Is there something in the actual article that you feel pushes an unfair narrative?
To me it reports facts, which are scary. I don't think the article uses much hyperbole, but even if one concedes your point there IS impending doom to the people he interviewed. Their houses are sinking and rotten and becoming not livable because of climate change.
I really liked the Newsroom show; there's a great quote about narratives and bias. Sometimes giving equal weight to arguments just for the sake of 'fairness' is inherently unfair on settled topics like basic fundamental climate change facts.
As others have pointed out this type of journalism has some inherent bias simply from the choice of the journalist to do research & write on the topic.
Quackenbush writes in this blog how the hot moldy house piqued an urgency in himself, which he (rightly) feels is important to report on.
It's fundamentally a human interest piece, just like interviewing people who's houses were destroyed after a hurricane.
IMHO this is the most important & pressing issue today and should be #1 news and Quackenbush is right in trying to report more stories that give real human emotional consequences to the reality of destruction.
Responsible journalism asks questions like these: "What perspectives on this issue am I leaving out? Is it justified to do so?". There's a near endless supply of perspectives on virtually any issue. Of course representing all of them in a journalistic piece would be impossible, so a journalist needs to make a decision about which perspectives should be included and which should be left out.
Is it fair for journalists writing about climate change to leave out climate change denialist perspectives? Perhaps, especially when climate change denialists engage in deceptive arguments, which is extremely common. But often, some amount of skepticism is totally warranted, as there is even quantified uncertainty in the IPCC reports. Often journalists can cross into propagandist territory by not including some of that skepticism, and it makes their presented narratives a bit less credible, especially to people who have been inoculated by hardcore climate change denialist propaganda.
We really don't know exactly how bad things will get by 2100 (or later), there are several different models based on many different parameters, and humans can significantly alter those outcomes based on decisions we make. There are a few facts which are undeniable, and can be verified by virtually anyone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising, mean global temperatures are rising yoy. Based on many models, the rate these changes are occurring at will very likely cause significant systemic problems to the ease at which we, and most other species, survive on this planet.
Just think, a group of 5 year olds will have a career as journalists writing the exact same articles about climate change in 20 years, just like a group of now 40 year olds did when they were 25, 15 years ago.
See Duconomy...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90396592/this-credit-card-cuts-y...
The problem is when journalists/scientists cherry pick the information that helps their agenda/hypothesis and downplay the rest. That's unscientific. But that's why we need multiple journalists working the same topic, i.e. replication. And we need a general population/peer review who is intelligent enough to spot biases.
But historically humans are just bad at spotting their own biases, and more often than not, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
This seems like a tough nut to crack - not sure how we'd hold people accountable for their journalistic malpractice.
Advertising is really just bribes for positive press.
IMO the news sources we have are as good as it will ever get. Maybe we can enact some legislation about advertising, since we all know there are privacy issues around it as well, but at the end of the day we just need people to evolve in the information age. To understand that our attention is valuable, and it's important to be able to distinguish what is worth our attention. We're in for some rough years until we figure that out as a species.
Go to substack and find someone you trust.
I like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, but YMMV.
Also, check out Congressional Dish. She reads legislation and reports.
> Anything can be bankrolled under the table by anyone, and you'll never know.
Sure, but should we take the possibility of mixed compromised interests as a reason to stick to the known compromised?
Government media sources will have interests counter to your own. Large corporate media sources as well. Advertiser funded sources must not report negatively of their cash cows. I'll not be getting my information from sources like these
Again, I don't see the difference. I think compromised news is the best we can hope for, and we just need to get better at living with it.
Of course that won't happen, most of these corporations are just mouth pieces for politicians, and they like to keep them around.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...
Particularly their bottom line.
I dunno what you call it, but it certainly isn't journalism; more like infotainment.
Big bucks in that.
So oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter, calling it "just a theory": https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-ad-campaign/
And now we live in a world where you simply can't talk about climate science without running into spin and having to sink to that level to counter it.
No, they didn't. In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". The "global warming" narrative wasn't really being pushed until the late 1980s, and it wasn't until well into the 90s that discussion of the overall issue of what the climate might be like in the future was widespread.
> oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter,
So did global warming activists--in fact they did it sooner (what started the "global warming" debate in the late 1980s was a Congressional hearing purposely staged by activists to occur during a summer heat wave--and the A/C for the hearing room just "happened" to not be working that day). We are awash in propaganda on all sides of this issue.
No, there was much more uncertainty in the 70s, but the idea that global cooling was even a moderately dominant idea was a narrative constructed largely in the 2000s.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
Tell that to all the people that were talking about the next Ice Age coming. They seemed pretty confident.
However, even if we accept "much more uncertainty in the 70s", you're agreeing with me that the post I was responding to, which said that global warming was accepted as "scientific fact" back then, was wrong.
The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate by burning fossil fuels. What has always been uncertain is what impact this would have on the environment/animals/humans long term. Will it heat everyone up? Will it trigger an ice age? Didn't matter, everyone agreed that more information was needed and we had to take action UNTIL a lot of money went into dovetailing that uncertainty into doubt about the whole thing. And here we are still arguing at square one 30 years later.
Yes, to the extent there has been a consensus about human activities in general, it is that those activities do have significant effects on the climate.
> by burning fossil fuels
No, that hasn't always been a consensus. The human activity with the largest impact on the climate is land use: in the past 10,000 years or so we have significantly changed the surface reflectivity properties of the planet by converting land from forest to farms and cities (and now paved roads and skyscrapers and many other things). It's still not clear that the impact of fossil fuel burning is of comparable magnitude. But it's a lot easier politically to demonize people for burning fossil fuels than for farming and building cities. So that's what gets all the attention.
> everyone agreed that more information was needed
Yes, there has always been broad agreement on that.
> and we had to take action
No, there has not been broad agreement on that. There is certainly not broad agreement that, if we are going to spend trillions of dollars to do something, it should be on browbeating people into not burning fossil fuels. It would make much more sense to spend that money on (a) bringing more people out of poverty, and (b) beefing up our infrastructure. Those things will benefit everyone no matter what happens with the climate--and will also put us in a much better position to adapt to whatever climate change does happen. And in a situation where our information is incomplete and we don't have a good understanding of the overall system (the climate), it's much better to take an action that will benefit you whatever happens, than to place a huge bet on an action that will only be beneficial if one particular theory about what is happening turns out to be right.
You're also being disingenuous if you think "just a theory" isn't a phrase constructed to mislead. Your comment implies that you understand that a theory is literally the strongest model that science can give us about a topic, but saying something is "just X" implies that there is something else beyond X. So which is it? Is a theory as strong as it gets, or can science do better? If it can't do better, then never use the phrase "just a theory".
I still think it's harmful to general understanding to put any scientific knowledge on a pedestal of being unchallengeable fact. How can we know where we might be wrong? The earth is round, is it? What if that's just a slice of it in 3 dimensions and it's actually some other higher dimensional shape? Future people might laugh at our simplistic belief based on only seeing a little part of it - similar to ancients believing the Earth was flat because it was flat as far as they could see.
We have evidence which suggests that climate is changing and humans may be responsible. But the global climate system is complex, constantly oscillating on periods ranging from days to eons, and our data is sparse, especially going back 20+ years.
The certainty behind this consensus has been drastically overstated by ideologues who have taken it upon themselves to prioritize action over accurate reporting. There fundamentally is no proof that the changing climate will be catastrophic or result in runaway, especially when our historic temperature data is not fine grained enough to measure abrupt changes on the scale of 100 years. Though it is taboo to discuss, there is in fact evidence that such a rapid change is not unprecedented, that the earth has been hotter than it is now in the past, and that past sudden temperature swings clearly did not result in a venuslike earth.
The fact that virtually all major climate change model forecasts published in the last decade or two have significantly overpredicted temperature increases is telling of the bias in mainstream climate science.
I similarly take issue with this revisionist history wherein oil companies "knew" of climate change 60 years ago and deliberately ignored the danger. A claim of catastrophic anthropogenic terraforming requires evidence collection and modeling capability that simply did not exist 60 years ago, and given the periodic nature of climate, we simply will not know if this warming will indeed continue and/or become catastrophic without a lens into the future. Our current modeling capabilities are still inadequate.
You're wrong about climate change models. The first 1990 one was based on a simplistic energy balance model and did overestimate warming. But all the later models have proven to have been uncannily accurate. [2]
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-...
[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...
> No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact".
You talk about "scientific fact" and "proof" like this is mathematics. The best empirical science can do is to gather as much data as possible and arrive at a probability that a conclusion is true given what is known. And what is known is that there is a greater than 99% chance that global warming is anthropogenic:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU (Actual paper is paywalled and if you cared you'd go find it)
You're right that our instruments and data have only gotten better over the last 70 years, but studies from the 50s conducted by oil companies already suspected that that global warming was happening and experimentally confirmed that CO2 released by fossils fuels were a likely contributing factor:
https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-ech...
So much for "revisionist history".
But all of that is beside my point about media propaganda, much of which you are simply reciting in your own comment. My point is that the propaganda works, so thank you for taking the time to illustrate that.
If they truly wanted to be unbiased, you'd write an article like: - Permafrost is melting at faster rates than before in Alaska, showing varied studies and charts. - People are being displaced because their houses were built for permafrost and now that it's gone their houses are falling apart. The journalist seems to have done this from my reading. - We need to look at the future and see how this will affect our planet, our ecosystems around it, and the people directly affected by it. - We're looking at old traditions and cultures to try and come up with new unique ideas to living in the north as 'naturally' as possible.
The journalist doesn't need to "tell" you you need to be concerned. They don't need to tell you "possible reasons or speculations in an industry or environment the journalist has next to no experience in, that may or may not directly correlate to the plight of the Alaskan permafrost but it's convenient and helps drive the narrative so we'll put it in". Tell us the facts and let us make our own opinions.
I'd read the original washington post article in full, but they want me to pay for it so I'll pass. Pay for biased journalism? Nah, I'm good.
[0] - https://archive.is/20210925074935/https://www.washingtonpost...
There’s also the Twitter mob. If you don’t toe the line to some people’s preferred narratives you start losing advertisers and getting death threats.
This washington post journalist seems to think it's their obligation/duty to inform the seemingly "uneducated" people of Alaska of the impending doom of climate change, but I'm pretty sure Alaska knows its permafrost is melting.
That all being said - it's a bit disappointing to see such a beautiful landscape change so quickly, however it's just another sign of the times changing and everybody will need to adapt to it.