Agenda-setting, alternative facts and journalism in the age of Trump
If you’re a news junkie (I am), then this is the best of times, but also the worst of times. There is no shortage of news, especially over the Trump inauguration weekend. There is a buzz to checking your feeds and reading the commentaries. He said what? He did that? You’re kidding me!
From the inauguration speech itself, to the row over the size of the crowd, to the visit to the CIA headquarters, to the dressing down of the White House press corps, it’s been a news reporter’s dream as one controversy rolls into the next and one pinch-me moment follows another.
But it’s also the worst of times, because the media (i) are not sure how to report Trump, and (ii) Trump is out to de-legitimise the media. He has spoken about changing the libel laws, throwing reporters out of the White House, and his spokesman threatened to hold the media to account.
Trump has banned questions from media outlets he doesn’t like. His officials have threatened a reporter with removal when he persisted in trying to ask a question. When CNN reported that a two-page dossier detailing alleged compromising material held by Russia was included in intelligence briefings (which it was), he said it was “false news”. He also said that media reports of a rift with the intelligence services was a media fabrication, when he himself had likened them to Nazis only days before.
There is a considerable body of scholarship in the Journalism Studies tradition that considers how the media should perform in a healthy society. One of the key roles assigned to them by many scholars is to hold the government to account (Deuze 2005b; Deuze 2008; Deuze 2005a; Schudson 2001; Schudson 2008; McQuail 2010; Altschull 1995).
This looks like it’s going to be difficult under Trump. First up, it looks like Trump will not make himself available to the media. He went months without holding a press conference before taking power. His press secretary Sean Spicer did not take any questions at his first press briefing. Questioning the president on the rationale for, and detail of, his policies will be almost impossible.
Secondly, there have been so many controversies and issues (Taiwan/China, divestment, appointees who know nothing about their departments, the Trump Hotel, the wall, rounding up Muslims, the protests etc.) that there is no time to get into the detail of any single topic. Trump is a little like Mohammad Ali – when you think you got him and landed a blow, he is already gone. In these instances, the media is reduced to fact-checking after the event, when the audience has moved on.
This brings me to another facet of the press under Trump. He has been a master of controlling the media agenda. When Maxwell McCombs first established the theory of media effects known as agenda-setting in the late 1960s, he was able to show that the media had the power to set the agenda for the public and for politicians.
In the words of Bernard Cohen (1968), the media “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” In other words, politicians are often forced to respond to pressure from the media. Now, Trump sets the agenda, often via Twitter, and the media are playing catch-up. There are some signs that this is changing: the emphasis on the small size of the inauguration was a media story first, and Trump felt the need to respond.
Trump’s attacks on the media come at a time when the media – the print media anyway – is at its weakest. Local papers are dying, consolidation of the sector into mega-media companies is eating away at diversity and the imperative not to upset corporate interests (and thereby advertising revenue) is strong.
How can the media respond? Some say it would be better if the Washington press corps were kicked out of the West Wing, as they would be freed from following Trump’s agenda so closely. Others warn of the temptation to beat Trump at his own game, by tabloid-ising coverage and disregarding the truth. If the president doesn’t care, why should we?
A chilling warning about what the press could turn into under Trump was given some weeks ago by Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books. The account was based on her experience under Putin. Trump’s tactics – restrict access, set them against each other, intimidate, says something outrageous then row back – are taken from the Putin playbook.
An insight from her article is particularly striking: Putin and Trump lie to demonstrate their power over truth. If I say it, then it’s true. Even though America has never been richer, even though the economy is booming, even though there is near full employment, if Trump says it’s “carnage”, then it must be true.
This “if-I-say-it-then-it’s-true” tendency was revealed when Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway spoke of “alternative facts”. Sean Spicer was offering “alternative facts” on the size of the inauguration crowd, she told NBC.
Angela Merkel once sighed after coming off the phone to Putin. “He lives in an alternative reality,” she said. Trump seems to be living there too, a land where there are facts, but also alternative facts. It reminds me of the Groucho Marx line: “I’ll have you know that I have principles…and if you don’t like those, I have other ones.”
It is clear that the need for a media that holds power to account is crucially important now. A re-emphasis on traditional news reporting, sourcing, checking, digging; the slow, unshowy work of trained journalists is needed. The New York Times is trying hard, and others will follow. For journalists, the era of Trump is what the military call a “target-rich environment”. The complication is that they are also targets themselves. It’s one of the best of times to be a journalist, and one of the worst.
References
Altschull, J.H., 1995. Agents of Power: The media and public policy, Prentice Hall.
Deuze, M., 2005a. Popular journalism and professional ideology: tabloid reporters and editors speak out. Media, Culture & Society, 27(6), pp.861–882.
Deuze, M., 2008. The Professional Identity of Journalists in the Context of Convergence Culture. Observatorio (OBS*), 2(4), pp.103–117.
Deuze, M., 2005b. What is journalism?: Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism, 6(4), pp.442–464.
McQuail, D., 2010. Mass Communication Theory 6th ed., Los Angeles, London: Sage Publications.
Schudson, M., 2001. The objectivity norm in American journalism*. Journalism, 2(2), pp.149–170. Available at: http://jou.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/146488490100200201 [Accessed October 6, 2014].
Schudson, M., 2008. Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press, Polity. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Q2Dg55cxgfUC&pgis=1 [Accessed August 10, 2015].
Five reasons why the media are not to blame for climate change
Who is to blame for climate change? You might think first of the oil companies. After all, they have known for a long time that their product was harming the planet. Or you might think of various governments, who have shied away from radical measures to reduce dependence on fossil fuel. You might also think of the various corporate interests who have put pressure on politicians not to act, or to delay, or even to deny.
Or you might think of the media.
In a recent article in the Guardian, George Monbiot, one of the leading environmental commentators of the age, does just that. The media misleads us on climate change, he says. That’s when it bothers to report on it at all. It “turns away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives and towards issue of brain-melting irrelevance,” he says.
According to Monbiot, the media reports the effects of climate change as being caused, not by global warming, but by the El Niño effect. The rest of the article is devoted to considerations of the US presidential election campaign, but Monbiot returns to the media to argue that, among the many biases in the media, the bias against relevance is the most important.
How the media reports on climate change is a very active and vibrant field of academic study. How often the media covers climate change, how the coverage is presented, how it varies country to country – all these topics have been considered in depth by scholars in the disciplines of journalism studies, journalism practice, science communication, environmental communication, political communication among others.
I hope to add my tuppence worth with a piece of research on Irish coverage in particular between 2007-2016. As part of my work on this project, I’ve looked at a lot of analysis of media coverage of climate change. And, much as I admire George Monbiot and his work (I’ve been a fan of his Guardian contributions for a long time), I’m not sure I can agree with this particular article.
First of all, the media do report on climate change. Indeed, the opening section of Monbiot’s article features several hyperlinks to media reports of temperature records and extreme weather. A study by Schmidt et al (2014) studied media coverage in 27 countries and found that it was a salient topic in all of them.
For those of us most concerned with climate change and most involved in the climate discourse, such coverage is not enough; but it is there. The problem is that it is not pervasive enough, it does not gain traction. It just doesn’t seem to stick.
Coverage flares up and dies away. International conferences are covered, but there’s no follow-up. Weather is seldom linked to climate change, and, perhaps most crucially, the implications of climate change are not pursued. The days when the media portrayed climate change as not quite a settled scientific issue are long gone, however, and contemporary coverage takes the anthropogenic element of climate change as a given.
When one looks at the threat of climate change on the one hand, and the lack of public engagement or political action on the issue on the other, the disparity is striking. And it is tempting to blame the media for this state of affairs. However, climate change is a “wicked” problem, and the media comprise a complex system.
Here are some of the reasons why the media finds climate change a difficult subject:
- The news media like things that are new, and climate change is essentially the same story over and over again. Climate change is happening by increments, and such events over long timescales are not suited to the news values of the media;
- Climate change is a complex story, covering many different areas of scientific inquiry. It is a multi-faceted story, whereas the news media like single, one-off, discrete events. A murder is the perfect news story: a discrete event with a perpetrator and a victim;
- The news media are in crisis. Their funding model has collapsed. Specialist correspondents are expensive, and fewer and fewer of them are being hired, or retained. Assigning a reporter to a complex story such as climate change instead of a simple, half-day news assignment is a tough call in the current media environment;
- Getting sources for climate change stories is becoming increasingly difficult, even for journalists willing to cover it. Climate scientists are being chased out of the public sphere by trolling on social media and other aggressive tactics;
- It is one of the tragic aspects of climate change that those who have done least to cause it are the ones who are suffering its impacts most. For most Western media, the victims of climate change are different from them and geographically remote. This means they are less likely to be newsworthy.
The pleasures and perils of owning an electric car
I am standing at a Topaz forecourt in Templeogue, Dublin. My new Nissan Leaf car is charging at an ESB fast-charging unit. As I’ve had the car only a few days, I am excited by this new process, and circle the vehicle like a mother hen.
There is another, newer Leaf parked beside me. My car is a 152 D reg; the other is a 161 D. My car’s range is 140km; the other one does 250km. The owner strolls up and, as I now know is usual for e-car owners, we fall into talk about the benefits of electric cars.
“This is my fourth Leaf,” he says. “I swear by them. They are fantastic cars.” I grow a little taller. Isn’t it wonderful to have your choices validated so comprehensively?
He’s been living off-grid for years, and charges his car mostly with micro-generated power from his photo-voltaic cells at home. He is the real deal, someone who has taken pretty radical steps to reduce the amount of CO2 caused by his presence on the Earth.
Our chat got me thinking. There are usually two reasons why people change their behaviour. Either it makes sense financially, or it makes sense ethically. When it comes to climate change, lifestyle changes can often be a win-win, because it turns out that the changes required to lower individual emissions – reducing your carbon footprint – make financial sense as well.
The first steps along this saving money/saving the planet road are usually the easy ones: installing a smart meter to monitor energy use and switching appliances off rather than leaving them on standby. The next steps are slightly more hassle, but do-able: insulate your attic or walls, upgrade your windows, change your boiler, fit temperature controls to your radiators.
Once you start on this path, it can become quite addictive. You become interested in all sorts of stuff, such as Passivhaus technology, domestic-scale electricity generation, water harvesting. You may even consider Birkenstock sandals.
And once you’ve done those easy things – picked the “low-hanging fruit” as policy people and politicians like to say – you look at the next step up: your car. A zero-emissions car, now wouldn’t that be something?
For me, the impetus to actually do something rather than just look longingly at EV brochures came in March this year, when Prof Kevin Anderson gave a talk at my university. Kevin is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK.
His talk was hard-hitting. He pointed out that the Paris Agreement was really a fudge, that it was too weak to stop the climate change that’s already build-in to the climate. And then he said something that really resonated with me.
“I haven’t got on a plane for the last eight years. Why? Because I thought: if we, the scientists who know what’s going on, don’t do anything, don’t change anything, how can we expect anyone else to?” he said.
Two months later, I had traded in my old Audi A4 estate and was whirring about in a Nissan Leaf. And I have to say that I am loving it.
For anyone thinking of changing to an all-electric car, I have advice, encouragement and a warning.
First, the advice. There are great deals in ex-demo EVs all over the place. I got mine at Windsor Belgard, a Nissan dealer on the Belgard Road in Tallaght. They have a €4,000 scrappage offer, which I talked up to €4,500. I got a high-spec Leaf (leather and other gizmos) for €17,500. A new, basic model Leaf costs €21,000 new, a price which includes a government grant of €5,000.
There are several options for EVs: Renault, VW, Audi, BMW etc, but the Leaf seems to offer the best value for money and is the most popular. The gold standard is the Tesla, but there is a long waiting list and they are expensive also.
Most dealers offer a 24 or 48-hour test drive. Avail of this, but beware: you won’t want to get into your old car again afterwards.
Another important piece of advice is this: check out your charging options. I live in a Victorian terraced house in Rathgar. Good for you, you might say, except that it’s not suitable for having a home charging point installed.
You get a free home charging point with every EV. But the system is set up for houses with a driveway, so that you can charge your car on your own property. Anything else – apartments, terraces etc – is a bureaucratic nightmare.
The network of public charging points is pretty good, and charging there is free at the moment. These come in two varieties. On-street ones are slow – about 5 hours for a full charge – while forecourt ones are fast – about 30 minutes to charge from 0 % to 80%.
You should also note that EV batteries get very hot if you charge them at fast chargers in quick succession. Three fast charges on a long trip could be enough to overheat your battery.
Now for the encouragement. Buy one, and you’ll be leading the change to a low-carbon society. You’ll have a machine that is fast, quiet (almost silent in fact) and a joy to drive. You will positively look forward to journeys in it, and that niggling though of “I really should walk or cycle” is gone because you are not using up fuel or emitting greenhouses gases from the tailpipe.
You will also find yourself answering a lot of questions, because everyone wants to ask about them. Everywhere I take the Leaf, people want to find out about it.
Lastly, the advice. Owning an EV makes you re-think travel. Short journeys around town are fine, but longer trips need to be planned. In a way, you will be going back to a time when distance travel involved lots of stops, when speed wasn’t king and when the journey was as much a part of the experience as the destination.
ESB map of charge points: https://www.esb.ie/our-businesses/ecars/charge-point-map
ESB E-Car connect app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id499852635?mt=8
Nissan Leaf site: http://www.nissan.ie/vehicle/leaf
Prof Kevin Anderson and the idea of carbon rationing
Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at Manchester University, and former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, visited Dublin earlier this month (March 2016). He managed to pack in a lot during his time here – he spoke at Dublin City University, the Royal Irish Academy and the Irish Institute for European Affairs. In each speech, his theme was the same: we have systematically over-estimated the effectiveness of our responses to climate change and under-estimated the rate at which the climate is actually changing.
We have been deluding ourselves about climate change, says Prof Anderson, because we cannot face up to the radical changes needed to deal with the problem. We say to ourselves: “Oh, the Emissions Trading Scheme will do it.” Or “Carbon capture and storage – that will solve everything.” Or even: “Planting more trees, converting our power stations to biomass – that will do it.”
Even the climate change agreement signed in Paris in December 2015 plays into this “Emperor’s New Clothes” scenario – it pretends that the measures it sets out will be enough to keep dangerous climate change at bay. It keeps alive the idea that continued economic growth is compatible with a safe climate.
Nature cannot be fooled
Prof Anderson uses a quote from an inquiry into the Challenger space shuttle disaster: “nature cannot be fooled” – and applies it to climate governance. The climate does not read the texts of international agreements, the climate does not trade CO2 emissions, and it does not abide by the terms of the Kyoto Protocol.
“The position on climate change mitigation has not changed since the first IPCC report in 1990. So we’ve had a quarter of a century of complete and utter inaction and abject failure on climate change,” he said during his DCU talk.
This seems a little harsh. There have been advances in the promotion of wind and solar energy and huge efforts have been made at a global climate change agreement. But largely, Prof Anderson is right. We have failed to stop, or even mildly influence, climate change in 25 years of trying. In fact, as he points out, that 2015 emissions will be 60pc higher than they were in 1990 – a damning statistic that show that, not only have we failed to curb emissions, we have carried on emitting recklessly.
Prof Anderson considers the carbon budget – the amount of CO2 we are “allowed” emit and still keep warming below 2C. The figure is 1,000 gigatons, and we emitted 511 gt by 2011.
He notes that the problems with the Paris Agreement are (i) there is not reference to fossil fuels or decarbonisation in the text (because of lobbying by the Saudis); (ii) aviation and shipping (which together account for more CO2 emissions than UK and Germany combined) are not included in the CO2 calculations covered by the agreement; (iii) there is no review of the CO2 pledges until 2020, which is too far off; (iv) there is a reliance on “highly speculative” carbon reduction technologies.
Communicating on climate change
Prof Anderson’s talks were challenging. Things we – the climate concerned community – thought were “wins” are actually meaningless in climate terms. Emissions reduction policies are doomed and we have failed to make the case for deep societal change.
Yet the communications and framing research shows that “doomster” and apocalyptic messages about climate change just make things worse. People throw their hands up and become resigned to climate change as inevitable.
So although the “tell-it-like-it-is” has attractions, not least of which is that it is true and congruent, it also has consequences. It appears that, when it comes to climate change, you can’t shock people into action. What happens is that you shock them into inaction.
The idea of a personal carbon allowance
In response to a question from Duncan Stewart of Ecoeye (at 49mins into the video above) about what needs to be done to get people to act in response to climate change, Prof Anderson suggests that each individual have a “personal carbon ration”.
This is an interesting idea – a ration of CO2 that we can decide how to spend. We might blow it all on a flight, or husband it carefully. Or perhaps even sell it on.
There are communications problems with this. Firstly, don’t call it a ration. Don’t make it seem negative as if you’re depriving people of something. Make it sound positive, like you’re giving them the opportunity to save the world. Rationing has connotations of the post-war period in the UK, of queues and drabness and lack of opportunity.
But helping people to emit less is also an opportunity for innovtion, creativity and community spirit. Maybe a “carbon wallet”? Or a carbon “treasury”?
Climate change basics 8: the anthropocene
This is the last in a series of posts on Two Degrees related to the University of Exeter’s massive open online course (MOOC) on climate change. There are eight parts to the course, each dealing with a different aspect of climate change. After each part, participants are asked to record and reflect upon what they have learned.
The other parts are:
Climate Change basics 1 – climate feedback mechanisms and the “blanket earth” theory
Climate change basics 2 – early climate history of the earth
Climate change basics 3 – how weather and emissions are measured
Climate change basics 4 – climate models, feedbacks and geoengineering
Climate change basics 5 – the oceans and the ice
Climate change basics 6 – urban heat islands and food security
Climate change basics 7 – adaptation and mitigation
This week’s learning concerns the Anthropocene – the era in the history of the earth during which mankind’s activities are changing the planet. The term was first used by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000. (Their essay is here; previously, we were in a geological period known as the Holocene, which stretched back 10-12,000 years).
How we’re changing the planet
Up to now (that is, over the past 850,000 years), we have had a long cycle of steady cooling followed by rapid warming, followed by slow cooling again. If the CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise as they have done since 1950, there will not be the slow cooling of previous cycles.
Already, there have been warning signs this year. First, the Mediterranean has suffered its worst drought in 900 years, second that January 2016 broke all heat records, and thirdly that atmospheric CO2 for 2015 was at its highest levels in 8,000 years, and its rate of increase is unprecedented, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
If we burn the remaining 4,000bn tonnes of fossil fuels, CO2 would rise to 1,500 parts per million – it’s currently at 403ppm. This would lead to an increase in average global temperatures by 8C. That’s an average, of course: it would be much hotter in many parts of the world.
According to the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, a business-as-usual scenario (RCP 8.5; RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathway) says warming could be as high as 2.6C in the 2046-2065 period, and as high as 4.8C in 2081-2100 period.
It would take the earth a long time to deal with that CO2 – as long as a million years to bring temperatures back to where they are now. Even by the year 3000, it would drop by only 2C from the rise of 8C.
The Anthropocene relates to more than the climate – human activity is affecting the landscape too. Humans move 57,000 million tonnes of earth and rock every year through mining, building, infrastructure projects and an extractive technique called “mountaintop removal”. The Earth itself, through rivers and oceans, moves only 27,000 million tonnes.
A good example of the impact of humans on the landscape is the Alberta Tar Sands, where open-cast mining, or “scaping” of the topsoil to extract bitumen (extremely heavy crude oil) has affected about 140,000 sq km of Canadian wilderness. Another would be the alteration in the landscape caused by fracking in the shale deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah (among other states).
A feature of the Anthropocene is the rising sea levels associated with climate change. The estimates of the amount of sea level rise vary, but the Climate Central website has mapped the extend of sea level rise at various levels of warming. For Dublin, much of Clontarf and Sandymount will be under water, even at 2C warming.
You can find out about other Irish cities, and zoom in on particular areas here.
Think global, act local
The “think global, act local” slogan has been the motto of Green parties all over the world. In thinking global, we must focus on the international climate change agreements, the latest one being the Paris Agreement of 2015 which sets a global target of keeping warming to 2C and aiming for 1.5C. This will require a 60% cut in emissions globally, more in the advanced countries, as the less developed countries will have to be allowed to emit as they grow their economies.
The “act local” part means doing what we can as individuals to reduce our own emissions. A useful tool to calculate how much CO2 you are contributing to the atmosphere is provided by the World Wildlife Fund. By answering a series of lifestyle questions, the online tool calculates your carbon footprint and works out how many tonnes of CO2 you are using per year.
Is whose hands is the solution to climate change?
This is the crux of the problem facing us as a species. There are so many special interests, so many competing demands on finite resources and so many forces acting against collective action that it’s no wonder climate change is called a “wicked” problem. The real question, as Prof Tim Lenton says, is whether we can decouple economic growth from exploitation of the environment.
As Naomi Klein argues in her book ‘This Changes Everything’, perhaps capitalism (at least as we know it up to now) and a healthy biosphere are no longer compatible. We need a new kind of economic model, one which is not based so completely on the exploitation of natural resources, one where the environmental costs of production are front and centre, rather than discounted. Perhaps we need to challenge the place of economic growth at the centre of all policy and societal discourse. We are passing through planetary boundaries, and the system we have is not working.
Met Eireann – the only weather service in the world that can’t say the words ‘climate change’
Recently, I wrote about how disengaged Met Eireann – the national weather service of Ireland – is about climate change. Their forecasters never mention it, even though it has been shown how extreme weather events can now be attributed directly to man-made climate change. And they do not publish much research in climate change effects in Ireland either, especially when compared to their UK counterpart, the Met Office.
Since publishing that post, a Met Eireann video on what Ireland’s climate will be like in 2050 has been drawn to my attention (thanks to David Healy of Oxfam). Its content simply beggars belief. It is Ireland’s contribution to an initiative by the World Meterological Organisation, and was posted in November of last year. Here is the video in question:
In looking forward to what the climate might be like in 2050, you might think that Met Eireann in general and Evelyn Cusack in particular might mention climate change. After all, the world’s top climate scientists have issued no fewer than five Assessment Reports on the future of the climate since 1990. Well, you;d be wrong. There is not a single mention of the phrase “climate change” in the two minutes and six seconds of the video.
Essentially, the presenter Evelyn Cusack throws her hands up and says: “Well, it could be warmer, it could be colder, it could be drier, it could be wetter etc.” All this with a “shure this is Ireland” kind of smile on her face. Sure don’t we get all four seasons in one day as it is.
The problem with this is: it’s not true. We DO know what Ireland’s climate will be like in 2050 – thanks to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their Fifth Assessment Report sets out four scenarios – called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs).
- RCP 2.6 – a stringent CO2 reduction scenario
- RCPs 4.5 & 6.0 – two intermediate scenarios
- RCP 8.5 – a very high Greenhouse Gas emission scenario
The authors make clear that a business as usual emissions scenario will lead to impacts somewhere between RCP 6.0 and 8.5. That will mean increased temperature, increased rainfall and increased frequency of extreme weather events.
The strange thing is that Met Eireann has contributed to a paper forecasting Ireland’s weather by 2050 – so somone in there knows something about climate change. They have also published a paper entitled Ireland’s climate: the road ahead, which sets out the scenario for Ireland’s climate by mid-century – wetter winters, drier summers, increased temperatures, less frost, higher sea levels etc.
It’s as if there is a culture in Met Eireann which dictates a kind of “don’t mention the war” attitude. They will engage with the issue in academic journals, but for heaven’s sake don’t tell the actual public anything about it.
Update – new research into meteorologists’ views on climate change
The Guardian has reported on new research that shows American meteorologists are becoming more convinced that mankind is changing the climate. This is what the survey found:
First, nearly every meteorologist (96%) agrees that climate change is happening, and the vast majority are confident in their opinion. Only 1% felt that climate change isn’t happening (3% did not know). Next, a large majority feel that climate change is being caused by humans. For instance, 29% believe that the change is largely or entirely human caused; 38% think most of the change is from humans; 14% answered that humans and natural factors are about equally responsible. Only 5% felt that climate change is mainly natural.
On one hand, this is depressing: there are only 29% of professional weather forecasters, ostensibly with a scientific outlook, who believe climate change is anthropogenic. But on the other hand, weather forecasters have always been slow to accept that the climate is changing. But note what author John Abraham says:
Speaking more broadly about the meteorology community beyond the AMS, that population tends to be more skeptical that the Earth’s climate is changing. I tend to believe that the skepticism is partly because meteorologists in general focus on short-term events and also because a great many non-experts are counted as meteorologists (including people who do not have degrees in any science, let alone a meteorological science).
Climate-proofing your house
The changing climate of the Earth is already affecting our buildings. In Ireland, we will have wetter but warmer winters and drier summers. Intense bursts of heavy rainfall will become more frequent, and there will be more flooding as a result. So how are architects and builders responding to these challenges?
Of course, people are already thinking about making houses more energy efficient, but there are other considerations the industry has been slower to take on board. For instance, there will have to be systems to actually cool building in summer, and finding a way to do that which does not involve CO2 emissions will be a challenge.
The materials used will have to be energy efficient, of course, but will also have to deal with more extreme conditions. Builders will have top pay attention to detailing on buildings and how materials behave in different temperature conditions.
Managing water will be a big issue for the construction industry – both in dealing with too much, too little, and the reaction of the soil to both of these extremes.
It is generally accepted that there will have to be a deep retrofit of existing housing stock to meet Ireland’s obligations under various international climate change treaties and agreements. Different parts of a building have different “life expectancies” – foundations won’t change, but cladding, roofing and glazing will also change several times in the lifetime of a standard house. These “intervention opportunities” must be exploited to adapt buildings at the least cost.
In terms of temperature, 24C is accepted as a “comfortable” temperature in a domestic dwelling. People start to feel uncomfortably hot at 28C and at 37C heat stroke starts to occur as the body cannot cool quickly enough and is unable to maintain its core temperature.
In a climate changed work, we’re going to have to look at the main principles of the passivhaus system:
- have a large thermal mass (a heavy concrete wall, perhaps, or a column) that will absorb heat during the day and release it at night,
- examine systems for the exclusion of solar gain
- airtight construction to exclude outside hot air
- high levels of insulation to minimise heat gain through fabric of building.
In other words, at summer temperatures climb (and the recent Paris climate change conference accepted that a rise of 2C was more of less inevitable now), shading of buildings is going to become very important.
Ironically, all the measures we in Ireland are undertaking to keep heat INSIDE our homes will now serve the opposite purpose of keeping heat OUTSIDE. (See the UK government’s 2005 publication Beating the Heat).
In addition, most houses will have to have some sort of active cooling system – air conditioning, in other words. We will have to have:
- shading systems for buildings
- glass that excludes solar gain
- reflective building materials that reflect rather than absorb heat
- cooling systems powered by domestic scale renewables or groundwater
It may also be the case that mechanical heat recovery systems will be redundant in a warmer world. The energy they expend may outstrip the energy they save.
When it comes to construction, the following considerations will have to be taken into account:
- changing rainfall patterns may increase shrinkage of clay soils
- foundations will have top perform better and last longer
- underground pipework may be affected by climate change
- slopes and restraining structures (banks, earthworks, ramparts etc) may become less stable
Climate change also brings more wind – and the wind load on buildings will have to become a major construction factor. Older buildings will be more vulnerable to wind damage.
In terms of detailing, there will have to be more recessed window and door reveals, more projecting cills with drips and more render finishes (as opposed to exposed brick).
Rainwater or grey water harvesting systems will become the norm, we will have gutter and downpipes with greater capacity, and, most worrying of all, our sewers may not function properly as we use less water. Furthermore, architects and builders will have to consider the dangers of flash flooding as intensive rainfall events become more common.
Climate change basics 7: adaptation and mitigation explained
This is the seventh is a series of posts on the Two Degrees blog recording and reflecting on the content of the University of Exeter’s massive open online course (MOOC) on climate change. This week’s learning concerns mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Mitigation vs adaptation
A certain amount of climate change is “locked in” – even if we stopped emitting CO2 right now, the existing emissions would continue to have an effect on the climate. Therefore, societies will have to adapt to climate impacts on some scale. Indeed, as mitigation efforts (to stop climate change by reducing or stopping emissions) intensify, these adaptation measures will become more widespread.
An example of adaptation is better energy efficiency in the built environment. An example is the Montgomery Primary School in Devon, which is built to Passivhaus standards. This means the school building is carbon neutral; some Passivhaus buildings actually generate surplus energy which is then sold back into the grid. (Note: you have to have a smart grid to allow this; Ireland does not have a smart grid).
A lot of thought has gone into how to plan buildings for a climate changed world. Buildings will have to cope with warmer temperatures, with more heavy rainfall episodes and sometimes with flooding. It may be as important to keep people cool enough in their homes as to keep them warm enough.
Planning the built environment for a 2C or 4C warmed world will have to take into account active cooling systems, planting of vegetation for shade in a warmed climate, and measures to reduce the Urban Heat Island effect. There is even speculation that mechanical whole-house heat recovery systems may become obsolete because, due to shorter cold seasons, they may use more energy than they save.
There is a general acceptance that some older housing stock will not be capable of upgrading and will have to be demolished. The cost of a deep retro-fit will be more than the cost of reconstruction, especially when the new standards of below-ground works necessary in a wetter and more windy world are taken into account.
The construction details – window sills, facets, guttering, recessed porches etc – will have to take account of heavier rainfall, and rainwater harvesting and grey-water harvesting will become the norm.
Examples of energy efficient home in Ireland
It is difficult to find examples of energy efficient public buildings in Ireland. The Civic Offices of Tipperary County Council in Nenagh are reputed to be highly energy efficient thanks to use of solar energy generation, but it is difficult to find details of the measures taken. It would be helpful if public buildings were required to install some micro-generation technologies, as much as a visual example to the public as for energy conservation.
There are many examples of energy efficient domestic houses, however. The one I find interesting is a retro-fit of a 1960s semi-detached house in Galway. It’s interesting because it achieved Passivhaus standard – previously it was thought that only new-builds could achieve this.
Details of the build are here in the Passive House Plus magazine.
NIMBY-ism and the need to move to renewable energy
Prof Patrick Devine-Wright of Exeter University thinks we have been too dismissive of people who say: Not in my back yard! The acronym is used to negatively stereotype people who object to renewable energy projects near them. (By the way, he sounds Irish and his name is wonderfully close to “Divine Right” – I’m sure his students have come up with great nicknames!)
The prof cites two concepts that we need to bear in mind when dealing with communities who are facing having energy infrastructure built near them: procedural justice and place attachment. People are more likely to react favourably when they are dealt with fairly, and their identification with place, landscape and community must be acknowledged.
Community energy projects
One way of helping communities come to terms with the need to move from fossil fuels to renewables is to involve them in community energy projects. Often people are suspicious of corporate interests, and placing the running of a small, co-operative energy company in local hands is a way around this.
Community energy projects have taken off in Germany, where locals have bid against multi-national companies for energy contracts. Currently, there are over 1,000 energy co-ops in Germany and Denmark is not far behind.
Templederry Community Wind Farm is an example from Ireland. For an overview, see Mícheál Callaghan’s article on the Irish Environment blog.
In the UK, RenewableUK have a community energy protocol that guarantees £5,000 per megawatt per year for co-ops over 5 MW capacity. This is a low enough sum – the biggest turbines available now are 6MW, so there would be a community gain of £30,000 per year for installing one of these.
Is Met Éireann letting us down on climate change?
Met Eireann, the Irish meteorological service, has just published its February weather report. (The Irish Times coverage of it is here). It describes in detail the weather conditions in Ireland – above average rainfall and below average temperatures everywhere, and six major Atlantic storms battering the country – yet nowhere in the document is there any mention of climate change.
The report reminded me of a contribution made by Gerard Fleming of Met Eireann to a conference held last year at DCU by the CELSIUS group about communicating climate change. He said that it was not his job as a meteorologist to become involved in policy, advocacy or the attribution of blame.
It is also striking that Met Eireann weather bulletins never mention climate change as a factor in the weather. (Remember: weather is day to day; climate is weather measured over 30 years or more. Another way of explaining the difference is the old saying: “climate is what you expect; weather is what you get”). There is a school of thought which believes that, were climate change to become part of the daily weather discourse, there might be greater public awareness of the problem and it might be promoted in the policy agenda.
Scientists have been working on ways to calculate the contribution of man-made climate change (or anthropogenic global warming, AGW) for some time. Indeed, it is now possible to state that certain extreme weather events have become more likely because of human-induced climate change.
Recent research from Oxford University has found that the heavy rainfall and flooding in the UK in the winter of 2013-2014 were largely due to AGW. According to the paper in Nature Communications, the floods – which caused €600m of damage – were made more likely by 41 per cent due to human interference with the climate. (Irish Times report here).
Research by Prof Myles Allen has shown that storms off the west coast of Ireland are 25 per cent more likely to occur because of AGW. Climate reseacher Mike Hulme has given a compelling account of these attribution techniques here. The method most favoured now is called Fractional Attributable Risk (FAR) – a technique which provides a means to calculate the contribution of AGW to any given weather event.
As Hulme points out, there is also a simpler, more philosophical approach to the attribution of causes:
This is the argument that since human influences on the climate system as a whole
are now clearly established…there can no longer be such a thing as a purely natural weather event.
(Hulme 2014: 5-6)
It’s interesting to compare Ireland’s Met Eireann with the UK’s Met Office. For example, a search for “climate change” on the Met Eireann website gets 22 hits, whereas a similar search on the Met Office site gets 1291 results. Indeed, the Met Office site is actually called “weather and climate change”.
The Met Office also runs the Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services and funds extensive climate research. Meanwhile, Met Eireann has a short section on climate change under the general heading of “Ireland’s climate”, which includes the following statement on weather attribution:
Extreme weather events will continue to occur, while it might not be possible to explicitly attribute these to human induced climate change, the probability of occurrence of extreme events is expected to increase.
However, Met Eireann has published significant research into climate impacts in Ireland. Ireland in a Warmer World in June 2008 and Ireland’s Climate: the Road Ahead in 2013. (Met Eireann’s three climate change reports here). The disparity in research output between the Met Office and Met Eireann is no doubt a result of funding to some extent. But there is the lingering impression that the UK organisation is more engaged on the issue.
The Met Office has often been drawn into controversy over its setting out of the facts of man-made climate change. Met Eireann never has. The Met Office has decided to play an active part in the UK’s and indeed the world’s conversation about climate change. It seems Met Eireann has not.
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