Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) addresses US Congress armed with a snowball that disproves global climate change. He got more coverage than other climate change issues for several months.
In recent weeks, network television news has understandably focused extensively on the extreme cold and snow in the Northeast and upper Midwest. But a new FAIR study shows they’ve almost completely ignored a related and even more dangerous phenomenon out West: record-shattering winter warmth. And they’ve overwhelmingly failed to discuss what connects the two sets of strange weather phenomena: human-caused climate disruption.
FAIR examined ABC, CBS and NBC transcripts from January 25 (as the Northeast’s first blizzard approached) through March 4, looking at all mentions of cold, snow and ice. Over the same time period, we studied coverage of heat, warmth and drought across the West and Pacific Northwest.
A total of 417 network segments mentioned the extreme cold, but just seven of these included a reference to climate change–barely over 1 percent. That’s even though science is clear that climate disruption is loading the dice for extreme weather events.
“One of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, DC, for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming,” Kevin Trenberth, climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told NPR (2/15/10). A 2014 study linked a rise in polar vortex cold blasts to Arctic sea ice loss caused by global warming (USA Today, 9/2/14).
But not a single climate scientist was quoted by network TV in the entire study period. Viewers were left in the dark, part of a pattern of journalists reporting on the effects of the climate crisis while steering clear of the cause (Extra!, 8/11, 12/13).
On the CBS Evening News (2/19/15), anchor Scott Pelley at least pointed out that cold weather in one region doesn’t mean that the world as a whole is cooling. “As cold as it is, a federal climate report out today says that last month was the second warmest January on record for planet Earth,” he said.
Only 12 segments mentioned the record-setting warmth and drought out West, and that included weather updates. Just one made the link to global warming, and even that one tried to discredit the connection. “A new study from Stanford University claims the drought in California is being fueled by human-caused climate change,” Amy Robach told viewers of ABC’s Good Morning America (3/3/15). “But some scientists not involved in the study are questioning some of those findings.” What scientists? Were they independent or polluter-funded? Were the concerns valid? The story ended there.
Virtually ignored was that more than 20 cities out West, including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Sacramento and Las Vegas, had their warmest winters on record, while as Weather.com (3/1/15) pointed out, “few if any cities in the East will have their coldest winters on record despite a series of high-profile blizzards and record cold waves—mainly because December was relatively mild.”
Mild winters may sound pleasant, but there could be a high price to pay come fire season. “Things are much more dry and, frankly, more ready to burn…than in [recent] memory,” Jason Curry of Utah’s Forestry Division told the Salt Lake Tribune (3/1/15).
Over the time period studied, just 13 segments mentioned climate change at all. And four of those were about Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) bringing a snowball to the US Senate floor to mock climate science.
The top source of climate talk on the networks was actor and activist Rosie Perez of ABC’s The View, who addressed the topic repeatedly. On February 17, Perez did something literally no network journalist did over the study period: She told viewers that the scientific consensus is that manmade carbon pollution is causing global warming:
A lot of politicians, a lot of lobbyists, keep saying that they aren’t scientists, but the scientists are saying that climate change is real, and part of the reason why we have so much more rain and snowfall is because what happens is when the temperatures changed in the oceans, the evaporation increases, and so you have all this condensation just held up into the sky. And because of the greenhouse gases, you know, we need the carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, but when we have too much of it, it becomes a dangerous thing. And so that’s why things are changing, and we should be taking this very seriously, especially in an election year, 2016.
Meanwhile, on the February 3 edition of Today, NBC News political director Chuck Todd cited climate change as a “hot potato” politicians should stop discussing altogether. While hosting Meet the Press on March 1, Todd applauded Inhofe’s science-mocking snowball as “a fun little prop,” but declared, “I’m not going to use that to get into a climate change debate.”
Miles Grant is a progressive blogger and environmental communicator in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. He’s senior communications manager for the National Wildlife Federation (though his thoughts here are his own). Read more at The Green Miles and follow him on Twitter (@MilesGrant).
