Media amplification of messages

Jonathan Watts of the Guardian published an article Thursday about using the term global heating instead of global warming.

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It was interesting to read this article because I was in the audience for the side event when Watts asked Richard Betts a question about global heating. This was the sequence: an observer? an activist, perhaps from Italy or Spain? asked “Hans Joachim Schellnhuber” (as Watts called him, though on the panel he was called more simply “John” and he noted that he had spent many years working in the UK) whether activists using the term global heating were supported by the evidence. Schellnhuber promptly took responsibility for the term, stating that he and his colleagues had used the term “hothouse earth” in their paper in PNAS, and that this might have sparked laypeople’s use of the term global heating. Heating, said Schellnhuber, was a more accurate term than warming.

After an intervening question or two, Jonathan Watts asked Richard Betts whether he agreed with Schellnhuber; Betts confirmed that he thought “heating” was a better term, because the energy systems of the earth were changing. That became the subtitle of the Guardian article, with an eminently British image focused on the British heatwave of this past summer.

Was Watts wanting to amplify the voice of southern European activists via the authority of the UK Met office? Was he wanting to credit a local boy (UK Met office) rather than a German scientists (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)? Did he just want to give Richard Betts some attention in a panel where almost all the questions went to Schellnhuber? I’m just curious–but I was fascinated to see this kind of journalistic intervention in action.