and economic system."

It is to expose a programme that relies on robbing the future to fuel the present, that demands perpetual growth on a finite planet. It is to challenge the very basis of capitalism; to inform us that our lives are dominated by a system that cannot be sustained – a system that is destined, if it is not replaced, to destroy everything.

Update (September 9):  Conor Lynch echos Monbiot.

[I]t goes beyond simply discussing climate change. After Harvey and Irma we also have a moral duty to talk about the economic system that has brought us to this point. That is, we can no longer talk about climate change without talking about capitalism, which has laid waste to our planet and now impedes humanity’s effort to deal with the climate crisis it engendered.

Update (September 11):  While Republicans do their best to bring us to ruin, the media breakdown itself obviates our moral responsibility.

Broadcast networks are decreasing their climate coverage at a time when the case for reporting on the issue is become more and more compelling. By ignoring this serious matter, media are failing to inform audiences about pressing impacts on human migration patterns, women, and the economy.

Update (September 14):  Eric Holthaus is blunt about climate change making storms worse.

Make no mistake: These storms weren’t natural. A warmer, more violent atmosphere — heated up by our collective desire to ignore the fact that we live on a planet where such devastation is possible — juiced Harvey and Irma’s destruction.

Update (September 16):  Wildfires have also been part of the story of climate change. Over one million acres have burned in Montana.

[W]hat we can say with certainty is this: increases in temperature in the last decades have set the stage for drier conditions and more fires.

Update (December 13):  Two studies support the contention that climate change has made storms both stronger and more likely to occur.

Also, data from an Alaskan weather station got omitted from a report because a computer system flagged the (real) temperature anomalies as too irregular.

Update (May 21, 2020):  A study published by PNAS finds that climate change is already intensifying hurricanes.

[R]esearchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Wisconsin at Madison analyzed satellite data over the last 40 years and found that planetary warming during that period increased the likelihood of a tropical cyclone become a major hurricane ― Category 3 strength or higher ― by approximately 8% per decade.