Journalists still struggle to convince editors and owners that ‘climate’ is not a standalone category. What might news look like, if news reports treated our climate crisis as integral to everything?
This article describes the editorial challenge behind new See Through Prod-cast Joining The Dots. It asks how ‘climate news’ might escape its increasingly leaky silo and render the notion of ‘climate journalism’ obsolete.
What is ‘Climate News’?
Because the answer seems obvious, this sounds like a stupid question.
It seems obvious because the average news consumer’s notion of ‘climate news’ is largely identical to that of most news editors and journalists.
It’s news about the climate. Duh. ‘Climate news’ is the stuff reported by specialist ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ reporters, and introduced by presenters as such.
Typical climate news items, flagged in this way, include:
- Reports & press releases: anything issued by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or other government bodies, think tanks, NGOS or pressure groups with names including words like ‘Environment’, ‘Climate’, ‘Emissions’, ‘Carbon’ etc.
- Unusual weather events: usually storms, wildfires, floods and heatwaves, less commonly famines, droughts, and mass migration extreme enough to be explicitly linked to ‘climate change’.
- Protests & campaigns: to raise awareness, call for action – or both – on climate-related issues. Newsworthiness often determined by the listing of the celebrity endorser.
In an increasingly divided world, it’s rare for us to agree on anything. So why rock the boat? Surely now is when we need more ‘climate news’, not to abolish it.
Emissions are rising, but so is ‘climate inertia’. Now the greenhouse effect are kicking in, our appetite for ‘climate news’, already limited, is waning.
So why are 90% of the journalists who deliver our news concerned current coverage is not meeting audience needs?
The problem is not climate news, but ‘climate news’.
What’s wrong with ‘climate news’
Our current understanding of ‘climate news’ is obsolete. This makes it more of a hindrance than a help.
The roots of this narrative are deep, hence hard to eradicate. The Industrial Revolution, modern society and economic systems were all built on carbon. Since the beam engine, we’ve been propelled by the efficiencies, economics of scale, and innovation made possible by combusting energy-intensive hydrocarbons: coal, oil, gas.
For the couple of centuries before the environmental bills for our fossil fuel addiction came in, the benefits of carbon-fuelled industrial growth were regarded as positive. Karl Marx quibbled about the social inequality and transfer of power to capital, but most people it was a price worth paying for ever-rising living standards. Not even Marxists were concerned about the environmental price. Soviet scientists only coined the term ‘ecological civilization‘, code for bridging the gap between Marxism and the environment, in the 1980s.
For fifty years now, scientists everywhere have been sounding the alarm about the unintended negative consequences. Their panic gathers with each new study and model. But the positive, growth-adjacent narrative of the fossil fuel economy is hard to shift. Stories are powerful and robust.
Our leaders and employers are not, by and large, motivated to act. The clearer the negative consequences of transferring carbon from ground to sky become, the more entrenched governments, industries and businesses that profit from burning carbon become.
They may bluster and grandstand about ‘change’, and ‘innovation’, but for vested interests it’s a bit of a slog. ‘Full steam ahead’ is cheaper, easier, and less risky than re-rigging the ship and setting a sustainable course.
This species-level act of self-harm presents two challenges, speed and scale. Both contribute to our ‘climate news’ problem.
Speed
During the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, when scientific evidence of the Greenhouse Effect was sketchier, vested interests could easily dismiss human-induced climate change as unproven. Emissions were a future problem we could get round to when we were absolutely sure.
As the hockey-stick curve of emissions continued its upward spike unabated over the ‘00s and ‘10s, the climate monster rushed us. The ‘future problem’ speck on the horizon was an overwhelming, ubiquitous and devastating ‘now reality’, before we’d begun to question the old story.
The monster arrived faster than expected. Models and predictions once dismissed as ‘speculative’, ‘unproven’ or ‘ideological’, are turning out to have been optimistic. Tipping points are arriving and being passed before we can even grasp their significance, let alone calculate their impact.
Scientific revolutions usually take generations to be accepted and internalised. While we dither, the planetary physics experiment the Industrial Revolution accidentally initiated will inundate, shrivel and incinerate more and more of us, poorest first.
Scale
Like all animals, human behaviour is primarily driven by kin selection. We don’t look much beyond our immediate circle.
When pushed, we favour first ourselves, then our family, then our tribe or nation. As our kin circle widens, the bonds binding us, and our inhibitions to kill outsiders we perceive as threats, weaken.
No animal, it seems, is driven by species-level interest. This is why appeals to ‘save the planet’ are ineffective. It’s why ‘listen to the scientists’ falls on deaf ears, when the ears are unattached to members of the Science Tribe.
The Gaia hypothesis reckons Planet Earth self-regulates in its ‘interest’, but that’s way above our pay grade. Even Gaia has to adapt when an asteroid impact or solar radiation storm disrupts business as usual.
When a dominant species doubles its population every 50 years, burns fossil fuels, extracts resources, gobbles up habitat and spews out plastic at scale, systems that have been fine-tuned over geological time, go haywire.
Gaia’s self-sustaining mechanisms are incomprehensibly complex, but we can’t expect to chuck multiple, massive spanners in at the same time with no consequences.
Homo sapiens’ appetite for killing each other in the tribal interest is typical animal behaviour. Our ability to shape atmospheric chemistry in the space of a couple of centuries, is not.
We’re probably the first species to know we’re committing suicide. In principle, this could give us a boost to beat the odds and survive relatively unscathed.
Practice so far, however, suggest our our neolithic emotions and mediaeval institutions are too strong to be offset by our God-like technology. Someone chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, turning it into an ecological desert that was promptly abandoned. We’re still at it, only on a planetary scale, and there’s nowhere else to go.
The fact that a human is writing this, and you’re reading this, hints at hope.
Those odds would be improved by binning the notion of ‘climate news’.
Reporting climate change tips
The problem with ‘climate news’ is not that it doesn’t exist. It’s that there’s too much of the stuff that comes with the quote marks (i.e. labelled as ‘climate news’), and not nearly enough of the stuff that links carbon emissions to just about every human activity (climate news, or preferably, ‘news’).
This newsroom problem is long-standing, and still unresolved.
Journalists too are tribal. They belong to ‘desks’. They prowl delineated beats. They publish articles with ‘slugs’ denoting these affiliations: Politics, Business, Culture, Sports, Lifestyle, Finance, Weather etc.
The International Federation of Journalists has published excellent guidance on climate reporting. Its ‘Reporting Climate Change’ tips are pinned up in media centres at international climate events, and delivered via training to journalists and editors at major news organizations:
- Why we all need to be climate reporters.
- What is happening to our world?
- What is causing climate change?
- What is the world doing about climate change?
- Where to find climate stories.
- Who to speak to.
- How to fight misinformation and greenwashing.
- How to stay safe.
- How to go further.
In short:
When our climate crisis is integral to all human activity, why is ‘climate news’ still being siloed as a stand-alone topic?
Conventional vs Responsible Climate News
What might non-’climate’ climate news look like?
A quick fix would be to insert the word ‘climate’ in front of every use of the word ‘refugee’, or ban any positive/negative adjectives from weather reports.
But breaking our old news habits may require a guide across the bridge. See Through Together is developing such a bridge in a new ‘See Through Prod-cast’ working title Joining The Dots. The concept is simple:
- take any conventional news headlines from anywhere anytime
- remove all the old siloed thinking
- insert the connections between human activity and emissions consequences
- publish the results
Here’s an example. These headlines happen to have been taken from a particular news outlet (The Japan Times) on a particular day (June 28 2026).
They could just as well have been taken from CNN International, The Salisbury Journal, Pravda, the Svalbardposten, Figaro, or the Uganda edition of the Daily Monitor, from any day ever.
Version A) is the actual Japan Times headline, cut-and-pasted, with links to the article. All we’ve added [in square brackets] are:
- the conventional news category assigned to each story (Politics, Business, Culture etc.) in bold
- a few worlds of minimal context to help clarify the headline for non-Japanese readers [in square brackets]
Version B) is how the same news story might be reported by a non-’climate news’ climate news reporter in italics. Not the only way, by any means, but we hope enough to make our point.
Headline 1: Politics
A) Published headline: Lower House committee approves flag bill in appeal to conservatives
[To curry favour with conservative voters, the ruling party is making the crime of desecrating the national flag punishable by up to two years in prison].
B) Joining The Dots headline: Populist PM Attempts Flag Distraction
Japan joins the global populist leader trend of focusing on confected culture wars rather than harder real-world issues. This distraction is an explicit aim of the many right-wing billionaires who own more and more of old and new media, so profit from us all taking our eye off the ball. Japan’s lawmakers are grandstanding over made-up crimes, when they could be discussing why their plan to decarbonise Japan’s economy by 2050, set out in 2022, is already falling behind schedule.
Headline 2: Business
A) Published headline: Japan mulls delaying minimum wage hike
[Japan’s minimum hourly wage is currently ¥1,121, or around US$6.95. Previous administrations had fixed a target of ¥1,500 (US$9.30) by 2030. Businesses have complained they can’t afford the burden, requesting a delay of several more years. Their lobbying appears to be working].
B) Joining The Dots headline: Leaders remain obsessed with growth over sustainability
Business and government leaders keep framing financial regulation as a zero-sum game: any employee victory comes at the expense of their employer’s loss. As there are countless different parties involved in any economy, this approach creates countless binary conflicts. In a climate emergency, this conflict leads to friction, which results in inertia. Inaction favours business as usual, which is environmentally unsustainable. If everyone on Earth lived a Japanese lifestyle, we’d need 3 planets to sustain our profligacy. Reducing this to a sustainable level (i.e. one planet) would put bickering about minimum wage targets into perspective.
Headline 3: Military
A) Published headline: U.S. missile moves in Japan send China clear message: A new era has arrived
[The US and Japan are deploying missile systems more widely in response to China’s growing regional military muscle.]
B) Joining The Dots headline: Military-industrial complex insists long-term survival depends on more bombs, not fewer emissions
Military spending protects you against a possible invasion. Climate spending protects us against certain devastation. Japan spends twice as much of its GDP – 1.4% vs 0.7% – on its military vs addressing climate change. Losing a war does not mean losing a habitable planet. Not addressing climate change means precisely that.
Headline 4: Transport
A) Published headline: Heavy rain continues across country with two approaching tropical storms
[Japan’s rail companies and airports warn of suspensions, closure and delays as the country faces unusually fierce seasonal storms].
B) Joining The Dots headline: Climate adaptation, like climate mitigation, fails to protect citizens
Once world-renowned for reliability and efficiency, Japan’s transport infrastructure is once again humiliated by increasingly severe seasonal storms. These are caused by human-induced climate change.
Headline 5: Technology
A) Published headline: Stellantis and Nissan in talks to buy assets from troubled Marelli
[Fiat/Chrysler/Peugeot/Vauxhall/Jeep holding company and Japan’s 5th biggest auto-maker join forces to pick the bones from the carcass of failed Italian parts maker].
B) Joining The Dots headline: Dinosaur car giants stumbling towards oblivion
Global automotive giants are now paying the price for ignoring atmospheric physics. Having spurned the short-term EV lifeline grabbed by China, neglected investing in public transport systems, and lobbied to preserve the crumbling internal combustion engine vehicle market, even now, legacy auto manufacturers remain focussed on asset-stripping, short-term gain, and deckchair re-arrangement.
Headline 6: Lifestyle
A) Published headline: Sony discontinues Japan sales of Aibo robot puppy
[When Sony’s robot puppy ‘Aibo’ was launched in 2018, it generated a lot of positive press and modest local sales, but flopped globally. Now, not even Japan’s unusually positive cultural stance towards robots could save this lemon.]
B) Joining The Dots headline: As AI’s devastating environmental cost challenges Japan’s embrace of automation, Sony’s robot puppy is put out of its misery
If Sony pulling the plug on the Aibo robo-pup signals the end of Japan’s love affair with robots, good riddance. Cute humanoid or anthropomorphic robots like Aibo were pushed by those who see automation as a more acceptable alternative to immigration. Reality appears to be setting in. Maybe Japan’s future is now a little more human.
Which do you prefer, A) or B)?
‘Climate News’, or climate news?
**
To discover how See Through News and the See Through Network reports climate news, visit www.seethroughtogether.org
To be notified when the Joining the Dots podcast is launched, and get links to articles like this emailed to your inbox every Sunday, sign up to the See Through Newsletter.