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Matthew Lau: Biased science reports fuelled climate alarm

First the UN tilted its synopsis of 'the science' and then the media picked the juiciest bits from that. No wonder policy turned deep green

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The journalistic rule, “If it bleeds it leads,” appears to be widely followed in reporting on climate change. In a new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, researchers compared newspaper articles from 10 major outlets in the United States and United Kingdom with scientific evidence from all six IPCC assessment reports from 1990 to 2023 (IPCC being the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body). Their conclusion? “Public summaries of IPCC climate assessments lean toward the more severe end of the technical evidence.”

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