Twenty years after Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” premiered, it is clear that many of his climate change claims never came to fruition.
In a recent piece for The Australian, Adam Creighton reported that 10 of the most important news outlets in Britain and the US have catastrophized the lengthy Assessment Reports produced periodically by hundreds of scientists affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Rigorous new research, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, trawled through more than 116,000 newspaper articles from 10 influential outlets, both right- and left-leaning, and found systematic fearmongering in their reporting of the six major Assessment Reports from 1990 to 2023.
“Public summaries of IPCC climate assessments lean toward the more severe end of the technical evidence,” the authors find in their new paper, Divergence in Climate Change Communication.
Their conclusion is striking, though not surprising. First, the official Summaries for Policy Makers are themselves biased. These summaries tend to cherry-pick the more extreme forecasts and outcomes contained in the much larger IPCC Assessment Reports.
All 195 IPCC member governments – whose bureaucrats have typically swallowed the alarmist narrative – must approve SPMs line by line before they are released to the media. “This makes the public-facing document a politically negotiated artefact rather than a neutral summary of the underlying science (and) because a single delegation (can) block consensus, the wording converges on what the most risk-averse delegation will accept,” the report says, adding the SPM “reweights severity upward” in every one of the six reports.
Read Creighton’s full piece in The Australian.
