Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage

Stephen Lewandowsky in Skeptical Science: "Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles." Iraq is progressing towards "dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missile." An Iraqi defector "tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites...

Those claims appeared in mainstream newspapers during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All those claims were false. ... A decade later, those media failures are relevant not only because of the war's six-figure death toll and because the Iraqi per capita GDP has so far failed to return to prewar levels, but also because they remind us that the media, including highly reputable newspapers, can sometimes get things quite wrong.

A similar media failure is arguably under way this very moment with regard to climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with near certainty that human economic activity is responsible for ongoing global warming, and some of the largest insurance companies on the planet have blamed the increase in losses from extreme weather events to climate-related disasters.

...One notable difference between pre-invasion reporting on Iraqi WMD and climate change is that, in contrast to the near-hegemony of war-supporting reporting (at least in the U.S.), the public has a broader choice now when it comes to climate change: While there is a large supply of disinformation that threatens the public's right to being adequately informed, there is also no shortage of actual scientific information, both in the mainstream media and beyond.

The diversity of sources empowers the public to select their information wisely, but it also provides a playing field for the dominant influence of people's cultural worldviews or "ideology", which can override even education. People whose core personal values are threatened by possible responses to climate change, such as a price on carbon or regulatory measures, are known to rely on media sources that are more likely to create confusion about climate change than disseminate scientifically accurate information....

Orwell plaque shot by Simon Harriyott, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license