Lemmings like us
Hurricane Sandy finally got the media talking about climate change last week, but Bloomberg Businessweek spoke the loudest with a bold, red cover that featured a picture of a flooded New York City street and the words, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” in big, black letters above it.
As the cyclone spun up the eastern seaboard, I warned against making overstatements about the connections between climate change and extreme weather, and argued for the importance of challenging such statements when they were, inevitably, made. Businessweek’s cover is a prime example of such overstatement: Sandy was a reason to be concerned about global warming, not, as the magazine’s cover suggested, a manifestation of global warming itself. That said, in this case I would cut the outlet some slack.
Magazine covers should be provocative and journalists, especially those on the presidential campaign trail, haven’t been giving climate change its due (in part that’s because the candidates haven’t been giving it its due). As David Sassoon, the publisher of InsideClimate News, told me:
Having that on the cover of a Bloomberg publication begins to redeem a decade of collective US media failures covering this story, and the silence of the candidates on the issue, and the failure of the moderators, as representatives of the US media, to bring up the topic during four debates. The cover gives permission to other mainstream media outlets to speak about the issue in ways long overdue, and I think we’ll see the floodgates open.
But it’s the urgency in the cover, not the exaggeration, that journalists should emulate, and the urge to reduce Sandy to global warming masks other factors in vulnerability to extreme weather that are just as important.