New research on disasters in the media by Alex Holden, Department of Geography at Durham University. The map shows frequency of reporting by internet news websites on different types of hazards.
Month: July 2014
Do people link flooding to climate change?
From Talking Climate’s newsletter 7 July:
“One recent academic paper showed an association between perceptions of changes in weather (especially flooding) and beliefs about climate change. However, the study couldn’t establish causation: people who were already concerned about climate change may have simply been more likely to notice changes and attribute them to climate change.”
The perception of links between extreme weather and climate change is a burgeoning field of research. Another question, though not the focus of this study (Taylor et al. 2014), is whether the beliefs of people who are already sceptical about climate change are influenced by extreme weather. In our analysis of media coverage of the Brisbane flood in 2011, Anne Leitch and I found that narratives reflecting a denial of climate change seemed to be reinforced by the flood and other extreme weather events. That is, by situating the flood in the historical record and current political context, a case is built to deny the existence of climate change.
One reader wrote in a letter to the editor that: “There were a lot more floods in the 19th century and I don’t think they had much in the way of global warming or rising CO2 levels back then.”
Another wrote: ‘‘carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had nothing to do with the recent severe flooding in Australia. Making exaggerated claims regarding CO2 only shows the lengths people will go to in order to score political points for the introduction of a big new (carbon) tax on everything.”
Disaster Memory 