Something like 40,000 and 100,000 people assembled in Copenhagen and marched the six kilometers to the Bella Center to demand climate justice. And, yet, the world’s largest single* climate change demonstration was “under the radar.”

The diagram, drawn by compiling weekly news summaries from Journalism.org, contains not even a postage-stamp-size space for coverage of climate — or the environment as a whole, for that matter,” observes Revkin.

Copenhagen was a non-event, i.e., what other than what everyone, everywhere around the world, saw as of critical importance according to media sources. The hive mind that is humanity remained unaware of a global crisis on par with the threat of global thermonuclear war or an expected impact event.

Revkin first noted the lack of public awareness in 2000 (see “Global Waffling: When Will We Be Sure?.“) And, if you don’t think that such observations by Dot Earth or After Gutenberg are worth the electrons with which they are published, then read the opinion expressed by Robert Brulle, “a sociologist at Drexel University who has long studied human responses to environmental issues and charted network television coverage of global warming over time.”

The complete lack of any significant coverage in the U.S. media of environmental issues in general, and global warming in particular, is not surprising. Television coverage of global warming in the nightly news peaked in 2007 and has been declining since then. The only variation is a one-time increase in December 2009 associated with COP 15 (see the graph). In general, this is an example of what is called the issue attention cycle, first developed by Anthony Downs in 1972.

The issue-attention cycle defines a cyclical process, in which a new public issue arises after some triggering event. Coverage and attention to this issue rises quickly, and then declines, as it is seen as no longer novel or unique, and other issues replace it in the public arena. For global warming, it appears that the appearance of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” served as a triggering event. However, since the peak of media coverage in January 2007, coverage of global warming has steadily declined, and has been replaced by concerns over the economy and the ongoing wars.

In addition to this cycle, there are other contributing factors that make continued coverage of global warming problematic. Global warming impacts are extremely slow and gradual compared to ongoing daily news. Additionally, individual events (such as specific hurricanes and other dramatic weather events) cannot be unambiguously linked to global climate change. When such events do occur (such as flooding in Bangladesh, ice shelf breakups in Antarctica) they occur in remote locations that are far from the concerns of average Americans, and making the link between these events and individual day to day concerns is very difficult to make.

Finally, many of the most meaningful impacts of global climate change, such as ocean acidification, incremental sea level change and ice mass loss in Greenland and Antarctica, can be understood only via abstract scientific presentations, which do not convey a vivid visual image of environmental change. Contrast this with the clear image conveyed by images of an oil spill. In this case, the origins of the spill are clear and unambiguous, the impacts graphic, and the whole environmental incident is easily understood.


Taking his cue from the likes of Robert Brulle at Drexel University and Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, student of the human mind Andy Revkin describes a “disconnect between things that can matter enormously and things that catch our attention.” The climate crisis is The Greatest Story Rarely Told, writes Revkin, who was a member of the press in attendance at COP15.

I think there is a danger that we can get used to global warming. Individuals 17 or under have grown up in a world where global climate change has always existed as a public concern. (The first climate treaty was negotiated in 1992.) So they don’t find the ideas of global warming unusual or outside of the norm. We can get used to a degraded environment. This process is known as normalization. Based on the concept of environmental generational amnesia, Dr. Peter Kahn shows in his work from 1999 that we take the state of the environment we encounter in childhood as the norm to measure increases in environmental degradation over time. Kahn notes that “the crux here is that with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norms, as the non-degraded condition.”

Over generational changes, we become progressively more accustomed to degraded environmental conditions. As a result, environmental problems become an accepted part of an everyday normality.” Additionally, the very nature of global warming contributes to its normalization. Global warming is an example of a crescive problem. Tom Beamish defined these types of problems in his 2002 work as being “phenomena that accumulate gradually, becoming well established over time.” They develop so slowly and eventually become naturalized as part of our taken-for-granted world.

Since most of our knowledge of global warming is obtained in the form of abstract scientific knowledge, most individuals in the U.S. lack direct unambiguous personal experience with this problem. Thus it is very difficult to translate the problem of global warming into significant public concern. One political implication of this normalization process is that if global warming proceeds slowly enough, then the potential exists that we will just progressively become more used to unusual weather – the unusual (by today’s standards) becomes usual, and we will cease being alarmed about what is now the usual course of events. Global warming no longer becomes news, but rather just part of the way the world is. This can lead to a lack of political concern over this issue, and thus a lack of political action until the possibility of human control over the process of climate change becomes impossible.

Isn’t this a wonderful conclusion! I just hope my discussion is dead wrong.

2 butterflies
“Two butterfly species, the small heath (left) and common blue (right), have become more likely since 1980 to have multiple generations in Central Europe in the same year, as a long-term warming trend has picked up pace.”

Note: The title comes from The Butterfly Effect: As Lorenz was later to explain, it was if something as seemingly insignificant as the beat of a butterfly?s wing in Peking could end up generating a hurricane in New York. Since then, the phrase “The Butterfly Effect” has come to describe the way in which an apparently negligible variable can have a surprisingly vast influence.”

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