Global Warming and the Media

The sudden hyping this week of Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (see the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Colbert, just in terms of links I've seen this morning) usefully highlights a few important features of our current media environment. First, of course, is the advertising function of nearly all non-breaking-news coverage. Second is a bias that might well be called the glorified middle—all debates are presented as having two sides (roughly mapped across the center-Democrat-right-Republican axis) in which the position directly in the middle is always the truth. The Wall Street Journal column in particular foregrounds this tendency explicitly as a kind of natural law:

In this world of Republicans and Democrats, meat-eaters and vegetarians, dog lovers and cat lovers, we have a new divide. On one side are global-warming believers. They've heard Al Gore's inconvenient truths and, along with the staff of Time magazine, feel "worried, very worried." Humanity faces no greater threat than a warming Earth, they say, and government must drastically curb carbon-dioxide emissions. On the other side are those who don't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, they don't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

What I also love about this is the way the ever-shifting denialism (and, really, psychological denial) of the "anti-" side is misrepresented not only as a coherent position but as the rational, skeptical corrective to the-sky-is-falling "believers" in global warming.

I'm also amused by the way in which the need to binarize all disputes and then split the difference necessarily pushes the presentation of the global warming side further and further towards the apocalyptic fringe. Before a few years ago—and An Inconvenient Truth naturally played a huge part in this shift—the debate would have been between those who accepted the scientific evidence of climate change and those who didn't, with Bjorn Lomborg clearly falling on "our" side. Now that the reality of anthropogenic global warming is widely accepted, the "truth" of the argument (and thus the middle point of the line) has to shift left—and since the line is always the same length we wind up with a debate that is now presented as the wacky environmental fringe vs. everybody else.

The third bias, of course, is the consumerist bias that tells us that not only do we never, ever have to change anything about the way we live our lives but that to ever do so in even the slightest way would mean the utter extinction of every pleasure that makes life worth living. If Bjorn Lomborg says we can have our cake and eat it too, well, God bless him, now we're talking. Like the other biases, this one pollutes discourse in real life as well: it's the same reason I feel such intense social pressure to apologetically present my vegetarianism as some random personality quirk rather than sort-of-maybe-kind-of a good idea.

And the fourth tendency is the one Ryan highlighted in his much-discussed (at least by me) David Graeber post not too long ago: the lassoing of values discourse by the political right creates a situation in which Lomborg's suggestions to supplement or replace Kyoto-style protocols with alternative-energy and anti-poverty programs—an argument that more or less corresponds with what I think we can (and should) pragmatically do in response to climate change, by the way—can be taken up as "proof" against the global warming "side" in a political climate where none of those anti-poverty programs are ever going to be enacted, either, precisely because of the same political movement that doesn't think that the Earth is warming; and even if it is, that doesn't think that man is causing it; and even if man is to blame, it isn't clear that global warming is bad; and even if it is, efforts to fix it will cost too much and may, in the end, do more harm than good.

Meanwhile, in actual science coverage, via those dirty hippies at Daily Kos, climate change threatens to turn the Mediterranean into another Dead Sea.