Washington Post Edits Out Climate Change from Its Sea-Level Rise Story
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 4th, 2011 5:36 am by HL
Washington Post Edits Out Climate Change from Its Sea-Level Rise Story
Projected sea level rise IF we don’t get off our current emissions path (which is between A2 and A1FI). The WashPost omitted any mention of climate change in its sea level rise story, even though a key source talked about it with the reporter. by Elliott Negin, Union of Concerned Scientists, in a HuffPost repost. […]
Projected sea level rise IF we don’t get off our current emissions path (which is between A2 and A1FI). The WashPost omitted any mention of climate change in its sea level rise story, even though a key source talked about it with the reporter.
by Elliott Negin, Union of Concerned Scientists, in a HuffPost repost. [I add some comments of my own at the end — JR.]
The Washington Post flunked Climate Science Reporting 101 this week, fumbling an opportunity to remind its readers about the threat global warming poses right here, right now.
On Monday, the day the latest round of annual U.N. climate negotiations opened in Durban, South Africa, the paper ran a scene-setter in its front section headlined “Global pact gives way to local action.” It pointed out that countries, states, provinces and municipalities are initiating their own policies to cut carbon emissions in the absence of a universal binding agreement. That story was not the problem.
The second story, which was plastered on the paper’s front page, is where the Post fell down on the job.
“In Chincoteague, a stampede against beach changes” reported on a dispute between the federal government and town leaders in a small Virginia coastal resort town best known for its wild ponies. The town’s 4,300 year-round residents survive on tourism — some 14,000 vacationers visit daily every summer, according to the state transportation department. But its beach — a part of the Assateague Island National Seashore and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge — is threatened by sea-level rise.
Without getting bogged down in the details, suffice it to say that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency that manages national refuges, recently proposed a new, 15-year plan to safeguard the more than 300 species of birds and other wildlife at Chincoteague. One of the options would move the public beach about a mile north where it would be less vulnerable to sea-level rise, build remote parking lots in a more stable area, and shuttle beachgoers in buses. The town mayor and many residents oppose the plan, fearing the proposed changes would turn off tourists.
The Post story included the what, who, where and how of basic journalism. What was missing was the why. Why is sea level rising and eroding the beach in Chincoteague?
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, over the last century, sea level rose 5 to 6 inches higher along the Mid-Atlantic than the global average because coastal land there is sinking. But there is another key factor: Global warming.
“Higher temperatures are expected to further raise sea level by expanding ocean water, melting mountain glaciers and small ice caps, and causing portions of Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets to melt,” according to an EPA web feature “Coastal Zones and Sea Level Rise.” “The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the global average sea level will rise between 0.6 and 2 feet (0.18 to 0.59 meters) in the next century.”
The story never mentioned the connection.
I called Louis Hinds, Fish and Wildlife’s Chincoteague refuge manager, who was quoted in the piece. “I talked about climate change in my interview with the Post,” he said. “I use ‘climate change’ and ‘sea-level rise’ interchangeably.” Hinds also was quick to point out that the climate issues that plague Chincoteague aren’t unique. His agency has compiled examples from all 50 states of how global warming is imperiling wildlife.
Why is it such a big deal that the Post story failed to mention climate change?
Because public officials in Chincoteague and Richmond continue to deny it is happening — and aren’t doing anything about it.
Hinds has to deal with that fact in his job. “I’ve been the refuge manager here for four years, and when I got here, no one was discussing the climate change problem,” he said. “Some members of the community do not accept the reality of climate change, but they face its consequences every day.”
Meanwhile, the McDonnell administration’s attitude has ranged from skepticism to outright hostility.
Gov. Bob McDonnell’s bad cop is Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who for the last year and a half has been harassing former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann, accusing him of fraud. My group, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), organized a letter signed by 800 Virginia scientists and academic leaders condemning Cuccinelli’s baseless investigation and filed amicus briefs supporting UVA. (See UCS’s June briefing paper, “Science Under Attack.”) Cuccinelli yesterday confirmed that he will run for governor in 2013.
McDonnell’s slightly nicer cop is Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Doug Domenech, who encapsulated the administration’s position at a June 28 press briefing. That’s when he announced that the governor had declined to revive a climate-change commission convened by his predecessor, Gov. Tim Kaine, which had recommended dozens of ways the commonwealth could cut carbon emissions and adapt to changes that already are occurring, such as rising sea levels. The McDonnell administration has not acted on any of those recommendations, and Domenech, who worked under President George W. Bush’s notoriously anti-environmental Interior Secretary Gale Norton, joked that he couldn’t remember if he even saw the commission’s final report. “I’m sure there’s a copy around here somewhere,” he said.
Why the indifference? “The climate is changing, no doubt,” Domenech said, “but it’s always changing… Humans might be part of the cause, but too often in the debate it’s missed that the Earth has been warmer in the past and it has been a lot cooler in the past… So I would say the science is mixed on a lot of those things.”
Finally, Domenech told reporters “It’s a global issue, and it’s hard to say what changes we could make that would make that much of a difference.”
In fact, there a number of things Virginia could do to make a difference, just like the cities, states and countries mentioned in the story the Post ran last Monday on the U.N. climate talks in Durban. For one, its legislature could establish a renewable electricity standard similar to what 29 states and the District of Columbia now have in place. Those standards require local utilities to generate from 10 percent to 33 percent of their electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar by a specific year. Virginia currently has an unenforced voluntary standard of 15 percent. Virginia also could initiate aggressive efficiency programs that would cut residential and industrial energy use, as well as preparedness programs, such as coastline management plans, to help communities adapt to climate change.
That brings us back to the Post’s Chincoteague story and its glaring omission. To be fair, the paper ran a story in June about sea-level rise at Virginia Beach that stated in the second paragraph that the culprits are climate change and the fact that the area is sinking. So it’s not as if the Post doesn’t get it. But given the cavalier attitude the McDonnell administration has about this critical issue, it is incumbent upon the news media to continually remind Richmond that climate change is a serious threat and that it has a responsibility to address it.
As Louis Hinds, the Chincoteague refuge manager, said to me the other day, “The fact that some members of the community do not believe that sea-level rise or climate change are happening doesn’t mean that I can choose to ignore the science.” That goes for the news media, too.
– Elliott Negin is the director of news and commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.
JR: One wonders what the residents would think if someone actually told them what the latest science said. The original article notes:
More than 100 yards of shoreline has been lost to the Atlantic Ocean since the mid-1960s, said Louis Hinds, the refuge manager. A federal visitors center has been moved twice from rising waters. And if cars didn’t occupy the 8.5-acre parking lot, piping plovers, an endangered shorebird the refuge protects, would nest there.
The changes facing Chincoteague are coming to coastal communities across the nation. In Hampton Roads, planning commissions are preparing for the day, 30 to 50 years from now, when sea-level rise reshapes the coast, and a few landowners are resisting.
At the core of the debate in Chincoteague are questions of fairness.
Should the federal government close a beach it established and helped popularize? Over a half-
century, it shored up Chincoteague’s way of life, spawning dozens of hotels and hundreds of rental houses, restaurants and shops.“If I’d known this was a possibility .?.?. we wouldn’t have quit our jobs and opened a store,” said Jonathan Richstein, who bought Sundial Books on Main Street in 2007 with his wife, Jane.
Even back in 2007, it was clear that Chincoteague was unlikely to survive the inevitable triage that is coming from our refusal to take any serious action on greenhouse gas emissions. I’ve visited Chincoteague many times, particularly for the oysters. It is very flat. Here is “Debris on Beach Road at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge in Virginia after Hurricane Irene.”
Now it seems increasingly likely to be unsavable by mid-century (see “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050“), particularly if it were to be hit by a major hurricane in, say, a couple of decades.
Scott Walker?s New Policy May Result In Protesters Being Charged For The Pepper Spray Used Against Them
Under a new policy unveiled late this week by the Walker administration, protesters who apply for permits to protest outside government buildings in Wisconsin may be charged for clean-up costs and the presence of police officers. “Gov. Scott Walker now wants to charge protesters for the time that the police that will monitor them and […]
Under a new policy unveiled late this week by the Walker administration, protesters who apply for permits to protest outside government buildings in Wisconsin may be charged for clean-up costs and the presence of police officers. “Gov. Scott Walker now wants to charge protesters for the time that the police that will monitor them and presumably pepper spray them,” Current TV’s Keith Olbermann observed last night. Watch it:
Marquette University Law School prof. Edward Fallone told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he’s “skeptical about charging people to express their First Amendment opinion. … You can’t really put a price tag on the First Amendment.”
Recently, the city of Nashville billed Occupy Nashville $1,045 for security the day before it decided to evict the entire encampment. The Republican governor of that state, Bill Haslam, is also in the process of formulating a new policy to restrict the ability of protesters to occupy state grounds.
