Don Shores, 70, and his wife Cathy, 65, hold to each other, their eyes stinging with embers and, lacking the strength to run, burn to death in their Paradise, California home. It was 2018, and the longest drought in California history had made tinder of the state. The resulting blaze — the Camp Fire — torched more than 150,000 acres. Despite the desiccated environmental substrate that fueled the disaster, news agencies covering the fire were hesitant to attribute the blaze to climate change, let alone codify the 85 lives lost as climate deaths. 

“A changing climate is potentially part of the Camp Fire’s story,” one hesitant New York Times article stated of the deadliest fire in California history. Another Times piece went marginally further, proposing that climate change was one of “four key elements that make wildfires in California so catastrophic.” Much of the coverage made no mention of climate at all.

This seeming reluctance of the press to blame climate for historic natural disasters is the standard practice in the news media. When the evidence is weighed, this tepid attribution constitutes a dangerous negligence.

The day before the Camp Fire, a mass shooting occurred in Thousand Oaks, CA. At the foot of the hesitant Times articles discussing the Camp Fire are links to Times articles covering the shooting. Unlike the coverage of the fire, which haltingly attributed just a portion of the blame for the blaze to climate change, the Times headlines and coverage of the shooting unflinchingly blamed the event on lax gun laws. “California Is Already Tough on Guns. After a Mass Shooting, Some Wonder if It’s Enough,” reads one. “After Thousand Oaks Shooting, International Readers Question America’s Gun Laws and Culture,” reads the next. Lax gun control laws are explicitly assumed to be the cause of specific mass shootings.

In the media coverage of Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 230 last October, climate blame was similarly sparse. However, a Chevron-sponsored Politico article covering Helene made for a depressing exception – juxtaposing climate disaster coverage with advertisements praising deep-sea drilling. 

Even as the Eaton, Sunset, and Palisades fires flatten Los Angeles, the media’s focus relegates climate change to the background. Harper’s, an outlier among the press in the emphasis they place on climate, reported a staggering statistic:

Number of U.S. weather disasters in the 1980s whose inflation-adjusted damages exceeded $1 billion: 33

Minimum number of such disasters that have occurred since January 2023: 47

There is little doubt that most recent weather disasters are attributable to climate change. The preponderance of evidence supports this, making the media’s present lack of proper attribution inexcusable and dangerous. 

Taking care not to misattribute blame is certainly warranted. However, a cursory glance at the similarly perennial issue of mass shootings shows that climate disasters are treated with a systemic skepticism that exceeds what other issues face.

The media’s current reticence may stem from its fear of facing the right’s frequent criticism that it is overstating climate change. These criticisms, however, are demonstrably rooted in false science originally fabricated by oil and gas giants. Approaching climate disasters with this level of hesitancy is a lowest-common-denominator approach, which meets the issue on climate deniers’ terms rather than on a sober evaluation of undisputed science.

A longstanding explanation for the public’s climate apathy has been that most adults, and thus the majority of those in power, subscribe to the “I don’t care, I’ll be gone” position on climate change. While certainly a crucial factor, this is not the root cause of climate inaction. 

If “I’ll be gone” thinking is the key hindrance to climate action, its removal should be like a champagne cork’s — producing an effusion of activity. However, most young people have already moved past this thinking, harboring no illusions about who stands to suffer from the climate catastrophe. Yet the only youth climate actions that have breached popular discussion remain Greta Thurnberg’s.

A better explanation for my generation’s apathy is the media’s unwarranted hesitancy in addressing the indisputable, present dangers of the climate catastrophe. Rather than speaking of climate in terms of the disasters that are its direct consequence, the media characterizes global warming as a dispassionate issue of an imposing, almost incomprehensible scale. It is presented through vague abstractions like “2 degrees of warming by 2100” or terms like “ecosystem collapse”. The paralyzing immensity of such terms overwhelms those who might otherwise be spurred to action. 

By failing to draw warranted connections between climate and its effects, the media has further failed to codify concise policy solutions into standard climate discussions — actionable and relatable terms such as “assault weapons ban” or “universal background checks” as are bound to instances of mass shooting, or as “police reform” is bound to police brutality. Without watchwords and policy avenues present in public discourse, what goal could a movement hope to coalesce around?

A mother condor returns to her nest to find her only egg crumpled under its own weight, her motionless chick stuck to its DDT sodden shell. A lottery card is drawn from a glass case, a boy’s birthday is read through the television; he cries in his dorm room and dies in the jungle. A black man bends down and, his fingers reaching for his wallet, is unjustly shot to death in his car. People march for causes — ban DDT, halt the draft, reform policing — when they can empathize with the instances of tragedy that necessitate them.

Consider a hypothetical alternative Camp Fire headline: “85 People Burn To Death In California’s Deadliest Wildfire Ever. Some Believe It’s Time For a Carbon Tax.” Shaking my generation out of their stupor of resignation may simply require presenting the problem, and its solution, accurately in the media — a convenient truth.

Photo via Wikicommons