Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
February 2019 Summary

February media attention to climate change and global warming was up 9% throughout the world from the previous month of January, and up 63% from February 2018.

While Asia, Middle East and Central/South America coverage was down 8%, 12% and 15% respectively from the previous month, it was up in all other regions. For examples, coverage in Europe was up 8%, Oceania coverage increased 34% and North America media attention went up 8% in February compared to the previous month.

Figure 1 shows increases and decreases in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January 2004 through February 2019.

Figure 2 shows word frequency data in United States (US) newspaper media coverage in both January 2019 and February 2019. Despite a waning Trump influence in January (see word cloud depiction in Figure 2, left), his influence in media coverage in the US returned in February (see word cloud depiction in Figure 2, right). The slow disappearing feature of a ‘Trump Dump’ (where media attention that would have focused on other climate-related events and issues instead was placed on Trump-related actions, leaving many other stories untold) was counteracted by Trump Administration (in)action in the month of February, such as an absence of mention of climate change in his State of the Union address (that sparked media remarks) and the presence of Trump Administration critiques of the proposed ‘Green New Deal’ (see below for more).

In February, there were many media stories about climate change that touched on political and economic content. In the US, committee hearings in the House of Representatives generated considerable media attention in early February. In particular, a hearing in the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources on climate change, and a subcommittee hearing in the Energy and Commerce Committee on the economic impacts of climate change generated media attention. For example, MSNBC ran with the headline ‘The House – finally – cares about climate change again’ while journalist Jen Christensen from CNN noted, “President Donald Trump did not mention climate change or any efforts to help the environment during his State of the Union address Tuesday, but members of the US House of Representatives held two hearings Wednesday on Capitol Hill to take a closer look at the threat of climate change”. Stephanie Ebbs from ABC News reported on dueling personalities in the hearings when she noted, “ranking Member Rob Bishop, R-Utah, raised concerns the hearing was too broad and not focused enough on the committee’s jurisdiction, which is federal conservation programs. Bishop said he wants to the committee to spend more time talking about how forests can be managed to promote clean air and protect states from smoke pollution as a result of wildfires in states like California…”I have to mention I’m kind of a loss, I don’t know where this hearing is going or the other six you have planned because you haven’t told us what the goal is. At some point we may be asking, where are we going? What is the real legislation to help people that is supposed to come out of these hearings? To understand whether these hearings are for those of us around the horseshoe that are going to make legislation or this group that’s sitting at a table in the corner so they can write cute stories,” Bishop said, point toward reporters in the hearing room”.

There was a lot of political coverage relating to the Green New Deal – co-sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) – in February. This legislation was touted as “a ten-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War II to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for all”. Journalists Lisa Friedman and Glenn Thrush from The New York Times reported, “Liberal Democrats put flesh on their “Green New Deal” slogan on Thursday with a sweeping resolution intended to redefine the national debate on climate change by calling for the United States to eliminate additional emissions of carbon by 2030. The measure, drafted by freshman Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, is intended to answer the demand, by the party’s restive base, for a grand strategy that combats climate change, creates jobs and offers an affirmative response to the challenge to core party values posed by President Trump…as a blueprint for liberal ambition, it was breathtaking. It includes a 10-year commitment to convert “100 percent of the power demand in the United States” to “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources,” to upgrade “all existing buildings” to meet energy efficiency requirements, and to expand high-speed rail so broadly that most air travel would be rendered obsolete. The initiative, introduced as nonbinding resolutions in the House and Senate, is tethered to an infrastructure program that its authors say could create millions of new “green jobs,” while guaranteeing health care, “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security” to every American”. Meanwhile, USA Today reporters Elizabeth Weise and Ledyard King noted, “The Earth is facing a climate change deadline, with a looming tipping point into a dramatically changed, less hospitable planet – and Democratic lawmakers are beginning what’s likely to be a long discussion over how best to deal with it. These first attempts have coalesced under a Green New Deal championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass”. As an illustration on US television, Amna Nawaz and William Brangham from PBS Newshour discussed the scale and scope of the plan with co-sponsoring US Senator Ed Markey.

In addition, a new ‘scorecard’ from the League of Conservation Voters was released late in the month, and this generated additional media attention in the US. It found that the differences in positions taken on climate change between Democrats and Republicans is stark, where the former has increasingly engaged with the issue over the past year. For example, journalist Dino Grandoni from The Washington Post reported “Democratic voters will have to decide among a slate of White House hopefuls tripping over themselves to commit to tackling climate change and other environmental issues. But which Democratic senator had the best environmental voting record in Congress last year? The answer: all of them. Each senator who has announced their candidacy for president received perfect scores in an annual voting scorecard kept by the League of Conservation Voters. The six declared 2020 candidates in the Senate — Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — always aligned with positions the environmental organization deemed ‘pro-environment’. So too did a handful of Senate Democrats thought to be considering a run for president, including Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)”.

Also in February, media covered ecological and meteorological dimensions of climate issues. For example (intersecting with scientific coverage), public understanding and awareness of links between extreme weather and climate change was assessed in a Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences study that garnered media attention in February. Through their research, the authors posited that over a period of approximately five years, what was considered once-extreme weather tends to become unremarkable and ‘normal’ weather. As an example of coverage, CNN journalist Jen Christensen reported, “The extreme weather that comes with climate change is becoming the new normal, so normal that people aren’t talking about it as much — and that could make them less motivated to take steps to fight global warming, according to new research. Researchers analyzed more than 2 billion social media posts between 2014 and 2016. What they found was that, when temperatures were unusual for a particular time of year, people would comment on it at first. But if the temperature trend continued and there were unusual temperatures again at that time the following year, people stopped commenting as much”. Read more …

A cause for re-examining how science partners with Indigenous Arctic communities

by Matthew Druckenmiller, CSTPR Research Affiliate and National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder

During the winter of 2017-18, the Bering Sea experienced the lowest sea ice coverage observed in at least 160 years. The combination of extremely reduced sea ice extent, little or absent protective ice along community coastlines, and winter storm activity caused substantial damage in several Bering Sea communities. The state and national media picked up on just how extraordinary conditions were. Scientists scrambled to put together short reports to raise awareness (e.g., this report from the University of Alaska Fairbanks), and the Alaska Regional NOAA branch quickly assembled a collection of briefing reports from over two dozen federal programs on what they were observing, intended to directly inform Alaska Native communities. A special session was held at the 2018 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (“Unprecedented Bering Sea Ice Extent and Impacts to Marine Ecosystems and Western Alaskan Communities”) and many related scientific papers are undoubtedly in the publication pipeline.

The lack of sea ice cover was remarkable, but urgency is more evident when considering the connections to the daily lives of local communities and to their Bering Sea foodshed. The connections are many: less sea ice exposes communities to greater storm surge, increased coastal erosion, reduced hunting access to marine mammals, unstable conditions for on-ice travel by community members, etc. Such issues are critical motivations for the research community to gain a deeper understanding of how the “system” is changing, and many of the previously mentioned efforts are important contributions especially where local communities have established entry points into the research process.

Yet, there is need for more local voices and new forms of collaboration, especially when unbounded to share outside the confines of a particular science program or project. More importantly, communities increasingly need to “use” the science and to insert it directly into their adaptation planning, emergency response protocols, and efforts to draw multi-level government and political attention to the challenges they face. The Bering Strait region is home to thousands of Inupiat and Yupik, who have lived in the region for millennia. For them, understanding their changing environment is critical to exercising tribal sovereignty.

As a case in point: In spring of 2018, local community observations combined with satellite-observed conditions of weather and sea ice collectively documented poor walrus hunting conditions around several Bering Sea communities. Because the lack of hunting access was a substantial threat to local food security, the Eskimo Walrus Commission used this information to declare a food-scarcity disaster with the State of Alaska.  Similar declarations in the past have resulted in large donations of fish to communities unable to harvest the number of walrus they require to feed themselves.

Following last winter, the science community largely came to the consensus that the unprecedented conditions were the result of both the footprint of climate change and the rare convergence of particular environmental conditions, most notably sustained periods of south wind that pushed the fragmented ice northward throughout winter.  The winter of 2017/18 was unique, but also in-line with what we might expect with Arctic amplification on a warming earth.

Most scientists did not necessarily expect last year’s conditions to return this year. Yet, here we are in mid-February 2019 where Alaska is facing “strange days” of way-above normal temperatures and sea ice coverage in the Bering Sea that is now once again within the range of being historic (see figure below), if you ignore last year of course. A lot can change however during the last few months of winter; the increasing sub-seasonal variability is just another challenge faced by the region.

The Indigenous Peoples of the Bering Sea region face a new normal: an environment that is unrecognizable in many ways. Yet, this is their backyard. We may be quick to think that “science is needed now more than ever”. Rather, this perspective needs to be flipped – “science needs to listen to communities now more than ever”.  Research-community partnerships, informal learning networks, and channels for sharing knowledge need investment that puts community leaders more in the driver’s seat for steering research agendas increasingly toward the local realities of food security, emergency planning, human health and, ultimately, survival. Some of this requires the long-view—a generational investment in the institutions and infrastructure necessary for “knowledge co-production”, but for those on the frontlines of global change, they are starving now for new approaches to actionable science.

by Fenja De Silva-Schmidt
original post from Climate Matters, University of Hamburg

While Donald Trump was responsible for most peaks in the Twitter debate on climate change in recent years, 2018 was different: a scientific report trumped Trump in triggering the most intensive Twitter debate related to climate change.

As in previous years, we take a look at the Twitter data our Online Media Monitor (OMM) has gathered over the course of 2018, and describe the events that triggered tweets about climate change, as well as the most important domains that were linked to and the most active accounts in our sample.

In summary, the number of tweets related to climate change has again risen in the past year. However, our sample does not allow us to examine whether this means that climate change has become a more prominent topic in Twitter communication, or if the number of tweets in total has risen, too.

For most of the year, the number of climate change-related tweets per day is astonishingly stable. In the second half of 2018, attention peaks were triggered by political and scientific events, as well as weather phenomena.

There were more than 1,200 tweets per day for the first time in 2018 in early August, during the persistent heat wave and drought in Europe. Forest fires were raging in Portugal while Germany and other countries were suffering from extreme drought. On Aug. 6, the German Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (Potsdam Institute for research on climate change effects) issued a statement that climate change might trigger heat waves sooner than previously thought. (We already analyzed if and how the weather triggered climate change coverage earlier on this blog.)

In September, Hurricane „Florence“ hit the US. The peak of attention manifested on Twitter when scientists’ reports connected the storm to climate change, warning that climate change will probably intensify the frequency and magnitude of hurricanes.

The most discussed event on Twitter in 2018 was a scientific one: After the release of the IPCC special report “on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels” on Oct. 7, the OMM recorded an all-time high of 4196 tweets on one day. In comparison: The highest peak in 2017 had 2803 tweets per day, when Trump announced to leave the Paris Agreement; in 2016 his mention of a “climate hoax” in the presidential debate with Hillary Clinton triggered 1485 tweets that fit our criteria.

Again, it was Trump who triggered another peak of attention for climate change, with his dismissive reaction to the fourth national climate assessment for the USA. Although the report warned that the US will face serious economic consequences of climate change, the American president just did not “believe it“.

As in previous years, the UN climate summit was a major driver of Twitter dialogue about climate change. Its beginning on Dec. 3 resulted in the highest number of tweets in the two weeks of the summit. Unsurprisingly, the debate reached its low point on Dec. 25, when most Twitter users were likely too busy celebrating Christmas to tweet about climate change.

We can sum up – in accordance with our colleagues from MeCCO, who are following the climate change debate in offline media – that Donald Trump is still a major driver of attention for climate change (although often in a negative way). In contrast to the previous year, however, he is not dominating the main events any more: Out of the five events triggering the most tweets, only one related to him directly. The other events are a combination of extreme weather events and scientific reports, linking the weather events to the greater picture of climate change. Thus, the voice of science seems to have become more prominent in the global Twitter debate.

Regarding the domains that the tweets linked to, there were almost no changes compared to previous years. News outlets still dominate the ranking. Two of them are new in our top ten list: Vox, an American news and opinion website noted for its concept of explanatory journalism, and grist.org, an independent news outlet and network of innovators writing about climate, sustainability, and social justice. On rank 10, we find the personal blog of an Australian climate activist.

The three accounts contributing the most tweets in 2018 were “GlobalClimateChange” (@GCCThinkActTank) with 56,759 tweets in our sample, Anne-Maria Yritys (@annemariayritys) with 33,943 tweets and AroundOnlineMedia180 (@AroundOMedia) with 20,814 tweets. All three accounts belong to the same person – who self-declares herself as “Finland’s most followed business person on Twitter” and describes herself as “an active (online) networker and social media strategist” also interested in climate change and sustainability. As far as a Google search reveals, she seems to be a real person and not a bot – which would make her case a stunning example how single people can reach vast audiences via social media.

The most retweeted tweets in 2018 were all sent by accounts that are extremely active, having sent more than 50,000 and up to 150,000 tweets. They contained either extreme right positions or an extremely positive stance towards climate activism – this is not a pattern specific for the topic of climate change, but extreme positions on Twitter in general trigger high numbers of retweets.

To sum up, our retrospective gave some insights into general mechanisms of attention on Twitter – controversies and extreme positions fuel the debate – as well as explain attention for climate change on Twitter in 2018, which was mostly provoked by scientific and natural events, completed by political events.

Method: Our Online Media Monitor provides ongoing monitoring of the transnational online media debate on climate change by searching for related tweets. Since January 2016, the OMM collects tweets if they contain the following hashtags or key words: #climatechange OR “climate change” OR “global warming” OR “Klimawandel”. Additional criteria are that the tweets got at least 5 retweets and contain at least one link.