Who Ignored The New Report Warning Of Calamitous Climate Change?
Written by Max Greenberg
Published
A recent World Bank report warned that we are on the path to a world “marked by extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” Yet The Los Angeles Times, CNN and Fox News ignored the report entirely, continuing a pattern of deficient climate coverage.
In November 2012, a World Bank report concluded that a 4 degree Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) worldwide temperature increase by the year 2100, of which there is approximately a 20 percent likelihood even assuming current commitments to greenhouse gas reduction are honored, would lead to “unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions” and the “regional extinction of entire coral reef species” that provide “food, income, tourism, and shoreline protection” for many communities. It also determined that the consequences of climate change would most adversely affect “many of the world's poorest regions,” which have contributed among the least to climate change and have the least ability to adapt.
Of the major print outlets The Los Angeles Times was the only one that didn't mention the World Bank report (The New York Times only covered the report online, but recently created an interactive graphic illustrating one of the report's major warnings: sea-level rise).*
MSNBC's The Cycle, on the other hand, dedicated an entire segment to the report and climate change policies:
Unfortunately, it appears that their climate coverage made them an outlier once again among cable news outlets, as CNN and Fox News skipped the report. Fox News routinely ignores or downplays the veracity and urgency of climate change, and CNN has been criticized for under-covering it.
*This post has been updated to reflect changes in Daily Kos blogger RL Miller's reporting.