Climate scepticism rare in developing nation media

Laurie Goering in AlertNet: Climate sceptics have gained a significant foothold in right-leaning U.S. and U.K. print media but are virtually absent in news reports in key developing world nations such as China, India and Brazil, a new Oxford University study shows.

That’s in part because fossil-fuel lobby groups are weaker in many of those countries, and homegrown climate skeptics simply fewer. But it’s also because many developing countries have more first-hand experience with the impacts of climate change, suggests the report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

China’s government, for instance, has “a very clear position, that climate change is real,” said Rebecca Nadin, director of the British Council’s climate change and sustainability programme in China, and one of the authors of the report. As a result, in a country where the government plays such a powerful rule, “climate change is not contentious, unlike other issues,” she said.

In Brazil, where hydropower provides 80 percent of electricity, the oil industry was until recently a state monopoly, and many leadinng newspapers have well-trained teams of science journalists, “climate skepticism is hardly present” in the media, the report said....

Caravaggio's "Denial"