goal of limiting temperature increases to well below 2°C, or 3.6°F, compared with preindustrial times. (Temperatures have already in- creased by half that amount.) With clean energy prices falling, and influential countries growing increasingly concerned about climate change and air pol- lution, experts hope the Paris pact will foster more ambitious pledges in the years ahead.


Meanwhile, public awareness of the threat of climate change is growing quickly. Gallup polling in March found two-thirds of Americans are now worried about climate change — the highest level since 2008. Experts attribute rising American awareness to a number of factors, including advocacy by Pope Francis, the high profile of the climate negotiations in Paris and warm recent temperatures, partic- ularly over winter in the U.S. Northeast. “You expose people to a really hot day or a heatwave or some- thing like that, and many people simplistically say, ‘That feels like global warming, so it must be real,’” said Anthony Leiserowitz, di- rector of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. After a cold snap, though, the opposite can become true again. “Because they don’t have a true understanding of climate change versus local weather, they will then change their view accordingly,” Leiserowitz added.


Take care in reporting cycles of warming


Journalists covering climate change have long seen the warm- ing hiatus used in disingenuous attempts to discredit good climate


John Upton is a senior science writer at Climate Central. He has science and business degrees and a decade of international reporting experience.


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science. Instead of including such baseless claims in stories, the dual roles of climate change and ocean cycles in global tempera- tures could be briefly mentioned.


It can be helpful for readers to be reminded that global warm-


ing doesn’t follow a straight line on a graph. “We should remember the impact of El Niño and be cautious about trumpeting 2015’s heat as proof of faster warming, only for skeptics to say in 2016 or 2017 that warming has ‘stopped’ if they don’t set new records,” said Reuters climate correspondent Alister Doyle. “A swing to La Niña conditions in the Pacific could mean a cooler year.” That’s natural, even if superimposed over an unnatural longer-term trend. The relationship between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the cycle of El Niños and La Niñas remains unclear, although it ap- pears to be a strong one. If that’s the case, perhaps the two ocean cycles are just climatic ripples in a greater cycle — one that’s so big we have trouble seeing it out in our century-or-so worth of weather monitoring. That’s why it can sometimes be easiest to settle on just report- ing the basic facts: Natural cycles have played important roles in recent temperature records and in the warming slowdown, but the overall trend is of accelerating warming. And that is already wors- ening heat waves and floods, changing weather patterns and threat- ening to drown island and coastal communities across the planet.


7 SEJournal Summer 2016


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