I see that recent events have confirmed my "climate change reporting end-game".
Just as the endless competition to use the most alarming nouns, adjectives, expletives, etc reached a frustrating point where no further mileage could be made of good old Warming, (beacuse there were simply no more terms in the English language that had not already been over used) a brief respite for the media arrived with the season's usual bushfires - which allowed another, albeit short-lived, chance to invent even more alarmist sentences and headings. But even that died quickly as there are only so many times you can sell a story given the limited headings and, well, not much more. The Red Cross angle gained them all a few more days (who doesn't love a rare chance to bag a charity?). The recent heavy rains in many areas seem to appear to have left the media in confusion - they now run these stories as either "Yay, look at the beautiful aussie battler kids playing in the rejoiceful mud", to the die-hards that say the ashes caused by the infernos caused by global warming are now being swept into the rivers and unleashing yet another pestilence... That confusion on which way to run the whole rains thing has truly left them in disarray.
But the whole Climate thing has been on very shaky legs for some weeks now. Apart from the inevitable sheer boredom of the reading masses, some other delights emerged that have almost completely derailed the Climate scandal - such as dear old Megan and ptr exitting the Royal family. Now that is really important! And the painful advance of the Trump impeachment simply adds to the whole loss of interest in the weather....
Now I see that the climate reporting is facing a new and even more fundamental danger - the new virus that has emerged from dear old China. This is great news (pardon the pun?) as it is actually something..... new
I loved when the whole Zika thing appeared - the scientists, in a rare moment of commercial prowess, found themselves talking about a disease that DISFIGURED BABIES!! And they gave the thing a really cool name! "Zika"!! By God the medical research cash flows opened for that one, however short lived that was once a dose of perspective reared its ugly head.
But now, thankfully, we have the new Coronavirus. In future years universities will teach their subjects that a huge error was made in managing this one - as they failed to come up with a cool name like Zika. The actual history / facts should have allowed them to come up with something truly gold, like "E-KARMA-B", short for "Eating Koala And Random Meats Are Bad !" I think they let their commercial guard down there, as being scientists they rationally thought that a new plague born in festering live-exotic-animals-for-food markets was shocking enough.
Now we have a situation where suddenly the media has essentially dropped the whole Climate thingy. Suddenly a cold that has killed a couple of hundred people rates twenty times as much media coverage as the Climate thing that was predicting doom for ALL OF HUMANITY!! Yes, there is the (hopefully for reporters) possibility that an aussie or three perishes. But for now the headlines can just scream that a fifth aussie has a runny nose....
Not sure how this whole E-KARMA-B will play out - I expect that for a month or two there will be endless stories of how a 6th, 7th, maybe 20th aussie has been stricken with a cold. There will no doubt be endless predictions of doom - yawn...... It could turn out to something significant - say if a half a million die just like malaria still manages each year.
But I really think that finding new stories about Climate Change will be much harder in the future.