Nature of climate change makes it a very difficult topic to report on

Global warming is a phenomenon whose nature makes it very unattractive for the fast-paced news business, Dagmar Dehmer writes in Der Tagesspiegel. “The events are complex and non-linear”, Dehmer says, arguing that climate change as a news event is difficult to handle as it “requires immediate political action that might bear results only decades from now”. A result of these difficulties is that journalists reporting on the phenomenon often take recourse to dramatic weather events to demonstrate the dangers of global warming, leading to an oversupply of catastrophes for news consumers that normalises disasters and also allows to use local or short-term factors for explaining them rather than acknowledging the underlying change in climate patterns, she argues.

Read the article in German here.