Media needs storytelling that catalyzes, not atomizes, the severity of the climate crisis.
Take a look at February’s weather:
- The temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere crossed 2C degrees on four consecutive days. Last year, it breached the 2C degree level for the first time.
- More than 500 all-time temperature records were broken in the United States, Mexico, and Japan.
- It was 70F degrees in Chicago and close to 100F degrees in Texas.
- The average Southern Hemisphere surface air temperature was above 17C degrees for the first time.
- Ocean temperatures hit an all-time high of 21C degrees.
Atomized news
Add it all up, and it was the warmest February ever. However, unless you read a tweet from Assaad Razzouk, author of Saving the Climate Without the Bullshit, chances are you did not connect the dots.
And that is a huge climate problem. There is a blizzard of climate media coverage, but its impact is largely white noise. One can get a sense of this problem when you look at attitudes on climate change. A vast majority of Americans say they are concerned about global warming. But they also believe transportation issues are a higher priority than addressing climate change, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
Clearly, the impact of climate reporting is not sinking in. It’s not that the reporting is terrible or in short supply. Quite the opposite. Media organizations have invested heavily in first-rate media reporting.
But here is the problem: Climate is still seen as just another story competing with the latest news from Elon Musk or Gaza. Such “qualitative” storytelling is fine for covering most news events, be it Joe Biden’s age or battlefield reports from Ukraine.
System-level climate reporting
But the climate crisis is a very different story and needs to be covered differently. The daily global impact of climate change makes it more like the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a systems-level crisis that requires a systems-level media response.
The daily global impact of climate change makes it more like the Covid-19 pandemic. It is a systems-level crisis that requires a systems-level media response.
Luckily, we have a model for how to cover a system-level crisis, and that is the remarkable work done by news organizations like the New York Times or the BBC during the pandemic. With rapid visual innovations, they could turn a blizzard of data into life-or-death storytelling through the power of interactive charts and graphs.
Remember these?
Or this.
Consider all the ways Covid was tracked by the New York Times:
Mobilizing billions
And it had an impact. The use of these interactive graphics helped personalize the story for millions who could now get data on anything from infection rates to deaths from anywhere in the world, including your own zip code.
The data added crucial context and gave viewers a visual arc of how the story was progressing and how it might impact you. It kept it relevant and actionable.
“When covering long unfolding crises like the Covid pandemic, there is just a certain numbness that is normal human nature… We tried just to keep reminding people of what’s still going on,” Times graphics editor Lauren Leatherby wrote recently.
There is a relatively simple reason that data, used effectively, can be so powerful. Look no further than the sports or financial page. Combining data and reporting has been a winning formula for over a century. What is the point of a bunch of random company news events, for example, if you cannot chart whether the stock price is going up or down?
We will only understand the full impact of climate change when we deploy the unlimited interactive data firepower that kept readers glued to their news feeds during the pandemic.
However, it took the pandemic to develop a new level of data visualization that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. Traditional qualitative news stories were now supplemented with equally powerful quantitative data visualization. The data journalism offers a roadmap of sorts that puts the individual stories in the context that readers need to begin to understand the profound implications of climate change.
We will only understand the full impact of climate change when we deploy the unlimited interactive data firepower that kept readers glued to their news feeds during the pandemic. Without it, it is a bit like fighting a war without drones.
New media moment
The information is there. Governments, multilateral institutions and philanthropic organizations are spending billions on critical research and data ranging from tracking methane leaks to the amount of coal being used. The problem is no one is seeing it.
This is the moment for the media to pivot its climate storytelling to include critical data in a sustained, systematic, and impactful way to catalyze, not atomize, how readers and viewers react to the information they receive.
Featured photo: COVID-19 heatmap by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at John Hopkins University.
