Media and Climate Security: Mutual Miscomprehension?

Dec 1, 2022 | Peter Schwartzstein
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There’s a scene near the climax of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express when Hercule Poirot starts to plot out the possible murderers. There’s Colonel Arbuthnot, who had opportunity and motive. There’s Mr. McQueen, suspicious in his transparent attempts to misdirect the detective. There’s even the haughty, toad-faced Princess Dragomiroff. Like practically everyone on the train, she had good reason to wish the evil Ratchett dead.

In the end (spoiler alert, etcetera), Poirot deduces that all dozen or so suspects are killers, each propelled by a shared revulsion for the victim. It’s simultaneously shocking and clever in its exploitation of the limits of our imagination—and the reason that this is one of Christie’s best-known works. I also remember feeling very annoyed when I first finished the book as a tween. How could a detective novel possibly have such a big and complicated range of culprits, while still somehow coming across as more plausible than many more conventional thrillers of its kind?

In trying to spell out the nature of climate security risks for broader audiences, it can seem as if media and climate security practitioners are doomed to a similar mismatch in narrative expectations. Journalists like—and, for the edification of readers, often need—clearcut storylines. Climate security scenarios seldom offer wholly linear, easy comprehensible causations (“killers” and “victims”) of the sort that are found in more garden variety murder mysteries. Trapped in this unsatisfying no-man’s-land, the climate-instability nexus has struggled to attract adequate coverage.

As senior German official and ex-Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan put it at the recent Berlin Climate and Security conference, we need to better link “data with reality on ground.” Implicit in her comments is the fact that government increasingly recognizes climate’s destabilizing potential, but that many officials aren’t yet convinced enough by the existing body of evidence to deploy more resources. It bears examination as to why media hasn’t helped furnish as much proof as it arguably could.