Explosions of methane in the Siberian permafrost. I first used this title four years ago, when there was scant news coverage of the explosion of methane out of the Siberian Permafrost (satellite pic from Siberian Times). I was more optimistic back then…

The big news in Media Matters on Monday–of the 50 largest largest US newspapers, only 22 thought that pending global disaster rated front-page coverage. Media Matters has been following the climate story for years–and also following the lack of interest in it by MSM. This has changed because of the recent explosion of articles about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Sixth assessment.  Bad news–it’s all bad news. Worse news–anyone who’s been following the IPCC’s previous assessments know that they don’t scratch the surface. the Ocean Scientist Peter Wadhams (who’s predicting complete loss of Arctic ice in a few years, hence human extinction not long after that) notes in his reading of the report that the IPCC DOESN’T HAVE specialists in various scientific fields pertinent to climate–for example, they didn’t have people with expertise in ocean physics. And the IPCC has refused to look at the issue of methane release, which scientists like Natalia Shakova have 

But it shouldn’t surprise anyone: all the papers mentioned in their article are for-profit enterprises and they don’t report on climate change because it hurts the bottom line. Fourteen years ago when I thought that Peak Oil would get us before climate change, I tried placing op-ed pieces in several print media venues including Long Island Newsday (cited by Media Matters).They wouldn’t even print letters to the editor on the problem. And (naive fool that I was) I looked at their Friday edition (back in the day–about 2006). And Newsday had ‘weekend supplements’ of over a hundred pages for selling cars (Long Island loves their muscle cars) and boats and suburban sprawl, all of which would be worthless if Peak Oil was real. So too with global warming. If you accept that it’s going on and the effects will get you, wtf would you buy another car? or a motorboat? More likely, you’d let your bills slide and you’d get into survivalist mode.

Quelle Surprise! (sorry, I didn’t actually study French)

And this isn’t just an American problem–someone on my doomer newsgroup shared a compiled list of all the news outlets the world turns to and how they covered the story. 

Jesus wept.

And for me the most ironic thing to happen in the last 72 hours viz the IPCC story involves Dr. Guy McPherson. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s maintained his website NATURE BATS LAST. He wasn’t perhaps the first person to use it, but people in the circle of climate folks identify him with it. They also identify him with this phrase, but it’s been co-opted by others.

Seen at a Youth Climate protest in July. I love the sentiment, but it would be nice if people knew who’d shared it first

And now, Nature Bats Last makes it into Brian Williams’ THE ELEVENTH HOUR on MSNBC on 10/8. It’s about 3:50 minutes into this great video from Guy’s website (composed by Tim Bob). Of course, Brian Williams (and other media types who’ve appropriated the phrase) didn’t mention McPherson’s name.  They really don’t want to acknowledge that Dr. McPherson was one of the people warning them for years about reaching this point. You can make a case that nobody in MSM wanted to put this news on their feed. And Brian Williams was arguably one of the legion of talking heads who didn’t plan to tell us.

Postscript

I’ve been gobsmacked at the lack of MSM coverage of the narrative of the ‘too late to stop climate change’ excuse the Trump administration put forward last week to explain why they were rolling back emissions standards (which I reported here). I’m the lowly blogger/simple artist, and I was able to connect the dots–the Trumpies believe in global warming, but they think we might as well embrace extinction because we can’t fix it. I’ve waited in vain for someone to acknowledge this and call out some WH official on it.