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Climate change alarmism or global warming alarmism is a critical description of a rhetorical style which stresses the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming. The term "alarmist" is primarily used by those who reject the scientific consensus on climate change as an epithet for those who treat the issue objectively.

The term "alarm" is also often used to describe the reports on global cooling in the media during the 1970s and is commonly compared with what is currently perceived to be alarmism in relation to global warming. Public perception of the realities and risks associated with climate change have been described as forming a continuum in which people with "alarmist" views form one extreme along the continuum, and those commonly characterized as "denialists, "skeptics" or "naysayers" at the other extreme.

Alarmism as a pejorative

The term "alarmist" is commonly used as a pejorative by critics of the scientific consensus on climate change to describe those who endorse the mainstream scientific view. Examples include Al Gore , Stephen Schneider , Mike Hulme and the International Panel on Climate Change . The term is also used to describe, usually in a pejorative way, the perceived consensus of scientists and media who propagated the global cooling scare of the 1970s. Often, the alarmism related to global cooling is compared with the perceived alarmism tied to global warming.

Alarmism as an extreme position

Alarmism is described as the use of a linguistic repertoire which communicates climate change using inflated language, an urgent tone and imagery of doom. In a report produced for the Institute for Public Policy Research Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit reported that alarmist language is frequently employed by newspapers, popular magazine and in campaign literature put out by government and environment groups. It is difficult for the public to see climate change as urgent unless it is posed to them as a catastrophe, but using alarmist language is an unreliable tool for communicating the issue to the public. Instead of motivating people to action, these techniques often evoke "denial, paralysis apathy" and do not motivate people to become engaged with the issue of climate change. In the United Kingdom, alarmist messages are often subject to "subtle critique" in the left-leaning press, while the right-leaning media often "embrace" the message, but undermine it using a "climate skeptic" frame. In the context of the climate refugees—the potential for climate change to displace people—it has been reported that "alarmist hyperbole" is frequently employed by private military contractors and think tanks.

People who hold alarmist views of climate change represent one end of a continuum in public perceptions of climate change. Anthony A. Leiserowitz found that alarmists made up about 11% of the United States population, while "naysayers", who have a skeptical or cynical view of climate change, make up about 7% of the population. The remainder of the public lay between these two extremes. Their perception of climate change was similar to that of the alarmists, but they differed significantly from them on questions related to perceived risk.

Media coverage

Minority views—both alarmist and denialist—were reported to get disproportionate attention in the popular press, especially in the United Kingdom. One of the consequences of this is a portrayal of risks well beyond the claims actually being made by scientists. Others have noted the tendency for journalists to overemphasize the most extreme outcomes from a range of possibilities reported in scientific articles. A study that tracked press reports about a climate change article in the journal Nature found that "results and conclusions of the study were widely misrepresented, especially in the news media, to make the consequences seem more catastrophic and the timescale shorter."

Views of scientists

Scientists who agree with the consensus view on global warming often have been critical of those who exaggerate or distort the risks posed by global warming. Stephen Schneider has criticized such exaggeration, stating that he "disapprove of the 'ends justify the means' philosophy" that would exaggerate dangers in order to spur public action. Mike Hulme, professor at the University of East Anglia and former director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, describes such exaggerations as "self-defeating," in that they engender feelings of hopelessness rather than motivating positive action. Hans von Storch has objected to "alarmists think that climate change is something extremely dangerous, extremely bad and that overselling a little bit, if it serves a good purpose, is not that bad."

Scientists also have criticized press sensationalism in reporting on climate change. Myles Allen, director of the Climateprediction.net experiment, criticized press reporting that seized on the extreme end of predictions from the experiment rather than the much more likely outcome of moderate warming.

See also

• Politics of global warming
• Merchants of Doubt
• Normalcy bias

References

1. "Climategate": A Different Perspective, Kerry Emanuel
2. ^ Kapitsa, Andrei, and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, "Challenging the basis of Kyoto Protocol", The Hindu, 10 July 2008, "Who remembers today, they query, that in the 1970s, when global temperatures began to dip, many warned that we faced a new ice age? An editorial in The Time magazine on June 24, 1974, quoted concerned scientists as voicing alarm over the atmosphere 'growing gradually cooler for the past three decades', 'the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland,' and other harbingers of an ice age that could prove 'catastrophic.' Man was blamed for global cooling as he is blamed today for global warming".
3. ^ Irish Independent, "Don't believe doomsayers that insist the world's end is nigh", 16 March 2007, p. 1. "The widespread alarm over global warming is only the latest scare about the environment to come our way since the 1960s. Let's go through some of them. Almost exactly 30 years ago the world was in another panic about climate change. However, it wasn't the thought of global warming that concerned us. It was the fear of its opposite, global cooling. The doom-sayers were wrong in the past and it's entirely possible they're wrong this time as well."
4. ^ Schmidt, David, "It's curtains for global warming", Jerusalem Post, 28 June 2002, p. 16B. "If there is one thing more remarkable than the level of alarm inspired by global warming, it is the thin empirical foundations upon which the forecast rests. Throughout the 1970s, the scientific consensus held that the world was entering a period of global cooling, with results equally catastrophic to those now predicted for global warming."
5. ^ Wilson, Francis, "The rise of the extreme killers", Sunday Times, 19 April 2009, p. 32. "Throughout history there have been false alarms: "shadow of the bomb", "nuclear winter", "ice age cometh" and so on. So it's no surprise that today many people are sceptical about climate change. The difference is that we have hard evidence that increasing temperatures will lead to a significant risk of dangerous repercussions."
6. ^ National Post, "The sky was supposed to fall: The '70s saw the rise of environmental Chicken Littles of every shape as a technique for motivating public action", 5 April 2000, p. B1. "One of the strange tendencies of modern life, however, has been the institutionalization of scaremongering, the willingness of the mass media and government to lend plausibility to wild surmises about the future. The crucial decade for this odd development was the 1970s. Schneider's book excited a frenzy of glacier hysteria. The most-quoted ice-age alarmist of the 1970s became, in a neat public-relations pivot, one of the most quoted global-warming alarmists of the 1990s."
7. Peterson, Thomas C., William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus", American Meteorological Society, 8 February 2008, pp. 1326, 1330–1331.
8. ^ Leiserowitz, Anthony A. (2005). "American Risk Perceptions: Is Climate Change Dangerous?". Risk Analysis. 25 (6): 1433–1442. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.2005.00690.x. ISSN 0272-4332. PMID 16506973.
9. ^ Ereaut, Gill; Segrit, Nat (2006). Warm Words: How are we Telling the Climate Story and can we Tell it Better?. London: Institute for Public Policy Research.
10. Lisa Dilling; Susanne C. Moser (2007). "Introduction". Creating a climate for change: communicating climate change and facilitating social change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–27. ISBN 0-521-86923-4.
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12. Hartmann, Betsy (2010). "Rethinking climate refugees and climate conflict: Rhetoric, reality and the politics of policy discourse". Journal of International Development. 22 (2): 233–246. doi:10.1002/jid.1676. ISSN 0954-1748.
13. Boykoff, Maxwell T. (2009). "We Speak for the Trees: Media Reporting on the Environment". Annual Review of Environment and Resources. 34 (1): 431–457. doi:10.1146/annurev.environ.051308.084254. ISSN 1543-5938.
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15. http://www.americanphysicalsociety.com/publications/apsnews/199608/upload/aug96.pdf
16. Ghosh, Pallab. "Climate messages are 'off target'". BBC Online. Retrieved 21 June 2010.
17. Cox, Simon. "A load of hot air?". BBC Online. Retrieved 21 June 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

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