The urgent need for journalists to communicate basic climate facts

Although climate change is arguably the most urgent issue of our time, the general public knows little about climate science. For example, most Americans do not understand that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming and its cause, and they do not know what the basic mechanism of global warming is. Since most people learn about climate change through the news media, we investigate how often five basic climate facts are conveyed in The New York Times news articles covering climate change from 1980 to 2018. With only one exception, the frequencies with which these facts appear in news articles today are vanishingly small. This suggests that print journalism is a largely untapped resource for educating the public on basic climate facts. We give examples of how these basic facts can be embedded in articles with ease.