(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

Remember way, way back in those hazy days of the summer before last when Australia’s devastating bushfires were resetting our understanding of global warming? Remember when nothing was going to be the same again?

It was the wake-up call for Australia’s politicians and media, the alert to shift from a narrow fretting about coal exports to a broader reporting of the real-life impacts of global warming on people and communities embedded in the narrative of a world at a tipping point.

Well it’s happening again. Far away from Australia’s lockdown bickering, the 1 percentage-point rise in global warming on pre-industrial levels confirmed in 2018 seems to have tipped the world: 500 killed by the heat dome in Canada; 200 in the floods in Germany; this weekend’s video footage of the ferry rescue from the fires on the Greek island of Evia rhyming with Australia’s own New Year’s Eve images from Mallacoota just 20 months ago.

But this time Australia’s politicians and media are too distracted by our immediate concerns, from commuter car parks to COVID, to pay enough attention to the “global” in global warming.

Instead of the events from Pacific Canada to southern Turkey being journalistically hammered into the narrative of a changing climate that’s changing the world to drive the urgency of action, each event is reported for the drama of the images — terrible, sure — but torn out of the context of global warming, too easily shrugged off as the unfortunate misfortunes of others.

Today the global warming alarm is scheduled to go off again, at 6pm today in Australia’s eastern states, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases its latest report on what the science tells us about how the warming of the planet will affect climate.

The splash news is likely to be a tightening of projecting when the world hits the outermost accepted limit of increase, the 1.5% barrier. In 2018, the IPCC experts predicted a range stretching out to 2052. Now it’s expected to be a far narrower range, stretching to some time in the 2030s.

It’s set to ratchet up the urgency of action (yes, even by Australia) in the debate leading into November’s Glasgow climate summit. Yet every time the climate alarm goes off, Australia’s media allows the government to hit the snooze button and wrap the country back up in the comfort of its denialist doona.

It’s a ruthless attention to agenda setting. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his ministers simply refuse to talk about the hard truths of global warming, deflecting with vague hints of a preference for 2050 zero emissions achieved by the magic of technology at some distant point, mixed up with an empowered contrarianism (hello, Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce) and a  finger-pointing look-over-here at Labor over the inevitable disruption of the necessary transition (Utes! Taxes! Jobs!).

Embedding the narrative we need is hard. Journalism is optimised for the rapid run of short-run news cycles (shallow, frothy, frequent) not the long arc of a story like global warming. But journalism needs to rework itself to meet the needs of its audience.

It’s particularly hard in Australia where most of the traditional media (*cough* News Corp) is embedded in the denialist movement, promoting contrarians and feeding the talking points that ricochet around social media. They tone-police journalists at Nine and (particularly) the ABC to avoid linking the outcome (Fires! Floods!) with the changing climate.

COVID-19 gives us a clue about how journalism can adapt: reporting the pandemic has demanded integrating a similar long-arc story into daily practice where just about every story — politics, finance, society, foreign news, even sport — has had to be reshaped to incorporate the impact of the virus.

There are lessons here for integrating climate change in rolling news. Every COVID press conference has demonstrated that journalists can force governments to talk about things they don’t want to talk about. Why not use that access to prise open the locked-down discussion about global warming — every time?

Each time the warming alarm sounds, it’s harder for the government to shut it off. Maybe tonight’s call will be the moment it changes. Maybe it’s the moment Australia’s media recognises its responsibility to force the change.