A failure to properly report on Climate Change | The Jackal

22 Sept 2014

A failure to properly report on Climate Change

I'm not sure if you've noticed the mainstream media, after a grueling 2014 general election, are too engrossed with their continued promotion of brand Key to bother properly reporting on matters of more importance like Climate Change events.

While the international media is covering some of the biggest global Climate Change marches ever, with 300,000 in attendance in New York City alone, journalists in New Zealand seem happy to rely on our isolation to try and keep the public in the dark.

It's not just the people power that our news agencies don't want us to know about, it's the scientific studies that are painting an ever bleaker-picture of a world with runaway climate change.

Yesterday, National Geographic reported:

New Reports Offer Clearest Picture Yet of Rising Greenhouse Gas Emissions

As the UN prepares to convene its climate summit, disturbing new numbers.

Two days before the UN Climate Summit in New York, three new studies paint the clearest picture yet of rising greenhouse gas emissions and the dwindling opportunity for staving off the worst impacts—and also of at least one way that huge undertaking might be shared fairly among the nations of the world.

“The overall outlook is rather bleak,” says Steven J. Davis, a climate scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who co-authored a paper published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change on how nations might share in reducing their carbon emissions.

Davis points to the “Global Carbon Budget 2014,” which was published Sunday in the journal Earth System Science Data Discussions. Produced by dozens of scientists from around the world, it’s the latest in a series of annual reports showing that “we're moving in the wrong direction,” says Davis.

“We're talking a lot about putting the brakes on emissions, but we’re actually accelerating.”

According to the new carbon budget, global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 2.3 percent in 2013 over 2012. The authors estimate that emissions will riseanother 2.5 percent in 2014, to a level that is 65 percent above emissions in 1990—the benchmark year established in the Kyoto Protocol.

Meanwhile the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 395 parts per million (ppm) in 2013. That’s an increase of more than 40 percent from the 277 ppm concentration in 1750, before the Industrial Revolution. (See “Greenhouse Gases Hit Record High Amid Fears of CO2 Saturation Point.”)

It's unfortunate that New Zealand, under a National led government and with the direct help of our biased media, will do nothing practicable to reduce our carbon emissions.

In fact, judging by their previous policies that have actually encouraged companies to pollute more, our clean and green image and international standing looks set to be badly tarnished by John Key's climate change denying government.