At The Observatory site maintained by the Columbia Journalism Review, primary writer Curtis Brainard has a close look at media performance as the inevitable question arises: is this year’s concantenation of extreme weather plus a monster iceberg the work of global warming, or just one of those things?

The answer, he writes, is in a sense both climate change and mere weather. And that’s how most major media he surveys wrote it. Brainard provides an excellent overview, with links, to recent coverage of weather that is starkly unusual.

Much of the coverage is also in line, as he notes, with a World Meteorological Organization Press Release.  It declares no individual events can be tied to global warming but that the spectacle of so many things unusual “matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.” There is a little bit of the blah-blah-blah to such a statement. That does not mean it is untrue.

- Charlie Petit

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