Journalists are cynical by nature, and it is perhaps understandable that some in India continue to retain a certain degree of scepticism about climate change – over whether it is truly taking place, being exaggerated or, worse still, whether it is little more than a conspiracy concocted by a handful of vested interests for unclear purposes. In August, the Business Standard carried a commentary to this effect by the conservative economist Deepak Lal, who highlighted several recent scientific studies suggesting that the Earth is, in fact, cooling rather than warming. He endorsed these views and argued that the so-called 'consensus argument', put forward by scientists and dutifully reported by most of the media, is erroneous.
As a former newspaper editor, I am well acquainted with such scepticism on the part of the media. This could have to do with an ingrained suspicion of anything that smacks of a motivated campaign – NGO-promoted causes based on preconceived ideas, and so on. I can still remember, as a young assistant editor in the late 1970s, timidly suggesting to my formidable boss, Girilal Jain, that I could write an editorial on the environmental issues surrounding a hydroelectric project in Kerala's Silent Valley, which was later to become a cause célèbre for greens when Indira Gandhi terminated the proposed dam. "Make sure you're being scientific," he sternly warned me. I took this advice to heart. And as I dug more deeply, I found far more scientific data to support my view. It was clear from every viewpoint, including that of economics, that the area to be affected by this dam, a pristine forest in the Western Ghats, possessed tremendous biodiversity and was indeed worthy of preservation. This opportunity to ground the argument in hard fact proved critical.
In this sense, scepticism is a positive thing. But the Indian media's approach to climate change has not been one based on science. In fact, the journalistic disdain of climate change changed only with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 fourth assessment report showing that the impact of global warming is far greater than even experts estimated. Most of the media is now convinced that the phenomenon is a reality. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth has also helped convert a sceptical media. Unfortunately, this is not based on the journalists' probing of facts, but rather a result of the tendency to follow the leader. What is needed today is for journalists and climate-change sceptics to work honestly to sift through the full evidence and analysis on the subject. After all, it does not require particularly complex tools to come to the conclusion that the climate is indeed changing, and invariably for the worse.
The most authoritative scientific source on global warming is the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, headed by R K Pachauri of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi. If anything, it has been accused of being too conservative and short on prescription – no doubt sensitive to the political stands taken by its influential industrial-country representatives, who stand to lose the most in the current debates prior to the UN Copenhagen climate negotiations in December. But beyond the accusations of partisanship, it is important for media practitioners to be aware that it would be largely impossible for the IPCC, with some 2500 scientists drawn from a spectrum of countries, to be massively swayed with regards to their eventual findings. And all of these have thus far revealed that climate change is occurring at a much more rapid pace than anyone has imagined.