Stories on Fire and Snow omit Essential Climate Context

The front page story yesterday about the cause of the Liberty Fire from last summer talks about fossil fuel in the micro-scale, about a spark from an ATV igniting the fire, but does not make any connection to our fossil fuel use in the macro-scale, about greenhouse gas emissions, our warming climate, and increasing probability here of wildfires on the urban fringe and even interior.

Front page story yesterday

The paper, in fact, whether from writerly preference or from editorial direction above, consistently slides over, even erases, climate and fossil fuel use in local stories.

Here's one on our weather year that implies a homeostatic notion of reversion to normal, as if we could still talk reassuringly about a stable normal to which we might return. But we now have a rolling, changing average, and it is rarely useful now to talk about a "normal" any more. Today's "abnormally" hot summer is tomorrow's cool summer bathed in nostalgia.

Front page, earlier this month

It doesn't have to be this way.

Here's a piece from yesterday's Seattle Times that specifically calls out climate change.

Seattle Times, front page yesterday

Here's a national piece distributed from USA Today HQ in January. The headline is pretty clear.

A wire story, from January

Just a couple of weeks later a local piece omitted what is stressed in the national piece. That's got to be a very deliberate choice.

Earlier this month here

The future of the ski resort? It's a mystery! Only Mother Nature knows "and she's not sending us any future reports." Come on.

It's a mystery!

There's a consistent pattern of omission and writing-around. The information is right there in our Climate Action Plan (and it even likely understates matters)! Note how it discusses 30-year averages, and not any "normal" — the charts make clear the rolling change to the average.

More Extreme Heat (Climate Action Plan)

Increasing Average Summer Temperatures

More wildfire risk

This is a little like the way our crash reporting focuses on bad actors and bad decisions, and not on our broad streets and roads, and our autoist frames of congestion relief and flow, that together invite speeding and jaydriving. We rachet down our focus on to the micro-scale and individual in order to avoid analysis of the macro-scale and system. The system does not itself determine catastrophe, but it makes it much more probable.

See previously on the wildfire coverage:

• From September 2023, this piece actually mentions "climate change," and it is interesting that the reporting has moved away from that, "Story on South Salem Wildfires omits Discussion of Emissions"
• Just a week later, a story on youth, on the "wildfire generation," omits the young plaintiffs in Juliana v. US, the climate case originating in Eugene, and also omits fossil fuel driving climate change, "Wildfire Stories Enact Erasure of Human Caused Climate Change"