On Global Warming Australia Gets Plenty of Bad Press

Sorry to have let the blog posts drop off during October. I’ve been pretty busy working on some restoration projects (more about this in later blogs).

            Anyway, I noticed this story yesterday in the Guardian. An analysis of Australia’s press coverage of global warming reveals that one third of that nation’s news media rejects the science of climate change. This is head spinningly astounding. The Australians have always impressed me as being particularly reasonable folks. But the Guardian explains that:

A study of 602 articles in 10 newspapers found that 32% dismissed or questioned whether human activity was causing the climate to change. The articles were analyzed between February and April in 2011 and again in the same period in 2012.Significantly, newspapers based a small fraction of their coverage on peer-reviewed science, instead relying heavily on comment pieces penned by writers without a scientific background.

If there is someone or something blameworthy here, the Guardian lays it squarely with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has increasingly treated the subject of global warming in opinion pieces rather than straightforward news coverage. The report, which was conducted by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, a non-profit organization based at the University of Technology in Sydney, said that, “By turning climate science into a debate, skepticism occupies space in Australian non-skeptic media that might otherwise be given to articles covering climate science.” Murdoch also owns Fox News in this country, which is pretty infamous for their questionable coverage of global warming.

Of course, things like this have consequences. Perhaps this had something to do with Australia’s last elections, in which the electorate voted out the Labor Party and replaced them with a two-party center-right coalition, whose leader, Tony Abbott, voiced as one of his objectives the end to Australia’s carbon tax.

Knowing this about the press coverage in Australia, the election starts to makes sense. If enough folks read in their newspapers that global warming is at best an iffy proposition, they will vote to rid themselves of a carbon tax. There is much more to the election than this one tax issue, but I’m certain that it played some part in the outcome.