Stossel Attempts Climate Journalism, Part 2

Stossel's second video about climate myths has been published, continuing the shoddy journalism from Stossel and fake research from Lueken. Like my last post, I'll first show the flaws in their rhetorical strategy and then look at the individual myths. I'll then provide a bibliography of the research on each of these subjects so you can check up on me and see for yourself that the actual research does not support Stossel's claims.

Rhetorical Strategy

The same tactics of taking soundbites out of context continues here. In fact, Stossel reuses the "We don't have decades; we hardly have years" clip in this video. He also shows a soundbite from news story reporting that extreme drought conditions exist in the northeastern US, but he doesn't show that the story attributes that to climate change (as his "myth" 5 claims). And he's still enlisting the help of Linnea Lueken to give scientific credibility to his shoddy journalism.

But he adds an additional tactic here. In this video he and Lueken attack the integrity of journalists and scientists. Lueken says we should be able to see through what journalists are saying because "all it takes is a quick google search to pull up the publicly available data on any of these conditions." As if doing a quick google search would dispel the supposed myths described below. She and Stossel then claim that journalists report "bad news" over "good news "because "good news doesn't grab headlines and it doesn't gain research funding and grants." Stossel adds, "they're out of business if they don't find a problem." Notice how they shifted from journalists to the scientists applying for research funding and grants. This is really quite ridiculous. Funding research that produces "good news" would save humanity a lot of money, so this research would certainly be worth the investment. They didn't support any of these claims with a shred of investigative journalism. No evidence is presented that scientists want to research "bad news" because that will give them funding. This is just a convenient conspiracy theory to try to explain away the fact that the scientific research is overwhelmingly concluding that AGW is producing more "bad news" than "good news." But let's look at the next three so-called "myths."

Myth 5: "Climate change is worsening droughts" and wildfires

It's absolutely clear both that "that climate change is worsening droughts" and wildfires regionally while at the same time globally there is little to no trend; in fact globally droughts may well be decreasing, and this is expected with global warming. The theory behind this is sound, and it's backed up by observations. Water vapor (WV) concentrations in the atmosphere are temperature dependent. As CO2 warms the planet, the atmosphere can hold more water vapor at about 7% for 1 C warming. This is both a positive feedback that amplifies warming (since WV is also a greenhouse gas) and an indicator that globally the climate will become more "wet" than "dry." However, in arid, drought-prone areas, like the American West, the water doesn't exist to evaporate into the atmosphere, so warming causes an increase in vapor pressure deficit (VPD) which in turn leads to drier plants and soils. If WV is not available to an area, the area becomes more arid with warming. And increasing hot, dry conditions leads to a build up of fuel in forests and grasslands that produces a greater risk of wildfires from lightning strikes and human ignitions.

In other words, climate scientists are not expecting an overall increase drought on a global scale, but they are expecting areas like the American West to have worse droughts as a result of climate change. And since Stossel and Lueken seem to focus mostly on California, I think it best to show how they misrepresent conditions in the Western US. Drought was probably worse in the 1930s, but the Dust Bowl was also made much worse by human activity. At the same time, journalists are correct to cite climate change as a large reason why wildfires are increasing in the Western US. Scientists estimate that climate change is responsible for roughly doubling the acreage burned the Western US since the 1980s. I cover this in more detail here and here.

But clearly Lueken didn't do her homework because they repeat common contrarian myth that wildfires were much worse prior to 1960. Here's the graph they show for this. The source they report for this graph is the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC).

On its own, this looks compelling, but a "quick google search" or a shred of investigative journalism would tell them what the NIFC says about the data prior to 1983: 

The National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC compiles annual wildland fire statistics for federal and state agencies. This information is provided through Situation Reports, which have been in use for several decades. Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures above prior to 1983 shouldn't be compared to later data.

In fact, in 2021 NIFC removed the data prior to 1983 from their website with the following explanation: "Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site." So the NIFC does not stand behind Stossel's graph. In fact, they warned against using the data in precisely the way Stossel and Lueken are using it. I go into a lot more detail about this in another post, where I show exactly why this is the case. Suffice it to say here that almost all of that spike in acres burned prior to 1960 is due inconsistent reporting by the USFS or isn't properly called "wildfire." They were controlled burns to remove vegetation, etc. 

Worse, almost all that spike in "wildfires" isn't even in the Western US; almost all comes from the southeast, with a very large fraction coming from just three states: FL, MS, and GA.[17][18] Historically, the eastern US does not have anywhere near the issues with wildfires experienced in the west.

I'd encourage you to read my other posts on this for more information, but it's absolutely clear that the American West did not experience anything like the spike in wildfires shown in Stossel's graph. In fact, the spike is not due to wildfires at all, and it was largely the result of reporting issues and controlled burns to clear vegetation in the American Southeast. In those other posts I also discuss the importance of land management in controlling wildfires; this is real, but this is not an either-or discussion. The fact remains that the two greatest predictors of a bad wildfire season in the western US are heat and arid conditions. And AGW is making both worse in the western US. Stossel and Lueken are not off to a good start in their second video.

Myth 6: "Sea level rise will soon cause catastrophic damage"

Stossel and Lueken respond to the threat of sea level rise (SLR) by claiming that it has been slow and manageable, and they suggest that the rate of SLR has been linear. Lueken says SLR is occurring at rates of about "a foot per century. There's no way that people wouldn't be able to adapt to it." Stossel argues that we could even adapt to 3 ft per century, since some people "already live below sea level."

There are three problems here. First, SLR is accelerating, and if acceleration continues, we're looking at 2-3 ft by 2100, not just 1 ft. Second, that amount of SLR is a problem. Certainly we can adapt; we will have to adapt. But the question is not so much whether we can, but how much it will cost compared to not mitigating AGW. The reality is that the engineering required to adapt is expensive, and there are hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas that are poor; neither the poor nor the countries they live in have the financial means to adapt, so we should expect an increase in damages with accelerating SLR. And third, the danger with SLR is not just that we're losing shoreline. It's also that storms can do more damage inland. I live about 30 miles inland from the Florida coast, but the lake my by home is normally less than 3 ft above sea level. In fact, the flood plain goes to about 3 ft above sea level. With 3 ft of SLR that floodplain greatly expands creating the need to rebuild bridges and move homes away from the expanding floodplain. Neither Stossel nor Lueken did any work estimating the costs associated more storm damage inland, adapting to rising sea levels or the feasibility of doing so in poor areas of the world. They just tell us that "we can adapt," which is kind of like saying you can always just buy larger clothes if you're gaining weight so there's no need to go on a diet - as if the health risks of obesity don't even matter.

Myth 7: "Coral reefs are disappearing fast"

The last myth is essentially just a lie on the part of Stossel and Lueken. It's hard to see a way around this. There's no responsible journalism or "research" that could reasonably lead to their conclusions. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has seen expansion but at the expense of biodiversity. Acropora corals can quickly recover and expand after bleaching events, and that has been the so-called "recovery." Other corals are not recovering, and bleaching events have become more frequent and severe, suggesting that that this trend is likely to continue. The scientists currently studying the GBR do not share Lueken's optimism. Quite the opposite.

From Eddy et al 2021[15]

Globally, things are no better. Scientists expect continued warming, sea level rise, storms, and ocean acidification to continue to threaten barrier reefs globally. While bleaching events don't always result in coral mortality, increases in bleaching events are a sure sign of declines in global coral health. And NOAA just released the their updated status on global bleaching, and  NOAA has confirmed that since April 15, 2024, the ongoing bleaching event is the largest to date, as "bleaching level heat stress" now impacts 83.7% coral reef area. This fourth bleaching event is the worst since the last bleaching event from 2014-2017, which affected 68.2% of the world's reef area. These bleaching events seem to coincide with El Nino events, as the first two documented by NOAA occurred in 1998 and 2010.

Conclusion

I'm not a "researcher" for anyone but myself. But I, just like anyone, can do more than a "quick google search" to discover the shoddy journalism and fake research that went into these two videos. While it's clear that there is a lot of sensationalistic journalism that takes place, and Al Gore didn't get everything he said about SLR correct, that's no excuse for this video. Stossel could have found scientists that actually study and publish in the areas of his so-called myths, and he could have set the record straight where journalists do become sensationalistic. He could have shown what the current scientific research currently is saying on these matters. Alternatively, there was nothing preventing Stossel and Lueken from doing what I've done here. But they didn't, and there's no excuse for what they put into these two videos.

References:

Droughts and Wildfires

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Elevated CO2 increases soil moisture and enhances plant water relations in a long-term field study in semi-arid shortgrass steppe of Colorado

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Sea Level Rise

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[12] Kleinherenbrink, M., Riva, R. & Scharroo, R. A revised acceleration rate from the altimetry-derived global mean sea level record. Sci Rep 9, 10908 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47340-z

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[17] Slater, T., Lawrence, I. R., Otosaka, I. N., Shepherd, A., Gourmelen, N., Jakob, L., Tepes, P., Gilbert, L., and Nienow, P.: Review article: Earth's ice imbalance, The Cryosphere, 15, 233–246, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-233-2021, 2021.
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[18] Marcos, M., and Amores, A. (2014), Quantifying anthropogenic and natural contributions to thermosteric sea level rise, Geophys. Res. Lett., 41, 2502– 2507, doi:10.1002/2014GL059766.
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Coral Reefs

[1] Wang, S., Foster, A., Lenz, E. A., Kessler, J. D., Stroeve, J. C., Anderson, L. O., et al. (2023). Mechanisms and impacts of Earth system tipping elements. Reviews of Geophysics, 61, e2021RG000757. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021RG000757

[2] Henley, B.J., McGregor, H.V., King, A.D. et al. Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger. Nature 632, 320–326 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07672-x

[3] Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report. 2024. https://outlookreport.gbrmpa.gov.au/

[4] The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Reef 2050 Plan Annual Report , Australian Government, July 2019. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/reef-2050-long-term-sustainability-plan-2021-2025.pdf.

[5] Benjamin Petrick et al.,High sea surface temperatures were a prerequisite for the development and expansion of the Great Barrier Reef.Sci. Adv.10,eado2058(2024).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.ado2058

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[8] GCRMN. Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2020. https://gcrmn.net/2020-report-v1-2023/

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[11] Graham, N., Jennings, S., MacNeil, M. et al. Predicting climate-driven regime shifts versus rebound potential in coral reefs. Nature 518, 94–97 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14140

[12] Dietzel Andreas, Bode Michael, Connolly Sean R. and Hughes Terry P. 2020Long-term shifts in the colony size structure of coral populations along the Great Barrier ReefProc. R. Soc. B.2872020143220201432 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1432

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(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332221004747)