By Keith Kloor
This absurd post by Joseph Romm, in which he accuses The New York Times of “media malpractice” due to supposed errant climate change coverage in several recent stories, reveals a doctrinaire mindset on the relationship between global warming and natural disasters that is becoming all too common in environmentalists.
Romm is ticked off because, among other things, this front-page Timespiece on California’s drought didn’t mention human-induced climate change as a “likely” factor and that another Times piece on Australia’s catastrophic fires (”Australia Police Confirm Arson Role in Wildfires”) was improperly headlined. Regarding the latter, let’s remember that straight news coverage of major disasters tend to highlight the newsiest developments of the moment. To Romm, though, the Times headline was a missed opportunity:
Apparently, the editors believe that blaming individual bad guys is the best way to frame the story, not blaming us all for all our contribution to human-caused global warming.
So let me get this straight: Australia’s tragic fires shouldn’t be pinned on arson, or bad fire managment, or recent settlement patterns, or least of all, parched conditions resulting from cyclical drought, but rather all of humanity?
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One Comment
It’s not entirely wrong to gripe about the NYT article, though, since they call the Southern California water shortage an “unlucky strike of nature.” This isn’t exactly the truth, either. The truth is that allowing massive amounts of agriculture in an area that traditionally gets very little rain is an unsustainable practice. Off years are going to mess things up. A string of off years are going to make matters worse. Perhaps our economic problems should be seen as a window of opportunity to stop depending on conditions that are ultimately inconsistent–if not consistently changing for the worse.