Climate Change in the Media: Reporting Risk and Uncertainty by James Painter
By James Painter
Read or Download Climate Change in the Media: Reporting Risk and Uncertainty PDF
Similar environmentalism books
Saving Global Fisheries: Reducing Fishing Capacity to Promote Sustainability
The Earth’s oceans are overfished, regardless of greater than fifty years of cooperation one of the world’s fishing international locations. There are too many boats chasing too few fish. In Saving international Fisheries, J. Samuel Barkin and Elizabeth DeSombre study the matter of overfishing and supply a provocative notion for an international regulatory and coverage strategy.
Environmental Management Systems: A Step-by-Step Guide to Implementation and Maintenance
This 3rd variation of Sheldon and Yoxon's authoritative Environmental administration platforms (previously entitled fitting Environmental administration structures) has been broadly revised to hide alterations in foreign criteria and different similar advancements within the box equivalent to British general BS 8555.
Bestselling writer Dave Hunt evaluates present occasions that time to the second one coming and underscore the at-any-moment hazard of the rapture. This e-book will swap how you imagine and dwell
- Utilization of Fish Waste
- Losing Ground: Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana
- Free Market Environmentalism
- Analyzing International Environmental Regimes: From Case Study to Database (Global Environmental Accord: Strategies for Sustainability and Institutional Innovation)
Extra info for Climate Change in the Media: Reporting Risk and Uncertainty
Sample text
It may be able to be reduced in some areas, but it is unlikely to go away completely. But for the general public educated in ‘school science’, this uncertainty may be something they do not readily associate with science. So what do scientists tell us about the degrees of certainty about different aspects of climate science? In broad brush terms, there is more certainty about the past, but (unsurprisingly) much less certainty about the future. So, there is almost universal agreement that the average surface temperature of the Earth has warmed in recent decades, and that the warming is mainly a result of human-driven emissions of GHGs.
A recent study of 12 newspapers in Brazil, China, France, India, the UK, and the USA strongly suggested that France and the three developing countries stood out for giving considerably less space to sceptics compared to the USA and the UK (Painter and Ashe, 2012). The US newspapers had, by some margin, the highest proportion of articles containing sceptical voices in the periods examined in 2007 and 2009–10. Well-known sceptics from the UK and other parts of the world are frequently quoted or mentioned in the UK press in a way that specifically links doubts about aspects of climate science to their opposition to taking action to curb GHGs (Painter, 2011: chapter 6 and appendix 4).
In other words, a decision maker could argue that, on the basis of this calculation, it would be wrong to take aggressive action as it would cost more to mitigate than it would to suffer the impacts. However, when he made a second calculation, in which he included a probability distribution of a range of inputs to estimate the impacts of temperature rises, then he came up with a much larger mean figure of US$400 trillion because it included the high temperature, high impact possibilities at the top end of the range.