Richard Zurawski

While we move into the last third of the summer season, I have been watching the newspapers for reporting on the summer ice of the Arctic. I have pretty much given up on TV as a news source since that wasteland of ambulance chasers and sporting events long ago abdicated any credibility as a serious news source.

And what strikes me is how the the public news is twisted and spun, by our much vaunted newspapers, to satisfy the business interests of the world. It appears, according to newspaper coverage, that the fact that the ice is melting at unprecedented rates and will have enormous and profound climate change impacts waiting to drop on us all, that is now no longer a news story. Climate change has had its 15 minutes of fame and now we have switched gears to business interests again.

Now it is all about Arctic sovereignty and oil and resources. Its back to business and while climate change and the melting ice is now a fete a complet, what is quickly forgotten is how vociferously the new organs of the world distorted the melt and any link to climate change in the first place. The nay-sayers of the print media, who had been looking for any scrap of information that would bolster their pro-business and anti-climate change perspective have now so skillfully shifted gears it boggles my imagination. It seems that the Northwest Passage is going to be free of summer ice and within a decade the entire north will suffer the same fate and yet it can be talked and conjectured about with ever admitting to absolutely incorrect information the newspapers put out!.

Its now a business thing and a political thing. Somehow the Arctic will be free of ice for the first time in thousands and thousands of years, but that is no longer a front-page story. What is the front page story, is not the escaping tundra methane, the acidification of the oceans, the threat to the Ocean Conveyor or any of the thousands of other pertinent science stories that might point to media culpability, but rather its about sovereignty and resources. Back to business and with the wave of a word processor the ice is melting, the global carbon dioxide content is still increasing, but business is ready to jump on a new mother lode of unfrozen riches that we can use to further hike the burning of our precious planet. And that is the story! All this without ever, for the tiniest of moments, reflecting on the scads of BS that floated our way through the past dithering decades where journalists were empowered to proffer every cockamamy whack job theory that even hinted at making climate change a misshapen polyglot of an idea.

Wow! No wonder 80 per cent of the populace is jaded with the media, the government and businesses who still refuse to address the catastrophe on our doorstep. We are going to get a front row centre seat to more and stronger storms, anoxic ocean zones, red tides, extinctions and yes the ice is melting. And here we are looking at the newspapers conveniently forgetting their responsibilities to inform us and looking for ways to spin this into business and politics.