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Don’t Mention The (Climate) War! The New Taboo for Fire & Flood News Reports

climate crisis news reporting fire wildfire floods earthquakes natural disaster journalism news reporting carbon drawdown emissions greenhouse effect fossil fuels

It’s ‘Never the Write Time’ for news reports to link climate change to  natural disasters 

The News Paradox: more climate deaths, less climate news

As long predicted by climate scientists, global heating-enhanced ‘natural’ disasters are becoming more frequent, more destructive, and more obviously driven by climate change.

At any given time, somewhere in the world is now experiencing an unprecedented local catastrophe. 

For locals, the damage can last a generation. For the rest of us, by the time the victims start dealing with the aftermath, there’s no time to address the ‘premath’ as the news cycle will have moved onto the next ‘math’:

  • Los Angeles area wildfires left thousands of American households starting 2025 homeless. At time of writing, this event is creeping up California’s worst-ever fire disaster league table, though its exact ranking depends on the metric – fatalities, properties destroyed, monetary damage, area burnt or even celebrity impact.
  • The LA fires aren’t close to matching 2024’s fires in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, the worst ever recorded on that continent. They burned an area of the Amazon twice the size of China’s entire arable farmland.
  • Even this months-long, multi-location conflagration in the ‘lungs of the planet’ only ranks Number Two in the Worst-Ever Fire rankings, as measured by total area immolated. That record goes to Australia’s 2023 bush fires.
  • More immediate, but no less devastating than wildfires are the increasingly powerful storm events – cyclones, hurricanes or typhoons, depending on where you live. These are rendering certain low-lying or river-adjacent areas of developed countries as uninsurable as coastal areas vulnerable to rapid erosion from rising sea levels and storm surges.

Yet… the more common and violent these events are becoming, the less often news reports mention ‘climate change’, ‘greenhouse gases’, ‘fossil fuels’, ‘global heating’, or any of the other explanations of the key factor driving natural disasters to the top of the news agenda.

Many recent studies have analysed ‘climate fatigue’, and have charted a decline in general media mentions of climate issues. Why has this extended even to the most obvious, and damaging of the consequences of our fossil fuel additions, wildfires and floods?

Big Oil’s Plans: Deny, Delay, Distract & Despair

In Dodgeball: A TRUE Underdog Story (2004) dodgeball legend Patches O’Houllihan dispenses his immortal ‘Five Rules of Dodgeball’: ‘dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge’.

Maybe the fictional Patches stole his dodgeball dictum from Big Oil’s real-world climate strategy to avoid the public connecting fossil fuels to climate change: Deny, Delay, Distract, Despair, and Deny. 

For decades Big Oil funded and coordinated a climate denial industry, paying tiptop storytelling talent to challenge any suggestion that combusting fossil fuels warmed the planet. 

For decades, they only needed Plan A: Deny. 

Denial involved creating a false equivalence between ‘climate pushers’ and ‘climate sceptics’, paying ‘experts’ to parrot their ‘talking points’ on the news, and concealing their involvement through benignly-named think tanks and ‘astroturf’ fake grass roots organisations.

Good News, Bad News

The ‘good news’ is that Big Oil has, by and large, binned Plan A. 

The ‘bad news’ is they still have plenty more options to keep the rest of us off their backs, and keep on drilling.

The vested interests driving the destruction of the California, Amazon and Australian wildfires have barely broken stride, and emissions continue to rise. 

The scale and frequency of climate-change-related ‘natural’ disasters is now too obvious to non-scientists for Denial. Plan A data cherry picking, deflecting and cavilling tactics are now only reserved for clandestine deployment, via online conspiracy theorists. 

Now that Big Oil CEOs and their PR shills can no longer pay credible scientists enough for them to blame sunspots or ‘natural cycles’ with a straight face, they’ve shifted gears.

The impetus behind the unravelling Anthropocene mass extinction event – the 6th in planetary history and the 1st created by a species – is now so clear, those who profit from accelerating it have publicly pivoted to Plan B: Delay.  

The really bad news is that Plan C: Distract and Plan D: Despair – are also going swimmingly. 

All Plans play on the same human frailties that induce us to let our hearts overrule our heads. These are as old as the human race, but experts can now deploy tried-and-tested storytelling tricks to manipulate public opinion in novel ways:

  • Using pictures of wind turbines and solar farms in ads, when renewable energy accounts for less than 10% of their output, and falling. 
  • Lobbying politicians to collude in labelling schemes that perpetuate fossil fuel extraction (like ‘carbon capture’ or ‘plastic recycling’ schemes), while soberly intoning their ‘commitment’ to a sustainable future.
  • Co-opting concepts like ‘freedom of choice’, ‘promoting growth’ and ‘cutting red tape’ to push for new drilling contracts.

Big Oil’s PR experts aren’t stupid, just cynical. 

They know atmospheric physics is indifferent to their spin, but also know that the consequences of burning carbon are still sufficiently separated in time and space to leave them ample wiggle room to manipulate public opinion before the game’s up.

‘Clever’ spin doctors have noted how rapidly survivors of a global pandemic can be encouraged to believe that lockdowns and vaccines were the problem, not the solution. 

Compared to that mind-bender, it’s relatively straightforward to nudge the debate on the causes of fires and floods away from climate change and towards rival politicians, immigrants, moral degenerates, or any other familiar popular narrative villains. 

With a free rein to spread misinformation and disinformation on the biggest platforms, broadcasters and publications providing our ‘news’, it’s even easier.

Blame the messengers?

When criticising the message (or absence of it), one should always consider the role of the messenger. 

  • Are the journalists narrating all those column inches and online content about fires and floods with no mention of climate change a) collaborators, b) dupes, or c) innocent victims of Big Oil?
  • Are they part of a vast Fourth Estate conspiracy against krill, copepods, charismatic macrofauna, the young, the poor, and other primary victims of climate change? 
  • Do their billionaire owners issue daily diktats threatening the sack for any journalist who mentions ‘climate change’ when reporting on wildfires, storms or floods?

If only it were that straightforward. 

For a start, journalists are just as prone to ‘ostrich’ responses as the rest of us. If you press gang the ‘climate’ issue into either side of a culture wars, it becomes just another tribal marker, detached from real-world consequences.

News coverage of some divisive issues –  terrorism or Middle Eastern geopolitics, for example – create obvious binary divides when reported by ‘authoritarian’ vs ‘democratic’ regimes. When it comes to climate reporting, the differences are much less obvious. 

Authoritarian constitutions overtly define the role of their media as being the ‘ears, eyes, tongue and throat of the Party’. Countries with a ‘free press’ may be governed by less formal arrangements between government, business and media, but when it comes to coverage of natural disasters, the results can be indistinguishable.

Large numbers of citizens losing family members or property to fires, storms and floods threaten the stability of all regimes. Autocrats and democrats alike have the same priorities when it comes to natural disaster crisis management:

  • Control the narrative.
  • Direct anger and blame to unthreatening targets.
  • Claim the role of saviour delivering succour. 
  • Dodge the role of instigator or enabler.

There are few short-term upsides for any political leader to mention climate change. 

The Greenhouse Effect is a relentless, global, and intractable problem. Best not risk tugging at a thread that could unravel to make leaders look impotent, passive and irrelevant. Blaming immigrants, saboteurs, infidels or degenerates is much better politics.

Politicians’ Big Oil bed-fellows and donors are only too keen to avoid the topic. With Plan A: Deny no longer on the menu, they apply the same psychological tactics to Plans B, C and D. 

They work just as well with Delay, Distract, and Despair. Sometimes the messaging is crude disinformation, sometimes the more subtle lying by omission, like just not bringing the topic up when covering the latest wildfires and floods. 

Either approach is fine, as long as they serve the same overall strategy of keeping pumping fossil fuel from the ground without drawing attention the consequences of pumping carbon dioxide into the air when it’s combusted.

Vested interests are happy to fund all Plans as long as they result in business as usual. Inaction leaves them quids in while the rest of us drown, burn and shrivel before them.

Plans C & D: Distract & Despair

The growing absence of any mention of climate change in news reports about fires and floods is a case study of how Plans C and D work in practice. 

These plans have been greatly facilitated by the concentration of media ownership, with vested interests who directly or indirectly profit from burning fossil fuels controlling as much of Old and New media as regulations permit

But this article focuses on explaining the mechanics and psychology of news to the non-media-professional.

In particular, how The News is being expertly, and cynically, exploited to sever the link between ‘natural’ disasters and atmospheric physics.

If you’ve ever remarked on how infrequently phrases like ‘climate change’ or ‘global heating’ appear in news reports about wildfires, storms, floods, famines, refugee crises, and other headline-grabbing events, this may help explain.

The Incredible Shrinking News Cycle

The big problem with reporting climate change is that, however rapid it may be in geological terms, global heating is too big and slow to qualify for news headlines.

In a potentially species-ending case of unfortunate timing, the greenhouse effect is speeding up just as our attention span is diminishing.

The calculation of what’s ‘newsworthy’ has always involved three factors: duration, distance and novelty. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, consider why:

  1. Duration: Everest growing by 1mm per year is a ‘feature’, not news. 
  2. Distance: A meteor impact on Venus belongs to specialist journals, not news feeds.
  3. Novelty: ‘Sun Rises In East!’ is no more a news headline that ‘Dog Bites Man’.

Climate change could hardly score higher on 1 and 2. It’s happening right now, occasionally spectacularly enough to kill large numbers of people in wildfires and floods. It’s happening everywhere, as its impact is planetary. 

You might reason that any equation factoring such a massive event, by any metric of time and space, would dominate any news agenda at any time. 

Logic would suggest that mentions of ‘climate change’ in connection with news reports should grow in proportion to the real-world impacts of climate change, as they become more frequent, immediate and lethal.

But much as we like to imagine we’re driven by reason and logic, Homo sapiens is an evolved ape driven largely by emotion, tribal affiliation, and neophobia.

Neophobia vs neophilia

‘Neophobia’, ‘fear of the new’, is a defining characteristic of most of the planet’s surviving species. 

No species has prospered by investigating novel volcanoes, munching on unfamiliar plants, or approaching predators without caution. 

Mammals are less neophobic than most; humans veer closest to reckless neophilia. 

We have a higher curiosity threshold even than our ape cousins – how else could we have become the only species to alter our planetary ecosystem in a couple of hundred years? – but our first instincts remain to keep our heads down, carry on, stick to business as usual, not rock the boat etc.

Nowhere is our Jekyll-and-Hyde love and fear of the new more evident than in our news feeds.

The Incredible Shrinking News Cycle

News, by definition, must be new. The more clearly a headline (for print) or intro script (for TV) flags to their audience that whatever follows is significantly different today from yesterday, the more likely that audience is to keep watching. 

As communications technology develops and spreads, news cycles have become further compressed. 

  • Peasants under Charlemagne might have a child or two before learning they’d been born under a new monarch from their parents. 
  • Even the Qing dynasty’s hyper-efficient civil service mandarins might take months to pass on the Emperor’s edicts around China. 
  • In 1841, Dickens fans crowded Boston and New York docksides to hear passengers who’d spend days crossing the Atlantic shout out the fate of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.
  • The first newspapers updating developments in seventeenth century European wars were published weekly, but by the 20th century news arrived in daily doses, sometimes with more than one edition per day.
  • The Internet now means any of its billions of addicts now hear reporting virtually in real time.

As news cycles become more compressed, sound bites have shrunk (42 seconds in 1968 to 8 seconds on 2004), nuance has become our foe, and concision our friend. 

This presents a problem for political discourse in general, but for rational public discussion of something as complex and multifactorial as climate change it’s particularly problematic.

A terrorist attack, for example, is specific to a time and place, and we know the total death toll within an hour or two. 

Natural disasters unfold over days, with shifting numbers and narratives. How to crowbar in one overarching story?

Sneak Peek Inside The News Sausage Factory

Academics have tried to capture the news editor’s instinctive feel for how much any given audience is likely to care about an event mathematically. 

This 2012 post by a blogger  (remember ‘bloggers’?) attempted to establish the formula behind the variance in US news coverage of:

  • Hurricane Katrina which killed 1,800 predominantly black,Americans,  in 2005
  • The Haiti Earthquake, which killed 50,000-300,000 Haitiians in 2010
  • Hurricane Sandy, which killed 117 predominantly white, Americans, in 2012

It includes this attempt to nail the ‘news death formula’:

This is far from the most complex attempt to represent human tribal affiliations mathematically, but this comes instinctively to all of us.  

We each have our own individual ‘Give-a-Shit-ometers’, engineered to our personal settings, with implicit tariffs comparing the relative impact of different types and numbers of deaths. 

If you consider yourself immune to such banalities, just imagine your different reaction if you were watching the evening news, and the lead item reported the death of:

  1. one of your close family
  2. someone you once met
  3. a celebrity you’ve never met, but greatly admire
  4. a stranger who lives within a mile of you
  5. A stranger from the same city
  6. A stranger from the same state/province/county
  7. A stranger from the same country
  8. A stranger from a neighbouring country
  9. A stranger from a country with a shared ethnicity
  10. A stranger from a country with a different ethnicity

Now repeat the process multiplying the death toll, but 10, 100 1,000, 10,000 etc.

All this is old hat to anyone who’s committed journalism, but can interest civilian news consumers, much in the way that someone who enjoys drinking wine might find it quite interesting to meet someone who makes it, and think for the first time about how the stuff is made.

In that spirit, for those who’ve only consumed news sausages, here’s a sneak peek at what happens inside the news sausage factory.

The Disaster News Cycle

Here are the 7 stages of journalism’s standard ‘news cycle’ template for reporting ‘natural disasters’:

  1. Time & Place: ‘Live/Breaking’ News on Basic Facts (type of disaster, location, magnitude).
  2. Dead & Injured: Focus on rolling death toll, actual and projected, True Scale of Disaster Now Emerging.
  3. Heroes & Miracles: Baby Found Alive After X Days Buried Under Rubble (earthquake), Dramatic Footage of Survivors Clinging to Trees/On Roofs (floods/tsunami), Families Lose Everything  (wiildfires) 
  4. Survivors & Plights: displaced peoples’ plight, risk of disease, provision of basic food and shelter, Cold and Disease Add To Misery, Families Face Winter On The Streets
  5. Aftermath & Tents: The Clean-Up Operation, as resolute survivors Try To Return To Life As Normal.
  6. Blame & Fury: Anger Turns To Authorities, Outrage At Corrupt Officials as the disaster’s Tragic Causes are revealed, and details emerge of What Could Have Been Avoided.
  7. Lessons & Learnings: Sober reflections on How We Must Never Let This Happen Again.

Notes:

  • The Terrorism Template news cycle is virtually identical. The only difference is that the Stage 6 fingers are pointed at people (either the Evil Monsters who committed the Atrocity, or the Bungling Authorities who through incompetence, corruption or misfortune Missed The Warning Signs).
  • The Natural Disaster Template Stage 6 need not necessarily be limited to Mother Nature. It may not take long for people with political, religious or moral agendas to start to attribute some of the blame to their favoured villains (extremists/unbelievers/the wicked).

So far, so standard.

But not all natural disasters are the same.

Natural vs Semi-Natural Disasters

Ignoring minor or location-specific players (avalanches, blizzards or sinkholes) or similar impacts that can be triggered by different causes (landslides), here are 8 major types of Natural Disaster.

  1. Volcanoes
  2. Tsunamis
  3. Earthquakes
  4. Storms/cyclones/hurricanes/typhoons 
  5. Fires
  6. Floods 
  7. Drought
  8. Famine

This list ranks disasters on a spectrum of ascending human causation. Pandemics are off this scale. Plagues may once have been listed along with floods and fires as acts of God, but are now obviously mainly caused by human incursion into animal habitats.

1-3 are different manifestations of the same cause – seismic activity – over which humans have zero control. 

Earthquakes are listed at 3, because massive human infrastructure, like the weight of water created by China’s Three Gorges dam, is known to influence seismic activity, but the scale is so marginal, and in any case so hard to prove, earthquakes can still be treated as what insurers used to call an Act of God.

At the human-caused end of the list, it has long been accepted that famine is almost entirely driven by human intervention. It really has no place in a list of ‘natural’ disasters, but it’s worth noting that the non-human contributing cause of most famines is next up the list at number 7.  

It’s also worth noting that Drought rarely makes the news, or when it does, rarely remains in our eye line for long. This is because drought takes too long to kill enough people to qualify as ‘news’.  

Never the right time

Ironically, the biggest problem with being a pervasive, permanent polycrisis is that there’s never a ‘right time’ to talk about it. 

Humans generally just lack the bandwidth to respond to a crisis with no clear end point. We’re much better at dealing with small problems than big ones, and tend to pay more attention to what’s Urgent than what’s Important. 

When we see ostriches ‘burying their heads in the sand’, we assume they’re ignoring danger. This reveals more about humans than ostriches, as they’re actually turning eggs in their nests. 

All humans share conflict-avoidance traits. What makes us such easy marks for storytelling experts and PR merchants to manipulate, is that unlike other animals (so far as we know), we like to dress up our emotional responses in rational clothes. For advertisers, hucksters, grifters, politicians and priests who know which buttons to press, we’re easily malleable. 

Control all the means of communication, and the job’s even easier. Learn the right tricks to distract, deflect, delay, or flip us directly from Denial inaction into Despair inaction, bellow them from the highest platform, amplified by the loudest megaphone, and you can fool most of the people most of the time. Until reality overtakes you.

Bring up ‘climate crisis’ before ‘natural’ disasters are in the news, and you’ll find that few people are inclined to talk about either. 

Connect them while fires and floods are killing people, and it’s ‘insensitive and disrespectful to the victims’.

Wait until after the embers have cooled and the waters subsided, and it’s ‘too soon’ or ‘too late’. 

Only a millisecond, it seems, elapses between it being ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’. People want to ‘move on’ to the next thing, even if it’s a repeat of the same thing.

To be clear, this vanishingly brief sweet spot between a chronic problem and its acute manifestation is not unique to climate change. The same is true of terrorist attacks, pandemics, wars, banking, refugees, and pretty much any complex problem we’d rather avoid. 

It’s the human condition. We’d rather not address hard problems head on. We eagerly embrace any pretext to avoid confrontation. Most people join a crowd running away from something, rather than pushing through it to see it clearly.

Consequently, we’re all aware of the drawbacks of denial, and ignoring our heads to follow our hearts:

  • not talking about a family member’s cancer doesn’t affect malignant cells multiplying
  • not mentioning the war doesn’t dissolve ethnic resentments
  • not citing climate change whenever we report on fires and floods doesn’t reverse the weather patterns that cause them, nor improve the infrastructure designed to protect us when a once-in-10,000-years event becomes a once-a-decade event.   

It’s true that those who accuse others of such insensitivity are often the same people who are quick to blame unrelated factors, like immigration, opposition politicians, or moral degeneracy. 

Debating the ‘right time’ to mention the C word is not, however, an argument it’s possible to ‘win’, so best avoided.

Covid, briefly

In the brief interval between Covid dominating all news and being forgotten, See Through News wrote at length about its value as a test of humanity’s ability to collectively address an existential crisis. 

Spoiler alert – our species comprehensively failed. 

Understanding how and why we failed provides both case study and cautionary tale when it comes to our response to climate change. Key takeaways:

  1. The pandemic was, like fires and floods, itself partially a consequence of human activity tipping the balance in evolved ecosystems.
  2. The coronavirus demanded government action because it rapidly killed millions of people around the world.
  3. As soon as scientists knew Covid-19’s R Value, forced lockdowns in affected areas could have contained and eliminated its threat within a couple of weeks.  
  4. Instead, politicians ignored ‘the science’, condemned lockdowns as ‘draconian’/ ‘impossible’/’unpatriotic’/’irresponsible’/’expensive’/’authoritarian’/’inconceivable’ etc., When the catastrophe the scientists predicted would be the result of inaction happened and their fear of being held accountable for mass deaths trumped their fear of forcing citizens to change their behaviour, they enforced lockdowns.
  5. Even as governments and politicians ‘followed the science’, ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy theorists accused them of having nefarious ulterior motives. Within a couple of years political leaders, including many who’d enforced lockdowns, parroted this anti-scientific revisionism rather than invoking science to claim credit for saving millions of lives.

This is ‘real’ politics. Substitute ‘global heating’ for ‘Covid’, and you see the problem.

How To Listen To The News

How does knowing all this help? What practical difference can understanding the nature of the problem make to finding a solution?

What you personally can’t do

  1. Prevent billionaires who profit over carbon reduction from buying media outlets (unless you’re a billionaire who can buy them first)
  2. Expect journalists to mention climate change more often if their employers tell them not to (unless you employ them)
  3. Create or enforce government regulations constraining 1 or 2 (unless you’re a politician)
  4. Prevent climate deniers or Big Oil apologists from spreading misinformation or disinformation.

What you personally can do

  1. If you’re alone when you consume news about ‘natural disasters’, mentally insert the climate change connections where you think they should be mentioned. If there are other people present, do so out loud.
  2. On social media, mention climate change whenever the causes of ‘natural disasters’ are mentioned, while avoiding divisive trigger words or phrases that make others stop listening.
  3. Share this article widely with people you think may act on it.
  4. Email volunteer@seethroughnews.org and join See Through’s global network of pro bono volunteers working to measurably reduce carbon.

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