Climate changing narratives: Jonathan Amos on thirty years of climate science reporting for the BBC —Interview
Three decades of progress in climate science meet the evolving landscape of climate communication, leaving space for the imperative shift towards ‘solutions journalism’, aligning with evolving audience preferences and the quest for comprehensive climate change narratives. Jonathan Amos, a science reporter with the BBC since 1994, offers profound insights into the evolution of climate change reporting.
A 30-year period of observation is what is needed to determine the average weather conditions that define the “climate” of a given place, serving as a starting point to identify and describe a changing climate. From his thirty-year career at BBC News, science correspondent Jonathan Amos helps bridge the gap between the worlds of science and media communication, having witnessed the evolution of both climate sciences and the transformative revolution of journalism, from the days of print to the modern era of online publications and the coming influence of artificial intelligence.
Reflecting on your tenure as a science correspondent with the BBC since 1994, how has climate change reporting evolved?
Over the thirty years of my career, I’ve witnessed remarkable changes in the scientific understanding of climate change. I have seen scientists become more sure about what is happening to our climate over that time, about the physical processes at play.
Initially, there were substantial uncertainties surrounding the magnitude and direction of the changes that were occurring in the climate. Even if in the 1990s there was already a good sense that such changes were human-induced, the extent of this influence remained uncertain. With the release of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001, the human impact on climate started to become really robust.
When I first reported on climate change, and particularly on the polar areas, there was considerable uncertainty, especially concerning Antarctica’s mass balance. Over time, advancements in satellite missions like IceSat, CryoSat, and Envisat have unequivocally shown the loss of mass in Antarctica and Greenland over the past two decades. Now, the focus has shifted from debating whether the ice is melting to understanding the rate and magnitude of this change.
Take sea-level rise as another example: from the very first TOPEX/Poseidon satellite mission to the recent Sentinel 6 mission, we’ve observed a steady acceleration from 2 millimetres per year to potentially up to 5 millimetres per year. Understanding its sources — from melting ice sheets and glaciers to oceanic thermal expansion and groundwater storage changes — has grown clearer.
Readers seem to increasingly select news that aligns with their preferences and tolerance for negative information. How does this affect climate change reporting?
In recent years, there has been a growing aversion to negative news, not surprisingly: there is a war in Europe, there is a cost of living crisis, and everybody was touched by COVID in some way.
Through our statistics at the BBC, we observed that people are trying to avoid such exposure, and this tendency reflects all types of stories, including climate change stories, which often entail distressing reports about melting ice sheets, rising seas, and extreme weather.
But what we have found is that people respond to what we call “ solutions journalism “. They want to know what the potential solutions are, and we get good engagement for those types of stories. People want to understand alternative energy options and individual actions that can drive positive change. This is very clear: if you can present people with climate solutions, they become really engaged.
As a journalist, how do you decide what you want to cover, especially when it comes to climate change’s ability to meet news criteria?
Every news story, including climate-related ones, undergoes scrutiny based on various criteria: importance, magnitude, exclusivity, relevance, timeliness, human interest, controversy, counter intuitiveness — people think something, but actually it is not like that — and zeitgeist. The latter is about trending topics, which are topics that everybody is talking about at that moment, and you know people are very interested and keen to learn more about them. We measure any piece of information against these criteria, and if they reach a certain bar then it is something that is worth reporting.
In particular, we evaluate new scientific studies based on their novelty. Incremental advancements — i.e. small advances on what we knew before — might not warrant coverage, but groundbreaking discoveries or new data-driven news stories do.
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Climate Foresight is published by the CMCC Foundation , a research center that develops models and predictions to study the interaction between changes in the climate system and social, economic and environmental changes. Climate Foresight is an observatory on tomorrow, a digital magazine that collects ideas, interviews, articles, art performances, and multimedia to tell the stories of the future.
Jonathan Amos has been a science reporter with the BBC since 1994. He was part of the team that set up the BBC News website in 1997. His online reporting focuses on the Earth sciences, with a particular interest in the changes taking place in polar regions. Jonathan is also known for his coverage of European space activities.
