Climate change and the media
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the IPCC - says that many parts of Asia are already suffering the impact of rising temperatures and extreme weather events.

In response, the United Nations Secretray General Ban Ki-Moon urged China and the United States to show real leadership.

The release of the report was widely reported and discussed.

But the key message was not new.

As one of the report's authors remarked this week - the science has been around for at least 30 years - showing that climate change is due to human activity.

So why has it taken so long for the message to get across.

One of the reasons is the media - which is so often the conduit for the exchange for information.

Journalists are taught to provide balance in stories and as a result, they have had to search out scientists of both persuasions - those who accept climate change as a reality, and those who believe it is nonsense.

In actual fact, those accepting of climate change far outnumber those against about nine to one.

The extent of this distortion of the public discourse on climate change was brought to my attention by a lead author of the IPCC report.

David Karoly, an environmental scientist at the University of Melbourne cites an article, This Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias, by Jules and Maxwell Boykoff.

The article says the need to tell "both" sides of the story has allowed a small group of global warming sceptics to have their views greatly amplified.

It says that the search for sceptics has resulted in journalists quoting scientists whose research is funded by interests associated with carbon-based industries.

And Boykoff and Boykoff observe that journalistic fairness seems to demand that journalists present competing points of view on a scientific question as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.

Meanwhile another study in the United States has found that scientists are used as news sources less often, as an issue becomes politicised.

And so the people who know the most about an issue tend to be used less as a news source, the more important the issue becomes.

In two weeks, Bali will host a conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, with this week's report from the I-P-C-C serving as the basis for a global response to climate change.

World leaders will be there, along with scientists, environmentalists, economists...and journalists.

Among them will be the presenter of Asia Pacific, Linda Lopresti, who will focus on the issues affecting our audiences, the people of the Asia Pacific, who are learning very, very quickly about the consequences of climate change and the cost of inaction...for it is in the Asia Pacific that the impact of climate change is expected to be the most dramatic.

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