Wildfires Are Linked to Global Warming -- But Media Obscure the Relationship

By Sam Kornell, Miller-McCune Magazine. Posted July 6, 2009.

"People can relate to what's happening in their immediate environment -- their town, their community, their part of the state," says Eric Pooley, a veteran Washington journalist currently writing a book about the politics and economics of climate change. "To the extent that people still think of climate change as something abstract and going to happen in the future, it's very powerful if reporters can point to things that are already happening" as a consequence of global warming.

The former editor of Fortune magazine and a longtime reporter and editor at Time, Pooley wrote a widely discussed study this winter for the Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard examining shortcomings in media coverage of the economics of climate change. In the extensive research he conducted for the report, he concluded that climate change in general is "still woefully underreported" by the press. In a phone conversation, he argued that reporters and editors are still "wary" about linking climate change to natural disasters, even when such links are scientifically uncontroversial; he believes this needs to change.

Of course, it is true that no single fire can be directly attributed to climate change in much the same way that climate change couldn't be cited as the cause of Hurricane Katrina. The relevant question is not whether a particular natural disaster can be linked directly to the greenhouse effect, but whether it exemplifies future trends. Was Katrina the result of warming ocean water generating more intense hurricanes? There's no definitive answer.

But there is much more certainty if the question is reframed slightly to ask whether, in the future, climate change will generate more frequent and intense hurricanes. The same is true of wildfires. "No individual event can be linked beyond a shadow of a doubt to global warming, but we do know that a warming world makes those events more likely -- it loads the dice in favor of more wildfires, in favor of more hurricanes, in favor of more dramatic flooding and more drought," Pooley said.

California is now in its third year of serious drought, and according to the Forest Service, this summer is going to be marked by extreme fire danger in many highly populated parts of the state. In the likely event that another fire threatens a large city sometime soon, will journalists and editors accord climate change a more prominent role in their coverage?

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