Violent Crime Increases in Warm Weather

Posted on February 6, 2019 by prometheus

by Alison Gilchrist
Originally published on Science Buffs, A CU Boulder STEM Blog

I was 10 minutes into my interview with Ryan Harp before he showed me the most shocking piece of data I have ever had to emotionally process. For three years, Harp has been investigating the connection between climate and crime. At one point, Harp had to call the FBI– he was asking for some statistics about crime that the FBI collects from most police departments in the United States. Ten minutes into our chat, he was holding up a jewel case containing that data.

Hold up, I thought, and then vocalized. “Are you telling me that the FBI sent you three decades worth of detailed statistics about violent crime… on a CD?”

Did you know that the FBI employs over 35,000 people and has an annual budget of $8.7 billion? It has its headquarters in Washington, D.C. and has 56 field offices throughout the 50 states. Did you also know that the FBI still sends out 3GB of data on CDs?

Don’t worry, I stayed professional while processing this bombshell. Harp went on to explain why he needed that CD’s worth of data. Harp is a graduate student in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) at CU Boulder. He’s currently working in the lab of Kristopher B. Karnauskas, studying the connection between local weather and crime. When he was sent this data, he was trying to correlate two very different datasets. The first dataset was from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and described the local weather all over the United States from 1979 to the present (sensibly delivered in a downloadable digital format). The second dataset described violent crime from the same time period (the CD).

Scientists have long known that crime rates increase during the summer and with warmer temperatures. There are two different theories about why this might be true. The first is that warm weather makes people more aggressive:

“When it’s really hot outside, your body gets physically agitated like you’re experiencing heat stress,” said Harp.  “You’re just irritated and a little more likely to do something that you might not do. You’re cranky.”

The second theory, called the “routine activities” theory, is built around the idea that a crime needs three elements: a motivated offender (someone who wants to commit a crime), a target, and the lack of an obstacle to the crime, like a police officer.

“During pleasant weather, people are more likely to leave their house, go to restaurants or parks,” said Harp. “You’re just increasing the likelihood that those three things are going to come together.” This, in turn, makes crime more likely.

Harp was interested in two questions: first, which of these two hypotheses is correct, and can we prove it? And second: will a warming climate lead to more violent crime incidents?

This is where the two databases described above come in. Harp first split the United States into five different regions: the Northeast, Southeast, South Central, West, and Midwest. Next he categorized all the data points for climate and violent crime he had by region. He then compared temperature and crime to ask: if the temperature in a given month is higher than average, does violent crime also increase?

The answer is yes. In a publication for the journal GeoHealth, Harp showed that when the temperature is above average for any particular month, violent crime is also higher. This is true in all five regions, and the correlation is especially powerful in the winter months. This implies that it’s not just warm weather making people cranky—higher than usual temperatures in the winter are still not usually very high.

“This was our first piece of evidence that the second theory—the routine activities theory—was the stronger driver,” said Harp. “So when it’s warmer in the winter, people are out interacting more, and that leads to more crime.”

But Harp has even more evidence for the second hypothesis—that unusually warm weather brings perpetrator, target, and motive into closer proximity than usual. As well as looking at violent crime, he also looked at property crime. If the first hypothesis was true—that warm weather makes people cranky—then you wouldn’t expect property crime to increase with higher than average temperatures. When people get aggro in the heat, it’s usually because someone’s actions are more annoying than usual. But you wouldn’t expect a thief to be more likely to rob a house just because it’s hot… right?

But sure enough, property crime does increase with higher than average temperatures. This suggests that all crime increases when temperatures are higher than normal, not just a crime that revolves around people getting cranky. This lends more support to the second hypothesis: that warmer temperatures bring people who would commit crime out of their warm, cozy houses.

Harp’s conclusions are important for multiple reasons. This report accounts for seasonality—meaning Harp split up the results by month and showed that the correlation between warmer temperatures and a rise in crime is very high. Reports that don’t split up the data by month just show that crime and temperature are both seasonal, which is true but not a novel finding. Interestingly, there is still a seasonal trend—the correlation between an unusually high temperature and a rise in violent crime is stronger during winter months.

Harp also used relatively simple statistics, which he thinks speaks to the power of the trend that they’re finding.

“We created these regions, which allowed us to get past the random fluctuations from year to year and pull out the climate signal a lot more easily,” said Harp. “We were able to use really basic statistics and were able to detect the relationship without using a lot of complicated models.”

Harp, a climate scientist, thinks it’s important that this story is framed in the context of how climate could shape the health of future generations. Many people have researched how a warming climate could influence the spread of disease, but Harp thinks there could be health consequences to global warming we haven’t predicted. “When a violent crime occurs, the victim experiences physical and mental trauma, and their health is very negatively impacted,” said Harp. “We’re adding this in to the overall climate and health focus.”

Harp is interested in the next big question: will a warming climate lead to more violent crime incidents? This seems like an easy connection to make based on the results of this study, but it needs to be directly investigated before any conclusions are drawn.

A warming climate could have many impacts on human society and health. Questions about the future increasingly keep scientists, myself included, up at night. Will disease spread faster as disease vectors migrate into new regions of the world? Will rising oceans displace people from coastlines? Harp adds two more questions to my nightly worried thoughts: will violent crime increase as temperatures rise? And—most importantly—will the FBI ever learn about flash drives?

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MeCCO Monthly Summary: The world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe

Posted on February 5, 2019 by prometheus

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
January 2019 Summary

January media attention to climate change and global warming was down 20% throughout the world from the previous month of December 2018, but up just over 15% from January 2018.

While African coverage was up 21% from the previous month, it was down in all other regions, including North America where coverage was down 10% in January compared to the previous month of December 2018.

Figure 1 shows increases and decreases in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – over the past 181 months (from January 2004 through January 2019).

Figure 1. Newspaper media coverage of climate change or global warming in sixty-six sources across thirty-six countries in seven different regions around the world, from January 2004 through January 2019.

This month we introduce media monitoring of Public Broadcasting Services on United States television and additional monitoring across four wire services: The Associated Press, Agence France Press (AFP), The Canadian Press, and United Press International (UPI). We at the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) now monitor sixty-six newspaper sources, six radio sources and seven television sources spanning thirty-nine countries with segments and articles in English, Spanish, German and Portuguese. In addition to English-language searches of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’, we now conduct searches of Spanish-language sources through the terms ‘cambio climático’ or ‘calentamiento global’, and commenced with searches of German-language sources through the terms ‘klimawandel’ or ‘globale erwärmung’ as well as Portuguese-language sources through the terms ‘mudanças climáticas’ or ‘aquecimento global’.

Figure 2. Media coverage of climate change or global warming across The Associated Press, Agence France Press (AFP), The Canadian Press, and United Press International(UPI) wire services.

Moving to considerations of content within these searches, Figure 3 shows word frequency data in Indian newspaper media coverage in January 2019.

Figure 3. Word cloud showing frequency of words (4 letters or more) invoked in media coverage of climate change or global warming in Indian newspaper sources. Data are from The Indian Express, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and The Times of India.

In January, considerable attention was paid to political and economic content of coverage. Prominently, the movements of newly elected Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro captured media attention. From his inauguration in January, coverage focused on his efforts to commodify ecosystem services in the country. For example, Bolsonaro immediately sought to cede control of indigenous lands to agribusiness. Journalist Marina Lopes from The Washington Post reported that “Brazil’s new right-wing president opened the door Wednesday for more potential development and tree-clearing in the Amazon rain forest, giving the Agriculture Ministry oversight over which lands are granted protected status. The move by Jair Bolsonaro — in one of his first acts since his inauguration Tuesday — is seen as a victory for Brazil’s powerful rural lobby, which has long sought access to protected lands for logging, farming and other projects. It also signaled the apparent start of a new era of sweeping deregulation in Brazil, a country once lauded for its strides in environmental protection — including its stewardship of the world’s largest rain forest. Bolsonaro, a former army captain who was backed by the rural lobby, supports greater development of the Amazon, the assimilation of indigenous groups and reduction of environmental regulation”.

In Europe, some coverage focused on a continuing trend toward decarbonization and electric transportation. For example, media focused on Germany’s announced plans in January to phase out all of its coal-fired power plants over the next two decades. In addition to abundant media attention in the German press, journalist Erik Kirschbaum from the Los Angeles Times reported, “the announcement marked a significant shift for Europe’s largest country — a nation that had long been a leader on cutting CO2 emissions before turning into a laggard in recent years and badly missing its reduction targets. Coal plants account for 40% of Germany’s electricity, itself a reduction from recent years when coal dominated power production”. As another example, coverage noted record-setting electric vehicle sales in 2018. Journalists Camilla Knudson and Alister Doyle commented, “Almost a third of new cars sold in Norway last year were pure electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025… The independent Norwegian Road Federation (NRF) said on Wednesday that electric cars rose to 31.2 percent of all sales last year, from 20.8 percent in 2017 and just 5.5 percent in 2013, while sales of petrol and diesel cars plunged”.

Meanwhile, the annual survey of global threats was released at the mid-January annual World Economic Forum. The survey showed climate change jump up the charts of concern, noting “of all risks, it’s in relation to the environment that the world is most clearly sleepwalking into catastrophe”. Journalist Joanna Sugdan from The Wall Street Journal reported, “The threat of a full-blown global trade war and rising political tensions between world powers are the dominant global risks, according to a report by the World Economic Forum ahead of its annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, next week. Cyberattacks and climate change also feature high on the list of potential hazards drawn up from a survey of around 1,000 lawmakers, academics and business leaders for the group that organizes the Davos meeting”. Meanwhile, Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot wrote, “Growing tension between the world’s major powers is the most urgent global risk and makes it harder to mobilise collective action to tackle climate change, according to a report prepared for next week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF’s annual global risks report found that a year of extreme weather-related events meant environmental issues topped the list of concerns in a survey of around 1,000 experts and decision-makers”. Read more …

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CSTPR’s 2nd Annual Volunteer Work Together

Posted on January 30, 2019 by prometheus

Our CSTPR community came together in January to volunteer at the Community Food Share, a local charity in Louisville, Colorado that works with multiple nonprofits to collect food for those in need. CSTPR joined together for an evening of reflection and celebration, along with considerations of a bright 2019 to come!

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To Engage or Not to Engage?

Posted on January 29, 2019 by prometheus

by Jenn Richler
Nature Climate Change, volume 9, page 88 (2019)

Although scientists have valuable knowledge relevant to tackling important issues, many resist calls to engage the public for fear that being labelled as an advocate will undermine their scientific credibility. Ambivalence over advocacy may be especially problematic for climate science, which is highly politicized in the United States and thus presents more risks associated with becoming a public voice. But everyday discussions of climate science are needed to raise public understanding and awareness.

Maxwell Boykoff and David Oonk from University of Colorado Boulder surveyed US-based academic researchers and scholars drawn from societies that support natural and social scientists, such as the American Geophysical Union. Respondents generally agreed that advocacy for evidence-based climate science should not be criticized, but social scientists were more likely to take this position than natural scientists. However, social scientists were also less likely to agree that academic researchers should advocate for specific policies. Younger respondents and social scientists were more likely to agree that those with smaller known carbon footprints are more persuasive advocates. A failure to distinguish between promoting evidence-based science versus promoting a particular policy may explain differing views on the acceptability of climate advocacy.

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Reticent Experts Still Have Climate Advocacy Choices, Scholars Say

Posted on January 22, 2019 by prometheus

Colorado Arts and Science Magazine
by Clay Evans

Scientists can be climate advocates without tarring reputations, CU Boulder researchers contend

When it comes to communicating the science of climate change, who better than a climate scientist to serve as messenger to the public?

There is broad consensus by scientists that the earth’s climate is growing warmer out of proportion to expected historical cycles, caused in significant part by carbon-increasing human technology. And yet, many researchers and scholars with relevant expertise are reluctant to speak out, for fear that they will be tarred as “advocates” rather than objective scientists, at a cost to their reputations or those of their particular disciplines.

“Scientists are conflicted on the topic of advocacy. On the one hand, they feel a moral obligation to help society deal with important issues, but are simultaneously cautioned that tainting science with bias will undermine the credibility of science,” said Jane Lubchenco, then-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two decades ago. 

And that, argue two researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, may be negatively influencing public awareness and knowledge of the scientific foundations of climate change science.

“When those recoiling from spaces of advocacy for evidence-based climate research are the relevant experts who hold insights for useful and informed commentary, these results show that they perhaps should be viewed as missed opportunities for further public engagement,” write Max Boykoff and David Oonk in December in the journal Climatic Change.

At the same time, they note, some scientists who do speak out may blur the lines between evidence-based science and specific policy outcomes, fanning suspicions among doubters. 

“The relationship between science and policy advocacy is incredibly sticky and fraught,” write Boykoff, associate professor of environmental studies, and Oonk, a graduate student and researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “Rather than treating advocacy as a vehicle to meet people where they are, some erroneously concoct visions of advocacy as an inappropriate exercise of telling others where this should be.”

Their research is part of a growing community of scholars examining climate communications—that which comes from scientists or from the mass media and is about climate science.

Surveying U.S.-based climate researchers and scholars, and analyzing interviews conducted through a joint effort of “Inside the Greenhouse” (a CU-based initiative to promote multimedia climate change storytelling) and “More Than Scientists” (a community of researchers), Boykoff and Oonk reach several conclusions about scientists’ attitude toward “the unresolved subject” of climate advocacy.

Among their findings:

  • There is broad agreement that climate change is a pressing issue.
  • Women are slightly more likely to see it as a pressing issue.
  • Those in the natural sciences are more likely than those in social-science fields to look askance at advocacy.
  • Those who are more sympathetic to advocacy are more likely to be influenced by the advocacy of someone with a small personal carbon “footprint” than someone with a larger footprint.
  • Younger researchers are more likely to change their own behavior in response to advocacy by a person who boasts a smaller carbon footprint than older scientists.

“You hear ad hominem attacks (on climate-change researchers), ‘We’re not going to listen to you because you have a large carbon footprint,’ or ‘You flew here to this conference,’” Oonk notes. 

“But in conversations with younger scientists, there is a kind of social responsibility or moral responsibility, ‘This is the world we are going to have to live in 10, 20, 30 years in the future. We have a very important role to play. That’s part of our job.’”

Some climate scientists concerned about their academic and public reputations simply go silent. They are hardly alone in their reticence to speak about this complex, politically sensitive topic. A survey by Yale and George Mason universities found that only 13 percent of Americans regularly talk about climate change issues in their lives. 

Reticent climate scientists “are unclear about where they could make useful interventions, and where they are stepping outside of their expertise,” says Boykoff, whose book “Creative (Climate) Communications” is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. “The resulting lack of engagement … comes at a time when engagement on the part of those relevant experts are most needed.”

Boykoff and Oonk say it’s important to make clear that scientists can advocate for the evidence without addressing specific policy prescriptions, such as a carbon tax.

“We have distinguished between advocacy for evidence-based climate science and advocacy for particular policy outcomes, as the conflation of these advocacy approaches has contributed to confusion, individualism, apolitical intellectualism, and restraint,” they write.

“Part of what we are trying to do is give people little more solid ground to be an advocate for science, information and evidence, without being tagged as plunging into advocacy for particular policy measures,” Boykoff says.

They also say scientists must be cognizant of their audiences and how they may be perceived. Oonk cites an example related by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe during a recent talk at CU Boulder, in which a scientist told her he wanted to go out and talk to “faith communities” about climate change.

“She answered, ‘Start with your own faith community and go from there,’” Oonk says. “The scientist said, ‘Oh no, no, I’m an atheist.’ She told him maybe the faith community is not your place to be advocating and talking.”

And, the researchers acknowledge, not everyone should become an advocate, regardless of their knowledge or passion: “These engagements are not for everyone,” they write. “Some see these endeavors as new and extra burdens on an already demanding job as a climate scientist. Moreover, some climate scientists may simply be bad communicators.”

“We are pretty good as a society in the United States at training scientists to be scientists,” Oonk says. “We’re not as strong at training them to be communicators and advocates.” Read more …


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Can Genetic Engineering Save Disappearing Forests

Posted on January 18, 2019 by prometheus
Ash tree killed by the invasive emerald ash borer. Photo: K Steve Cope.

by Jason Delborne
CSTPR Faculty Affiliate and Associate Professor of Science, Policy, and Society in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University

Originally published in The Conversation

Compared to gene-edited babies in China and ambitious projects to rescue woolly mammoths from extinction, biotech trees might sound pretty tame.

But releasing genetically engineered trees into forests to counter threats to forest health represents a new frontier in biotechnology. Even as the techniques of molecular biology have advanced, humans have not yet released a genetically engineered plant that is intended to spread and persist in an unmanaged environment. Biotech trees – genetically engineered or gene-edited – offer just that possibility.

One thing is clear: The threats facing our forests are many, and the health of these ecosystems is getting worse. A 2012 assessment by the U.S. Forest Service estimated that nearly 7 percent of forests nationwide are in danger of losing at least a quarter of their tree vegetation by 2027. This estimate may not sound too worrisome, but it is 40 percent higher than the previous estimate made just six years earlier.

In 2018, at the request of several U.S. federal agencies and the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formed a committee to “examine the potential use of biotechnology to mitigate threats to forest tree health.” Experts, including me, a social scientist focused on emerging biotechnologies, were asked to “identify the ecological, ethical, and social implications of deploying biotechnology in forests, and develop a research agenda to address knowledge gaps.”

Our committee members came from universities, federal agencies and NGOs and represented a range of disciplines: molecular biology, economics, forest ecology, law, tree breeding, ethics, population genetics and sociology. All of these perspectives were important for considering the many aspects and challenges of using biotechnology to improve forest health.

More than 80 million acres are at risk of losing at least 25 percent of tree vegetation between 2013 and 2027 due to insects and diseases. Credit: Krist et al. (2014), CC BY-SA.

A crisis in US forests
Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. Forests face higher temperatures and droughts and more pests. As goods and people move around the globe, even more insects and pathogens hitchhike into our forests.

We focused on four case studies to illustrate the breadth of forest threats. The emerald ash borer arrived from Asia and causes severe mortality in five species of ash trees. First detected on U.S. soil in 2002, it had spread to 31 states as of May 2018. Whitebark pine, a keystone and foundational species in high elevations of the U.S. and Canada, is under attack by the native mountain pine beetle and an introduced fungus. Over half of whitebark pine in the northern U.S. and Canada have died.

The emerald ash borer is destroying ash trees in 31 states. Photo: Herman Wong HM/Shutterstock.
The emerald ash borer feeds on ash trees, damaging and eventually killing them. Photo: K Steve Cope/Shutterstock.

Poplar trees are important to riparian ecosystems as well as for the forest products industry. A native fungal pathogen, Septoria musiva, has begun moving west, attacking natural populations of black cottonwood in Pacific Northwest forests and intensively cultivated hybrid poplar in Ontario. And the infamous chestnut blight, a fungus accidentally introduced from Asia to North America in the late 1800s, wiped out billions of American chestnut trees.

Can biotech come to the rescue? Should it?

It’s complicated
Although there are many potential applications of biotechnology in forests, such as genetically engineering insect pests to suppress their populations, we focused specifically on biotech trees that could resist pests and pathogens. Through genetic engineering, for example, researchers could insert genes, from a similar or unrelated species, that help a tree tolerate or fight an insect or fungus.

It’s tempting to assume that the buzz and enthusiasm for gene editing will guarantee quick, easy and cheap solutions to these problems. But making a biotech tree will not be easy. Trees are large and long-lived, which means that research to test the durability and stability of an introduced trait will be expensive and take decades or longer. We also don’t know nearly as much about the complex and enormous genomes of trees, compared to lab favorites such as fruit flies and the mustard plant, Arabidopsis.

In addition, because trees need to survive over time and adapt to changing environments, it is essential to preserve and incorporate their existing genetic diversity into any “new” tree. Through evolutionary processes, tree populations already have many important adaptations to varied threats, and losing those could be disastrous. So even the fanciest biotech tree will ultimately depend on a thoughtful and deliberate breeding program to ensure long-term survival. For these reasons, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee recommends increasing investment not just in biotechnology research, but also in tree breeding, forest ecology and population genetics. Read more …


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It’s Time to Talk About Ecological Grief

Posted on January 15, 2019 by prometheus

Undark Magazine
by Michaela Cavanagh

As climate change marches forward, it will exact a mounting, tangible toll on our collective mental health and productivity.

WHEN I CALLED COURTNEY HOWARD, one of the authors of the recent Lancet Countdown 2018 Report on health and climate change, she was Christmas shopping during a pit stop in London on her way to the 24th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland.

As she picked out ballet shoes for one of her young daughters, we discussed her work on the mental health impacts of climate change. She recounted to me the moment in her own life when climate change’s bottom line really sunk in. She was at home with her daughter doing some mental math: Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, where she lives, was already 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 1940s, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had recently reported that average global temperatures were on pace to warm another half degree or more by 2052. The warming would be irreversible in little more than a decade — well within the lifetime of her children. She wound up on the floor, wrapped around her daughter in the fetal position.

The impact of climate change on our physical world has by now been made clear and manifest to anyone paying attention: Rising sea levels and increasing temperatures have begotten wildfires, drought, tsunamis and heat waves, which have wrought unprecedented devastation. The impact of climate change on our internal worlds, though, has gone relatively unstudied. But a growing body of evidence demonstrates that climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, and a host of negative emotions including anger, hopelessness, despair, and a feeling of loss. Researchers have dubbed these feelings “ecological grief.”

In a briefing for Canadian policymakers released in conjunction with the Lancet Countdown, Howard and her colleagues honed in on ecological grief, eco-anxiety, and something called solastalgia — a form of homesickness one experiences while still at home. Grief and mourning are natural responses to the scale of ecological loss we’re living through. Research shows that the sixth mass extinction is underway, and the World Health Organization named climate change the single greatest threat to global health this century.

Ecological grief is the grief that’s felt in response to experienced or anticipated ecological loss. It may arise due to acute environmental disasters. For example, one in six survivors of Hurricane Katrina met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, and crop-damaging heat waves have been shown to lead to increased suicide rates in India. But grief can also stem from stress and anxiety associated with slow, creeping changes in one’s environment — feelings that many of us are experiencing as the winters become uncannily warmer and extreme weather events become more frequent.

Communities whose livelihoods and ways of living are inextricable from their natural environments, though, are on the frontlines of the crisis. In the Inuit communities of Nunatsiavut, located in the north of Canada’s most easterly province, Newfoundland and Labrador, temperatures are warming twice as fast as in the rest of the world. That has led to diminishing ice cover, shorter winters, and unpredictable weather. Like other public health challenges, the burden of climate change’s mental health impacts falls primarily on groups that are already vulnerable. The losses these communities suffer extend to every corner of their lives, and they’re unending, says Ashlee Cunsolo, the director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University and another contributor to the recent Lancet report. The land — or ice — is literally shifting beneath their feet and before their eyes. The attendant grief these communities experience is similarly amorphous and ubiquitous.

The changing landscape brings food insecurity, post-traumatic stress disorder, population displacement, and trauma. There are no roads in or out of Nunatsiavut’s Rigolet, the southernmost Inuit community in Canada. The town is accessible by ice road, by plane, or — during the summer months — by ferry. In recent years, the ice has started to form a month later and melt a month earlier, says Derrick Pottle, a hunter and commercial trapper. And when there is no ice, community members have nowhere to go. Without the ice road, “you’re trapped — even if you wanted to get out you couldn’t.” For Pottle and the rest of the community, the sea and the land are “our highways, how we move around, how we get out to harvest, and how we connect to the land.” Read more …

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Analysis: The Climate Papers Most Featured in the Media in 2018

Posted on January 10, 2019 by prometheus

Max Boykoff’s MeCCO work for Lancet Report (#23 most featured in the media) highlighted in Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief, January 9, 2019

In a year dominated by events such as Brexit, royal weddings, the Salisbury poisonings, US Supreme Court nominations and the World Cup, there was still space in the news media in 2018 for reporting on new climate research.

These new journal papers were reported around the world in news articles and blogs and shared on social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit. Tracking all these “mentions” was Altmetric, an organisation that scores and ranks papers according to the attention they receive. (Full details of how the Altmetric scoring system works can be found in an earlier article.)

Using Altmetric data for 2018, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate change-related papers of the year. Read more …

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MeCCO 2018 Year End Retrospective

Posted on January 8, 2019 by prometheus

2018 saw media attention to climate change and global warming ebb and flow, amid competing interests in other political, social, environmental, economic, and cultural issues around the globe. In the context of media attention paid to issues from Australian national elections to Yemeni conflict, climate change and global warming garnered coverage through stories manifesting through primary, yet often intersecting, political economic, scientific, cultural and ecological/meteorological themes.

At the global level, October was the high water mark for coverage of climate change or global warming among the sources tracked by our Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) team. This trend of highest levels of coverage in October was also the case at the national level in Australia, Canada, Spain, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) in 2018. This coverage was attributed primarily to attention paid to the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on impacts of 1.5oC warming. It was also bolstered by media coverage of continued impacts and reverberations from Hurricane Michael (coming on land in the US Florida panhandle) and Typhoon Yutu (tearing through the US Northern Marianas Islands) in October along with continued cleanup efforts from September’s Typhoon Mangkhut (damaging the Philippines) and Hurricane Florence (making landfall in the Carolinas).

Figure 1 shows media coverage of climate change or global warming month to month over the last 180 months – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – from January through December 2018.

In January 2018, we at MeCCO expanded coverage to sixty-two newspaper sources, six radio sources and six television sources. These now span across thirty-eight countries, monitoring segments and articles in English, Spanish, German and Portuguese. In addition to English-language searches of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’, we began additional searches of Spanish-language sources through the terms ‘cambio climático’ or ‘calentamiento global’, and commenced with searches of German-language sources through the terms ‘klimawandel’ or ‘globale erwärmung’ as well as Portuguese-language sources through the terms ‘mudanças climáticas’ or ‘aquecimento global’.

In the aggregate across the newspaper sources, coverage was down 26% in 2018 compared to 2017. However, at the country level, coverage increased most notably in the UK (up 22%), New Zealand (up 22%) and US (up 20%) in 2018. Meanwhile, coverage held relatively steady in Australia (up 1%), Canada (down 2%), Germany (down 1%), India (up 2%) and Spain (down 1%). As such, the overall decrease in coverage was detected through sources outside these key countries. By comparison, coverage in Central American and South American sources monitored by MeCCO were down 23%. This may be a warning sign of possible limited capacity to cover climate change in global sources that do not generally have the comparable resources of these other country’s outlets.

Our broadened monitoring involved the expansion into regional monitoring of Latin American newspaper coverage, beginning in January 2005. This also included new monitoring of climate change or global warming in US television coverage – ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Network, MSNBC, and NBC – from January 2000 through the present. And our 2018 monitoring expanded to representative radio coverage in six main sources – American Public Media (US), National Public Radio (NPR) (US), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (UK), SW Radio Africa (Zimbabwe), Radio Balad (Jordan), and Radio France Internationale (RFI) (France) – also from January 2000 through the present.

In the aggregate across US television sources, coverage in 2018 went down 30% compared to 2017. Across global radio sources we at MeCCO have monitored, coverage in 2018 was down 8% from 2017.

At the US country level, Figure 2 illustrates these trends month to month in US press accounts across five newspaper publications in 2018 – The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. Figure 3 shows trends across US television news – ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Network, MSNBC, and NBC.

Throughout the year (as in 2017) there has been continued prominence of news from US outlets on climate change or global warming associated with Donald J. Trump. We at MeCCO have referred to this as 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. Throughout the year 2018, in terms of the frequency of words in US news articles, ‘Trump’ was invoked 22,942 times through 5,106 stories in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times in 2018. In fact, ‘Trump’ was mentioned more than twice as frequently as ‘science’, ‘scientific’, ‘scientists’ and ‘scientist’ combined (a ratio of 2.2 times more frequent). These abundant mentions of Trump were a remarkable ratio of nearly 4.5 times per article on average. However, this is down slightly from a ratio of nearly 4.7 times per article on average in 2017.

Meanwhile, ‘Trump’ was invoked 41,172 times through 980 stories on US network television news outlets ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Network, MSNBC, and NBC in 2018 (a ratio of approximately 42 times per segment on average). Even though the NBC Meet the Press December 30 special report on climate change was seen to be an encouraging new media approach, the show nonetheless mentioned or quoted Trump fourteen times during the hour-long program (see December section and conclusion for more).

This was illustrated in a number of ways throughout the year. For example, media copiously covered comments about “beautiful and clean coal” as the President set carbon-based industry preferences in his January State of the Union address and throughout the year, factual challenges and all. As a second instance, Trump reactions to the November release of the Fourth US National Climate Assessment (NCA 4) generated media attention where journalists like Rebecca Ballhaus from the Wall Street Journal reported, “President Trump said Monday that he doesn’t believe the central finding of a report released last week by his administration … Mr. Trump said of the report, “I’ve seen it. I’ve read some of it. And it’s fine”.  Further elaborations and additional examples can be found in the month-to-month accounts that follow in this 2018 retrospective.

Among others analyzing media representational practices, Lisa Hymas from Media Matters picked up on this in 2018. She astutely commented, “The media should be chasing down stories on climate science, the people being affected by climate change, responses and solutions to the problem. Instead, even when they report on climate change, they’re still chasing Trump”.

Figure 4 depicts word frequencies in US newspaper accounts across the calendar year 2018.

This report is an aggregation and reprise of monthly summaries that our MeCCO team has compiled and posted each month on our website. It is our second annual review of coverage. The project is currently based in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR) in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder. However, contributions are made through collaborations and partnerships with MeCCO members at the University of New England (USA), Babson College (USA), Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) and the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) in Japan.

As 2019 begins, it is a time for important reflection on how the past year 2018 shapes the one to come. It is also a critical time to ponder how our histories up to the present shape those that will follow. Australian drought, Sub-Saharan African human displacements, Central and South American biodiversity losses, Asian commercial fishing woes, Brazilian presidential elections, IPCC and NCA reports, US federal (in)action mixed with rollbacks and wildfires across North America and Scandinavia punctuated more general trends across the 2018 media and climate change landscape. Consequently, the month-to-month summaries (below) highlight key events, stories and developments through political, scientific, cultural and ecological/meteorological themes. Read more …

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MeCCO Monthly Summary: Duly ‘noted’, but not duly ‘welcomed’

Posted on January 3, 2019 by prometheus

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
December 2018 Summary

December media attention to climate change and global warming was up nearly 8% throughout the world from the previous month of November 2018, and up about 54% from December last year. Increase were detected in Asia (up 28%), Central/South America (up 19%), the Middle East (up 7%), North America (up 10%), Oceania (up 37%) and Europe (up 8%), while going down only in Africa (down 25%) this month compared to the previous month of November. Figure 1 shows increases and decreases in newspaper media coverage at the global scale – organized into seven geographical regions around the world – over the past 180 months (from January 2004 through December 2018).

Moving to considerations of content within these searches, Figure 2 shows word frequency data in the dynamic spaces of Australian and New Zealand newspaper media coverage in December 2018.

In December, considerable attention was paid to political and economic content of coverage. Prominently, the 24th Conference of Parties meeting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) took place in Katowice, Poland. Driven by a journalistic penchant for conflict, media attention was paid to COP24 debates regarding whether to ‘welcome’ or ‘note’ the October United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on impacts of 1.5oC warming. For example, an Associated Press article entitled ‘U.S., Russia, Kuwait and Saudis block key climate study at COP24’ described that “almost all 200 countries present in Katowice, Poland, had wanted to “welcome” the IPCC report, making it the benchmark for future action. But the U.S. and three other delegations objected…Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also called for the study to be ‘noted’ but not ‘welcomed’”. In addition, media stories covered efforts to agree on a Paris Agreement rulebook, and discussions regarding how to establish and sustain financial support from countries of the ‘global north’ to countries of the ‘global south’. For example, journalist Megan Rowling from Reuters reported, “More than 190 countries are meeting in the coal-mining town of Katowice through Dec. 14 to hammer out rules that will enable the Paris accord to be put into practice from 2020, and spur countries to strengthen their current climate action plans. Current pledges to cut emissions would lead to global warming of about 3 degrees Celsius this century … under the Paris deal, governments have pledged to hold temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, and ideally to 1.5 degrees C. The world has already warmed about 1 degree C”.

In concert with these talks, in a strongly worded letter, hundreds of investors with approximately $32 trillion in assets-under-management demanded that world governments increase their ambition on climate change through policy interventions that assist with progress along decarbonization pathways. They recommended putting a price on carbon and a phasing out of coal power in order to meet the terms of the Paris Agreement. This generated media attention. For examples, journalist Simon Jessop from Reuters reported, “A total of 415 investors from across the world including UBS Asset Management and Aberdeen Standard Investments signed the 2018 Global Investor Statement to Governments on Climate Change demanding urgent action”. Journalist Damian Carrington from The Guardian noted, “The investors include some of the world’s biggest pension funds, insurers and asset managers and marks the largest such intervention to date. They say fossil fuel subsidies must end and substantial taxes on carbon be introduced”.

Many sub-global issues also percolated in media accounts. For example, on the domestic US front in December, the Andrew Wheeler-led Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rolled out a plan to reduce restrictions on coal production. Journalist Stephanie Ebbs from ABC News reported “The Trump administration wants to make it easier for energy companies to open new coal-fired power plants, even as government data shows the U.S. is at the lowest level of coal use in decades”. Meanwhile By Nicole Gaouette and Rene Marsh from CNN noted, “The Trump administration will reverse an Obama-era coal emissions rule as part of its effort to loosen restrictions on the coal industry, just days after a US government report warned that aggressive action is needed to curb greenhouse gases and ease the impact of global warming. The reversal won’t lead to the immediate construction of new coal-fired power plants, but it does send an immediate political signal that the Trump administration is intent on shoring up the coal industry and other energy interests”. Read more …

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