Darragh Worland:

Record breaking heat waves, shorter winters, flash flooding. Those are just some of the many effects of a warming planet.

Sabrina Shankman:

There is nowhere in the world that is exempt from climate change at this point. And so as it has become more in the forefront, it’s harder for major media to ignore.

Darragh Worland:

That’s Boston Globe climate change reporter Sabrina Shankman. And I’m Darragh Worland, your host for Is That a Fact?

Shankman is at the cutting edge of a new wave of journalism dedicated to covering the effect of carbon emissions on our atmosphere. And she’s here to talk about what it’s like to work the beat on such a politically charged subject.

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Thanks for joining me, Sabrina.

Sabrina Shankman:

Thanks so much.

Darragh Worland:

So today we hear the term climate change more often, but not that long ago we would hear the term global warming. What are we talking about when we use these terms and why the change in terminology?

Sabrina Shankman:

A lot of people get tripped up by that, and it’s not necessarily that there’s been a change, but more that there’s been, I guess, an evolution in thinking about it. The two terms both still exist, and you’ll hear them though you hear global warming a little bit less now. When we talk about global warming, we’re really talking about the amount of warming that the planet has experienced over time, really since the beginning of the industrial period because of the burning of fossil fuels and the emissions of greenhouse gases. When we talk about climate change, we’re talking about more than just the temperature getting warm. We’re talking about how weather patterns have shifted as the planet warms up. So things like a sea level rising, things like the ocean temperatures warming, things like the jet stream being impacted, extreme weather – all of those things are encompassed by this bigger umbrella term of climate change because it’s not all just one thing. It’s this very dynamic kind of shift that’s been happening. And so that term has been considered to be a better, more accurate way to talk about it,

Darragh Worland:

Right? Because you’ll have an extremely cold winter, for example, and people will say, ‘ah, see there’s no global warming. It’s been really cold lately.’

Sabrina Shankman:

Exactly. When, when the reality is that because of climate change, there can be these shifts where you experience incredibly intense periods of extreme cold. And that’s a very counterintuitive thing if you’re always talking about global warming. But all these things are actually linked.

Darragh Worland:

Global warming itself is a term that goes back decades in the science community, and yet the news media has only really recently picked up on it as a regular beat or an area of specialization with dedicated reporters and resources. Can you tell us why is that?

Sabrina Shankman:

For a long time, it was this story that nobody was really telling with any great focus, right? The scientific community was coalescing around this understanding: the burning of fossil fuels is leading to the warming of the planet. They were coming up with these models that decades later have borne out in this incredibly accurate way. [T]hey really knew what was coming down the pike, and yet the story wasn’t really being told. You would every now and then hear something about a major congressional testimony or something like that, but it was from your politics reporters. There wasn’t a dedicated climate beat. Gradually, we started seeing reporting coming out that was from climate reporters. But you know, I joined Inside Climate News in 2013, and, at the time, we were the largest dedicated climate change newsroom or desk in the country. Cut to now and there are dozens of reporters on the staff of The New York Times, dozens of reporters on the staff of The Washington Post who are dedicated to telling this story.

Here’s my theory for why this has happened: When I was first a climate change reporter, I was a reporter covering the Arctic and I loved it because I would get to go to the Arctic, but also because it was a way to tell the story of climate change in the place where it was happening. Then, you know, around 2013 (or) 2015 to tell the story of climate change’s impacts you were had to go to low lying islands in the tropics that were experiencing sea level rise and extreme weather, or you had to go to the Arctic.

Now I can tell the story in Boston because it’s happening in Boston. It’s happening everywhere. When we look at the effects of extreme weather, we’ve got extreme heat, we’ve got sea level rise, wildfires, you name it. There is nowhere in the world that is exempt from climate change at this point.

And so as it has become more in the forefront, it’s harder for major media to ignore. You know, the other thing that that has made a really big difference, I think is some of the evolution of science. So there’s been this incredible growth in what’s called rapid attribution science, where scientists now are able to look at specific events and run models that take out the amount of atmospheric warming that has happened due to the burning of fossil fuels and say ‘would it have been possible for this extreme rainfall, for this big heat dome to have happened if it weren’t for climate change?’ And oftentimes the answer is ‘no.’ And then that tells us this is an event that we can attribute to climate change. Climate change caused this event. And that makes it a lot easier as a journalist to, to speak with authority about the role of climate change in one community.

Darragh Worland:

So how would a journalist report on a finding like that?

Sabrina Shankman:

Once you’re a climate change reporter, you know, people find out pretty quickly in the scientific community, in the academic community, and then you’re bombarded with lots of releases of different things going on. And so part of our job is to filter out, you know, what is and isn’t worth writing about. There’s a lot of editorial judgment that goes on there. And so academic institutions, when they have a finding like that, they’ll send out an email blast to reporters and say ‘this new study, it’s been a peer reviewed process that they have found that without global warming,’ for instance, the Pacific Northwest Heat Dome of last year. I believe that was so significant and, and there were hundreds of deaths that were attributed to it … they found that that would not have happened without climate change. Right. So that was a headline that was all over the place, but it was based on this very valid science and rigorous work that had been done to, to look at that.

There is this really interesting dynamic as a climate change reporter, like for me. So I’m a regional … I’m a regional newspaper at The Boston Globe writing about climate change. But sometimes that does mean writing about the weather. There hasn’t necessarily been attribution science, but I do want to make sure that I’m giving some context for extreme events to our readers. So an example of that is the first summer that I was at The Boston Globe in 2021, it was like May, and we had our first day that was over 90 degrees, which was exceptionally early. So I couldn’t say ‘climate change caused this 90 degree day to happen in May,’ but I could say ‘let’s look at the historical record and see when has the first 90 degree day in Boston fallen historically’ and work with our graphics team to put together some data that showed that this was exceptionally early and something that really would’ve been unheard of 10 years ago even.

But trying to really show a long historic record so you could see just how much of an outlier it was. And that was a summer of extreme heat that just kept going, kept going, kept going. And so we kept leaning on, ‘well, okay, we’re not going to say this is climate change, but we are going to say this is what the historical record shows, and this is in line with what the best science tells us is going to continue happening’ and pointing to all these different parts of the scientific records, studies that have been done specifically on the impacts of climate change in the Northeast and the projections of how it will affect extreme heat to just contextualize the story for our readers.

Darragh Worland:

What kind of background do you need to be on the climate change beat? Do you have a background as a scientist?

Sabrina Shankman:

I definitely do not. I so wish that I did because I spend so much time just humbling myself to scientists and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I have a really dumb question,’ but I think of myself as like a translator. I try to just vacuum up as much information as I can from the scientists and from the data, and then translate it in a way that is very accessible for readers so that they can come to it without a scientific background. But my own background, no, I studied journalism. So I mean I have to do a huge amount of work to make sure that I’m understanding things and, and especially because the act of simplifying things is where you can introduce errors so easily. So you know, whereas as a journalistic practice, I don’t call people and read them my stories or let them see stories ahead of time. But when I’m writing about scientists, I am absolutely on the phone with a scientist saying, ‘it is my understanding that this is how I can accurately summarize your findings. This is how I’m paraphrasing something that you said to me. Am I losing the meaning.’ I go over it with them.

Darragh Worland:

Yeah, journalists don’t share their whole stories with their sources. Can you explain actually for our listeners why you wouldn’t do that? Why are you not sharing your whole story with your sources and then also because you’re only sharing pieces of a story, maybe the way you put the story together, you could have made an error. And then how did you handle that?

Sabrina Shankman:

It’s because if you share a story with a source, then they’re going to come in and they’re going to try to influence that story. They’re going to try to change the trajectory. It’s just human nature. When it comes to scientists, I do go over aspects of it. I also, when I’m reporting on a normal person, right? When I’m writing a story about a human being who has nothing to do with the media and politics, they’re a private individual, I will sometimes talk to them about this is how I’m framing the story. I don’t want there to be any surprises. And you take a different approach kind of depending on the media savvy of the person that you’re dealing with. Similarly, like if I’m writing a story that’s an accountability story that maybe a company’s not gonna really like, I will let them know, these are all the things I’m gonna say about you so that they have a chance to respond to it. But it’s very different than sending your story to someone.

On the question about science and getting things wrong … I cannot think of a time that I’ve gotten something wrong about the science in a story. I can think of times that I have spent so much time being so careful about every piece of science in the story that I’ve then misspelled someone’s name and having a correction on an article because you misspelled someone’s name when you have spent like days pouring over deep science, that is … God, the gymnastics my brain has to go through to understand this stuff, sometimes I am just exhausted by the time I’m through it. Then to misspell someone’s name is so heartbreaking. Journalists … we live in fear of corrections. It is the thing that haunts us. And to have it over something so silly and avoidable as that just breaks my heart.

Darragh Worland:

I feel your pain. Yeah. And this is such a contentious issue. So speaking of which, why are scientists so sure that humans are the cause of climate change? Like what’s the evidence that it’s real?

Sabrina Shankman:

The body of science rests on … it starts with this idea: You can measure the concentration in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. We have this long history of measurements that goes back many, many decades that shows how that concentration has risen. And you can overlay that with the burning of fossil fuels over time, which if you do a measurement of what’s coming out of oil as you burn it, you can measure that CO2. So we know that the burning of fossil fuels causes carbon emissions. We know that carbon emissions in the atmosphere have been on the rise ever since the Industrial Revolution, and we have seen that relationship just kind of travel in tandem as the burning of fossil fuels increases, so does the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. And then, from there, scientists are able to do work to look at what are the triggering effects, right?

So we know that when, when you have – and it’s like the greenhouse gas effect, this idea that when the atmosphere has more carbon dioxide in it, it essentially creates a blanket so that the sun’s rays come down to the planet. And instead of being able to reflect back up into the atmosphere, they’re kept here, and it creates this warming effect where we are gradually warming the planet. Now, if you think about how much we’re warming it by, it’s a little over one degree Celsius since pre-industrial times, which sounds so small, right? And you would never notice that if you walk outside your house. But when you, when you think about the amount of energy that it takes to do that, it actually has a tremendous effect and it sets everything spinning basically. It has the oceans at its hottest temperature that we’ve ever experienced.

What do hurricanes come from? Hurricanes come from the energy that’s at the top of the ocean. And so when you have a warmer ocean, you have bigger hurricanes, you have more extreme weather, look at the Arctic where it’s warming much faster than it is everywhere else. You know, we have a strong record of observations that measure how much sea ice there is at the Arctic. And we know that having sea ice at the Arctic is important because it helps cool the rest of the planet. It also helps control things like the jet stream, which affects weather all over the planet. Having a nice cold Arctic is super central to that. So as that ice disappears – and we’re measuring that, it is smaller and smaller and smaller each year, you know, with some variation – but the trend is all that it’s going smaller each year. It has an effect that goes far beyond the Arctic and it affects the entire planet.

Warming begets more warming, which begets more warming. So you’ve got all these knock-on effects. So in the Arctic for instance, we have the permafrost. The permafrost is frozen land that is containing old plants and matter that has been frozen in the tundra for thousands of years. As that earth is thawing, it warms up the permafrost and that releases the methane emissions that are contained in those organisms that have been frozen in the soil. And when the methane comes out, that’s way more potent than carbon dioxide. It goes right up into the atmosphere and it makes the warming even worse.

Darragh Worland:

And methane is another issue, and cattle are a cause of methane emissions as well. And that’s another human cause … source of warming.

Sabrina Shankman:

It’s funny because this, this came up, you talk about disinformation or misinformation. This came up on Twitter recently. Elon Musk had a tweet about how agriculture has nothing to do with climate change. Just very dismissive. Agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, both because of the cows … there’s always headlines about cow farts making methane. It’s actually the burps, as far as I know.

Darragh Worland:

Really? Oh, see, I didn’t know that.

Sabrina Shankman:

I think the burps are a bigger thing than the farts, but, but farts are funnier, so I get it. We all need a little levity when we’re talking about climate change, but it’s more than that. It has to do with some of the nutrients in the fertilizers that we use that have this incredible effect.

Darragh Worland:

And it’s the scale of agriculture, the scale at which we are producing food.

Sabrina Shankman:

It’s not like your old family farmer, that’s the problem, right? It’s the big industrial farming complex that is the problem.

Darragh Worland:

How did this become so charged politically? Particularly given that, from what you just explained, the science is so sound and the way you explained it, I can follow … it makes sense to me.

Sabrina Shankman:

It’s really unfortunate, honestly, and kind of upsetting because as a climate change reporter, you get accused of certain things. If I could tell you how many emails I’ve gotten that call me a liberal commie scum or something like that because I’ve reported on, on a climate driven event. It’s really, really charged.

Why is a whole other dynamic thing. I mean, when you look at the influence … who doesn’t want you to embrace this idea of climate change? The people who are the most responsible for the emissions that are causing climate change, right? They also happen to be some of the most powerful and well-off, wealthy corporations in the world. So, historically, there used to be this incredible amount of climate denial that came from oil companies, right? Exxon, Shell, Chevron. There is this long history of climate denial. We know that they were well aware that it was bunk, that their own science had showed them that this was not true.

But along with that denial came the funding and financing of a lot of the politicians in the United States and elsewhere too. So there was this real kind of overlap between the powerful interests around fossil fuels and the powerful interests who were helping create law and policy in the United States. And it became something that was more a feature of the Republican party, although not exclusively so. I mean, there’s been much reported about Joe Manchin, a Democrat and his ties to the coal industry in West Virginia, and how that has played a role in some of the climate policies under the Biden Administration. So it’s certainly not something that exists solely in the Republican party, though it has been more of a feature of the Republican party.

But that said, when you’re talking about climate change impacts, why are people resistant to this idea? I think because it’s a really hard and really scary idea. I think that it can be really upsetting to have someone say the way that you live your life is wrong. The way that you drive your car, the way that you heat your home, the way that you operate your fit for your farm, the way the food that you buy, the plastic that you use … those are a problem. And that’s a really upsetting idea. It is entirely true that those things are a problem. But it is also true that it is not a problem that was created by that individual. It was a problem that was created by a system that has then been imposed on this individual to the exclusion of other options. So the solution is not for this individual to solve the whole problem on their own. It’s for a systemic change.

But at the same time, I think that there has been this narrative that has discredited scientists and it has said ‘you call it science, but is it really?’ … this systematic effort to discredit the work that’s done by these scientists. And the funny thing is, there’s also this narrative that says the scientists are in it for the money that exists around journalism too, that we’re in it for the money. We don’t make very much money. If we were in it for the money, we’d be doing something different. And that’s also often true of scientists. These are not people who are taking big checks to the bank.

Through the Trump Administration in the U.S., in particular, there was this narrative that really grew that said ‘yes, science, you know, we don’t really …’ …. it married the idea of science and feelings, right? Science should be divorced of feelings. Science is about what can you prove. What is this? What is measurable? You test hypotheses. You’re always trying to build and grow and prove yourself wrong. And the narrative changed to say like that was somehow less valid and that you’re feeling that climate change was not really a problem mattered more than what the facts on the ground were telling us.

Darragh Worland:

But climate denialism was well established prior to the Trump Administration, wouldn’t you say?

Sabrina Shankman:

Oh, a hundred percent. It was, but it played a different role I would say. Climate denialism has been around for a long time, but your average person might not really think of it as being a part of their political belief system. Whereas now it is more part of it. I think the other thing that happened was this idea of the Green New Deal that took hold, which was this very progressive idea that we could work together to solve the climate crisis while also addressing a lot of societal problems and injustices. And that became a talking point of the right, too, to say ‘look at these kind of climate people, they wanna take your jobs away.’ It became part of this very charged conversation about how America was changing, about making America great again. You could no longer say, ‘this is science. Science tells us that this is what’s happening to our planet.’ You can see it. It’s not just happening in the Arctic no matter where you are, you can see it, but yet it became this sort of throwaway idea.

Darragh Worland:

To put it simply, how much would you say misinformation or disinformation played a role in how people think about climate change or how some people think about climate change or how climate change deniers are thinking and feeling? I’ll put that ‘feeling’ word in there about climate change.

Sabrina Shankman:

Even in the 10 years that I’ve written about climate change, the way that that climate deniers have denied climate has changed. First it was saying there is no proof that this is happening. Actually carbon dioxide is good for the planet. You know, plants need it. It’s great. There’s no problem. The next one was saying, well, I’m not a scientist. Like science is still out, right? That was like maybe late nineties, early two thousands we were hearing more. A lot of any politician you ask them about, I’m not a scientist. More recently, the language is more, ‘the climate is changing, the planet is changing. That’s undeniable. We see that happening.’ But until we have a solution that works, we need to be using fossil fuels to help get us to where we need to go. And we also need to come up with solutions that allow for the continued burning of fossil fuels. So there’s this technology that exists that is very promising for some uses, but it would capture carbon emissions and allow you to store them. And it’s something that is very much favored by oil companies moving forward because it might allow them to continue operating somewhat in the way that they do now.

So there is this like shifting face of what, what it looks like and in all things there is always a nugget of truth. And so if you are a consumer of the news, it’s very easy to hear that, right? It’s very easy to say, ‘gosh, like I don’t know, how would I get my house off of oil or gas right now? Maybe I live in an old house, I can’t afford to buy heat pumps. Or maybe I’ve heard that heat pumps won’t work. Or you know, that maybe there’s some messaging that says I need to have my gas car, or I keep hearing news stories about the, the, the waste around batteries for electric cars. And so that doesn’t seem like a good solution, and so maybe I’ll just stick with what I’ve got. And anyways, they’re saying that there’s gonna be some bridge fuels that help us going forward.’ There is a very clear framing of all of these all of these themes that, that makes it understandable if you’re, especially if you’re already feeling like kind of bad about this framing of climate change is something that you did and you are responsible for.

Darragh Worland:

It is such a daunting problem and everything we hear about climate change, whether you acknowledge the scope of the problem or not, is so negative. It’s ‘we don’t have the money to fix our infrastructure the way it needs to be fixed locally, nationally, internationally.’ It’s ‘we don’t have necessarily the solutions or the time individually.’ Electric cars are prohibitively expensive. I wonder if some of the messaging, is it too negative? Is there a shortage of more positive solutions or more positive messaging? It sounds to me like deniers are exploiting that.

Sabrina Shankman:

If you talk to climate journalists about this question, they are, and climate scientists too, they are of two minds. There is one mindset that says ‘we are in a crisis and if people don’t wake up, it is never going to get solved.’ We need to scare people into with the reality, not by exaggerating, but the facts on the ground are scary enough. We need people to wake up and get on board and we should be marching in the streets to make change. Okay? Then the other side says, well, exactly what you’re saying, that those stories about the realities need to continue, but also the stories about the solutions and about the … I hate to say opportunities around climate change because the human impact is so high and there is so much pain and suffering associated with it, but there are also ways in which certain places in particular can benefit.

And there, I’m talking about like I report on Massachusetts. Massachusetts is not losing a fossil fuel industry, but it is gaining a massive offshore wind industry that is a huge amount of jobs. We have not had the birth of an industry in a long time, and so a lot of people are seeing this as a way to potentially do it right. You know, make sure that we’re taking environmental justice into account, make sure we’re taking equity into account so that there are opportunities, especially in communities that have not seen those opportunities in a way that never has happened, right? So there are ways to frame the story. There are also incredible scientific breakthroughs that are so cool, like space age stuff, that’s going on looking for whether it’s like nuclear fusion, things like that, that can help tell the story in this way of framing it around human ingenuity that can be super inspiring. There’s also kids at elementary schools who are going on marches and having bake sales to try to make a difference. There’s local efforts to build green schools, to help people afford EVs, to get public charging, to increase and improve public transit so that people don’t need to rely on their gas vehicles as much. There are ample stories that can be told that really do frame it in a positive way of ‘look at us moving forward together to solve a problem.’ And I think you are right. I think that in the media, we don’t do a great job of telling those stories too. Maybe it’s because we are often so bombarded with so many big and scary ones that, that also need to get told that it can be easy to be like ‘I’m gonna write about that school leader. I’m, I’m gonna tell that that’s sort of evergreen. I can get back to that.’ But I think that we need to be doing a better job of seeing the value in telling those stories. Now different

Darragh Worland:

People are gonna be motivated by different stories, but I also think there is that tendency in the news (to say) if it bleeds, it leads. How much do we fall back on that?

Sabrina Shankman:

Those are attractive stories. But I will also tell you from … The Globe did not have a climate team previously. I was their first ever climate reporter and we’ve been trying to build this kind of climate coverage at The Globe in this very intentional way. And so we’re thinking about what are the stories that really resonate with people. There are definitely accountability stories, which is largely what I focus on, but a lot of the stories that absolutely kill when it comes to traffic have to do with how can you access rebates to put heat pumps in your home? Here are the steps you need to do to get an EV. People want to know how can I be part of the solution and so meeting them where they’re at by giving them the information has been a really, really helpful thing for us to do.

Darragh Worland:

What advice do you have for listeners who might be unsure of what to believe when it comes to climate change?

Sabrina Shankman:

Well, first I would like to validate that feeling of overwhelm. It is an overwhelming situation. There is a fire hose of information. Sometimes it feels like there is a new catastrophic study and headline that’s coming out every day. And then I would say it’s really about finding sources that you can trust, as with any kind of news, right? You need to be interrogating the information that you’re receiving. And so if a piece of information comes out, but the source of it is an industry group or an advocacy group … either side of it. I think that that is something that you have to say, okay, well maybe this information seems valid, but also it’s coming with a perspective. And what maybe what are some other perspectives that, that I could also meet this with? A lot of times journalists write a story and they are, they’re kind of grounding their story in a specific conclusion from a report, but it might not be the whole picture. If they’re doing a good job, they have linked to the actual report itself. Some of these, like I said, can be brutal to read, but some of them actually have gotten a lot better and the communication around science has gotten a lot better. I think scientists are spending a lot of time thinking about how do they tell a story, so click on the link. Maybe it’s one of the ones that’s actually written in, in a, in a form of English that a normal mortal non-academic can understand and um, and it could be worth engaging with it yourself.

Darragh Worland:

Thank you so much, Sabrina. This has been so incredibly enlightening and really helpful. You’re doing really important work and we really appreciate the work that you’re doing.

Sabrina Shankman:

Oh, gosh. Well thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Darragh Worland:

Thanks for listening. In this episode, Shankman mentioned there are two camps of climate journalists – those who believe they need to scare the public into action and those who believe they need to focus on the solutions and opportunities. What approach most appeals to you? Send us an email at [email protected] or catch our post with this question on social media. We’d love to hear from you.

Is That a Fact is a production of the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit building a national movement to create a more news literate America. For more, go to news lit.org. I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Our producer is Mike Webb, and our theme music is by Aaron Bush. And thanks to our podcast production partner, Rivet360. For more about them, go to rivetthreesixty.com.