The New York Times is one of many major news outlets blowing the story of the century (see “Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010“).

The one-time “paper of record” cut coverage sharply since its peak in 2006 and 2007 and failed to connect the dots — heck, a headline this week even blamed the recent record-setting Thailand floods on Thai “officials” not “an unusually heavy monsoon season”!

Yet the paper never mentions the collapsing media coverage in the Elisabeth Rosenthal article that takes up nearly the entire front page of the Sunday Review asking (subhed in print edition):

“Where Did Global Warming Go?”

Even as other countries take action, the issue is fading from the American agenda

The piece reminded me of the classic Onion article, “Report:  Global warming issue from 2 or 3 years ago may still be problem. Look at the above chart of coverage and then consider this line from the story:

Across the nation, too, belief in man-made global warming, and passion about doing something to arrest climate change, is not what it was five years or so ago, when Al Gore’s movie had buzz and Elizabeth Kolbert’s book about climate change, “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” was a best seller.

So media coverage collapses and public concern for the issue drops a bit.  Go figure!

But the ace investigative reporting team at the Times doesn’t seem to believe the sharp drop in media coverage merits even a single sentence in a piece on why the issue of climate change has faded somewhat.

Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted in 2009 as “an expert on environmental communications,” emailed me:

A major factor not mentioned in this article is the collapse of any significant coverage climate change in the media.  We know that 2010 was a record low year,  and 2011 will probably look much the same.  If the media doesn’t draw attention to the issue,  public opinion will decline. The media effects literature clearly shows that the public takes cues on concern over issues from the levels of coverage in the press.  So perhaps an interview with the editors of the NY Times and why coverage of climate change is declining and is having its predictable effect on public opinion on this issue.

There are a number of flaws and ironies in the story.  Rosenthal writes:

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by Kelly Levin, World Resources Institute

This week WRI released Climate Science 2009-2010, the latest installment in our periodic review of the state of play of the science of climate change. Co-authors Kelly Levin and Dennis Tirpak describe some of the latest climate science developments.

What are the key findings of this scientific review?

We divide up the report according to changes to physical, hydrological, and ecological systems, as well as advances in technologies. As a whole, the literature paints a bleak picture. We are continuing to see accelerating change in many systems, with some changes happening much faster than initially envisioned.

Some of the key findings:

• 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record since 1880 (NASA).
• The climate system has a number of different feedback mechanisms built into it, some of which are better known than others. New evidence suggests that as temperature rises, there may be positive feedbacks (processes that reinforce processes) through less cloud cover and in changes in aerosols, soils, peatlands, and Arctic ice cover, which can accelerate climate change impacts.
• Observations show that multi-year winter sea ice area decreased by 42 percent between 2005 and 2008 and that there was a thinning of ∼0.6 m in multi-year ice thickness over the same 4 years (average thickness of the seasonal ice in midwinter is ∼2 m) (Kwok et al.).
• Ocean acidification – caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide concentrations – was only recently recognized as a threat to coral in areas such as the Great Barrier Reef (and is happening much more quickly than anticipated (De’ath et al.)). It is now recognized as having implications for the entire ocean food web which is critical to whales, fish, and mollusks (snails and scallops) (Munday et al., Gooding et al. and Comeau et al.).
• The rate of mass loss in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet may be greater than previously estimated (Chen et al.).
• Based on physiological estimates, a global average temperature increase of 7° C, which is toward the extreme upper part of the range of current projections, would make large portions of the world uninhabitable to humans (Sherwood et al.).

What are some of the main areas in which scientists are making progress in advancing our understanding of climate change?

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The producers at “Koch Brothers Exposed” have another documentary piece on the environmental and health impact of operations run by Koch Industries. This piece examines the toxic waste water pouring out of a Koch-owned Georgia Pacific plant near Crossett, Arkansas — which residents say is boosting cancer rates and killing people in the community.

Watch on and consider the implications of a “wholesale rollback” of environmental regulations that leading Presidential candidates are proposing — with the backing of the Kochs and the Koch-fueled Tea Party.

This hilarious cartoon is making the rounds:

“I am the 1%. Smithers, release the hounds.”

And The Onion has a great short piece on Occupy Wall Street, “Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them”:

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