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The weather. Polite society’s politest conversation. A delightfully innocuous icebreaker in an otherwise combative society.
Alas, no more. Hurricane Milton has ransacked that calm reserve and left us in a wasteland of meteorological machinations and red-faced debate. The weather has become yet another right-versus-left-wing battleground: Where did it come from? What should we do about it? Most unhinged of all, who’s controlling it?
With placid weather chitchat out the window, it’s official. Our democracy is in tornado-esque freefall. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the ‘populist’ formula for democratic success (clicks + outrage) has outgrown its masterminds.
The beast needs feeding – by anyone who would like to win an election. In 2024 America, that means claiming science is a sham, illegal aliens are profiting off hurricanes and the Government is controlling the weather.
This week, Hurricane Milton tore destruction across central Florida as rubble from the recent Hurricane Helene still remained to be cleared. Since the record-breaking Hurricane Maria left 3,000 people dead in 2017, commentary has increasingly turned to potential links between manmade global heating and evermore extreme weather.
This was the focus of a headline-making study published on Wednesday by the World Weather Attribution group, which concluded climate change made Hurricane Helene deadlier.
It found that ultra-warm ocean temperatures intensified wind speeds by 11% and rainfall by 10%, and fossil fuels have made similar hurricanes 2.5 times likelier to occur.
Even in a partisan media landscape, scientific studies should have a unifying effect. Challenges and anomalies are controlled for in the process, so editorial ‘both-sidesism’ can take a backseat.
It seems natural, therefore, that the World Weather Attribution report was primarily reported in politically-centrist news outlets. We used AI analyser Ground News to identify papers’ partisanship, but when we aggregated the headlines they collected on the study, we found a glaring omission: of the 28 outlets that reported it, 64% were centrist, 32% were left-leaning, and only one single headline was from a paper on the right.
There are many great things about partisan journalism (if partisanship is declared) – we all play our small role in the wider conversation. Endless creative spins on the same old story are what ultimately help the story sink in.
Where Byline Times reports Hurricane Milton as a media storm, Forbes ponders how many millions Disneyland Florida will lose this quarter, and Fox News advises evacuees on deterring looters.
These layered commentaries are essential to make the climate crisis feel real, as producer Thimali Kodikara explained on Media Storm: “Climate is not a subject that belongs to environmentalists and hippies, it belongs to every single one of us – it needs to be contextualised to our lives because people only want to save what they can relate to.”
But it’s one thing to tell us why news is relevant, another to tell us that science is not.
Search ‘hurricane’ and ‘climate change’ on Fox News, the top result is an article from 2022, headlined:‘Democrats blaming climate change for Hurricane Ian at odds with science’.
The article quotes ‘experts’ saying there is insufficient evidence to link climate change to individual disasters, just as “Democrats and progressive commentators continue to blame the hurricane on human-caused global warming”.
Something to note – this article is not based on an independently published, peer-reviewed scientific study, but instead has been curated by its authors at Fox News.
They have harvested quotes from a fringe scientific body called the CO2 Coalition, which was founded by a one-time advisor of Donald Trump and received $1million from energy executives and anti-regulation lobbyist