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A newspaper board declares Cockermouth high street back in business after the flooding in Cumbria in 2009.
A newspaper board declares Cockermouth high street back in business after the flooding in Cumbria in 2009. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
A newspaper board declares Cockermouth high street back in business after the flooding in Cumbria in 2009. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Why are some British newspapers still denying climate change?

This article is more than 8 years old

Editors of the Mail, Express, Times, Sun and Telegraph should put the interests of their readers first by reporting the real facts about global warming

Why are so many British newspaper editors still serving up unscientific climate change denial to their readers, even though the governments of more than 190 countries - including the UK - agreed in Paris last month that urgent action is required to avoid dangerous impacts from rising greenhouse gas levels?
While the overall coverage in the Guardian, Independent and Mirror titles tends to reflect the mainstream scientific, economic and political consensus about climate change, the Mail, Express, Times, Sun and Telegraph titles all continue to use their opinion columns and leaders to try to cast doubt on the risks. This was plainly shown by the contrasting reports last month of the link between climate change and this winter’s flooding.
However, not all of the naysayers are the same, with some science and environment correspondents valiantly battling to serve the best interests of their readers with fact-based reporting about climate change. Sadly, it appears that some of these newspapers are now carrying out a cull of writers who choose not to reflect the uninformed prejudices of their editors and proprietors. Last summer, the environment editor of the Sun, Ben Jackson, left the newspaper and was not replaced. This was the culmination of a slow slide in the newspaper’s coverage of climate change and other environmental problems since James Murdoch left its parent company, News International (now News UK), in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

Murdoch junior, unlike his father, is acquainted with the scientific evidence for climate change, and had persuaded his stable of newspapers to recognise the importance to their readers of being better informed about environmental issues.
Since his departure, however, the editors of the Times and the Sun have fully embraced unscientific denial of climate change. Soon after losing its environment specialist, the Sun published an article from “climate expert”, James Delingpole, a notorious rightwing polemicist whose lack of scientific knowledge was cruelly exposed on national television by the president of the Royal Society. And the Times has been providing Viscount Ridley, the former chair of Northern Rock bank, with a regular column to downplay the risks of climate change.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph also decided last summer to make redundant Geoffrey Lean, one of the UK media’s most experienced voices on the environment. Lean wrote on his blog: “In the British press... there [are], in my estimation, some 10 columnists who reject or underplay the dangers of global warming, with precious few columnar voices on the other side”.
Fortunately, the Daily Telegraph still retains an environment correspondent, and at least occasionally publishes well-informed contributions to “balance” the babbling nonsense on climate change that appears in its columns by famous non-scientists such as Boris Johnson and Charles Moore.
But it is readers of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Express who suffer the most, with drivel appearing on both their news and comment pages. The Mail on Sunday has published a series of articles by David Rose, under the campaign banner of “The Great Green Con”, which attempt to undermine confidence in climate science in a very clumsy and unconvincing way, including stories that have been based on a fake magazine cover he found on the internet and a typographic error on a website.
Nevertheless, it is the Daily Express which has the worst track record, mixing ideological propaganda and inaccurate journalism. For instance, on 20 January, the United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, Nasa and the UK Met Office all announced that they had independently found 2015 to be the warmest year globally since records began in the 19th century.
The online report by the Daily Express, under the headline “What Global Warming? USA temperatures DOWN as climatologists claim 2015 was hottest year,” reflected the talking points handed out by climate change sceptics. Written by Jon Austin, who describes himself on Twitter as “Science & Paranormal Correspondent”, it stated: “Todays [sic] announcement that a major developed nation like the US did not experience its hottest year ever is likely to fuel the argument put forward by many US-based climate sceptics that human activities simply do not have the level of impact being claimed by the climate change lobby.”
This is bunkum. The contiguous United States, not including Alaska and Hawaii, covers less than 2% of the Earth’s surface and recorded its second highest annual average temperature in 2015, just behind 2012. The United States is warming, just like the rest of the world.
It should be noted that the Daily Express struggles with its coverage of weather as well as climate. On 10 January, the newspaper’s website reported the impending arrival of a few days of seasonal weather under the headline: “Arctic SNOWBOMB to smash into Britain: Coldest winter in 58 YEARS now just days away.”
In fact, the meteorological winter (December, January and February) of 1957-58 was not particularly cold, and 22 of the UK’s winters since then have recorded lower average temperatures. Given that last month was the warmest December on record in the UK by a considerable margin, and that the first half of January was also mild, this prediction by the Daily Express appears to be little more than uninformed speculation.
When will editors of the Daily Express and other British newspapers abandon their daft crusade to promote climate change denial, and instead put the best interests of their readers first by reporting the real causes and potential consequences?


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