Effect of weather extremes on climate change media coverage - Evidence from 57 000 newspaper articles

Climate change media coverage shapes climate-related societal and political debates and decisions [1, 2]. Yet it is unclear what drives media attention for climate change. More frequent and more intense weather extremes are a clear consequence of climate change and have a large impact on society. Extreme weather events might hence be an important factor for climate coverage. Here, we investigate whether weather extremes lead to more climate change coverage in the media. Further, we analyse how this changes over time and whether it differs between different types of extreme weather events such as heat waves or floods. Finally, we examine how the influence on climate coverage varies between weather extremes and other climate-related events such as climate protests, IPCC report publications and world climate summits.

To this end, we analyse approximately nine million articles from nine German newspapers over the last three decades (1991 - 2021). The selection of newspapers is diverse and includes regional and national media, daily and weekly publication rhythms, as well as various political leanings. Currently, the nine newspapers have a cumulative readership of more than 12 million people. Within all nine million articles, we identify approximately 57 000 climate-related articles, using a bag-of-word machine learning approach. Changes in the share of climate-related articles are evaluated against the background of the occurrence of weather extremes and other climate-related events, while controlling for potential confounders using fixed effects panel regressions. Information about extreme weather events are derived from the meteorological ERA5 reanalysis data as well as from the international disasters' database EM-DAT. In addition, we use data on activists’ protest, scientific publications and political climate-related conferences, derived from press releases of the corresponding organizations. 

Our study provides evidence that weather extremes increase climate change coverage. Separate analyses for the three decades (1991 - 2000, 2001 - 2010, 2011 - 2021) show that the influence of weather extremes on climate coverage increases over time. Differences in the influence on climate coverage are found for different weather extreme types. The influence of floods in Germany on climate coverage is about twice as large as that of heat waves. Comparing the effect of weather extremes with that of other climate-related events shows that the influence of social events on climate coverage is much stronger than the influence of weather extremes. We find evidence that protests exceed the influence of heat waves by a factor of four, and world climate summits even exceed the influence of heat waves by a factor of ten. These trends apply to all newspapers studied and are preserved under different controls and alternative climate coverage measures.

[1] Brulle, R. J., Carmichael, J. & Jenkins, J. C. Shifting public opinion on climate change: An empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the U.S., 2002-2010. Climatic Change 114, 169–188 (2012).

[2] Sampei, Y. & Aoyagi-Usui, M. Mass-media coverage, its influence on public awareness of climate-change issues, and implications for Japan’s national campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Global Environmental Change 19, 203–212 (2009).