Another Whiff by the Network News Eugene Linden : endangered animals, rapid climate change, global deforestation, fragging

Another Whiff by the Network News

Friday January 31, 2014

The NBC Evening News featured the California drought and the newly declared state of emergency as their second item in the program tonight (Jan. 31, 2014). They covered all the bases – an orange grower worrying that his trees would die, the expert opining that this was the worst drought in anyone’s lifetime, one of the driest January’s ever recorded, etc – all except one that is. They never mentioned that the drought might well be related to climate change.

Well over a decade ago, Richard Seager of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory first published a study predicting that the shifting of the precipitation zones further north in a warming world would lead to extreme and persistent drought in the Mediterranean (dry summer, subtropical climate) regions of the world, including the American southwest. I was in contact with Dr. Seager a couple of years ago after an earlier report on the southwest drought on the CBS evening news because that report also failed to mentioned the global warming connection. He said that he had spoken at length about the role of global warming during the interview, but none of those comments made it into the broadcast.

If, as Richard Seager has argued in the world’s leading scientific journals, climate change will likely lead to intensifying drought in these regions over the next 100 years, don’t you think viewers of the network news broadcasts might like to hear that perspective? Or, are we to get a drumbeat of news items over the next decades, itemizing the toll of the droughts, but never exploring why they might be happening?

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Another Whiff by the Network News

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