Our thanks to Roger Pielke Jr. for bringing attention to a new study that quantifies the media bias on climate change.
Pielke summarizes the study this way:
“In 2020, scholars published more than 50,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate change in almost 6,000 journals. A new study by Marie-Elodie Perga and colleagues looks at how these papers were covered by news media and reveals some profound biases in coverage of climate. There are still some excellent journalists providing good coverage of climate, of course, but the overall patterns are troubling.
“Let’s take a look at the numbers.
“Of the 51,230 peer-reviewed papers on climate change published in 2020, Perga and colleagues found that only about 9% of them saw any media coverage, defined as a single mention in the paper’s Altimetric score. About 2%, or ~1,000 papers, saw more than 20 mentions in the media. These “mediatized” papers are the focus of Perga’s paper.”
Most of these papers come from just six journals, and they rely heavily on a dubious “worst-case” scenario of the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. He quotes the Perga paper: “Mediatized scientific publications are selectively concentrated on the worldwide magnitude of the current consequences of climate change, and projected risks by the end of the century for natural Earth components.”
Image is by PublicDomainPictures on Pixabay.