When it comes to reporting on the climate, mainstream media is failing in its role as agenda setter.

Recently UN scientists announced that signs of human-induced climate change reached “new heights” last year. According to the report, the levels of CO₂ observed in the atmosphere represented an 800,000- year high.

I don’t recall seeing “CO₂ reaches 800,000-year high” in a 64-pt headline on the front page of our daily newspapers. Look, it’s possible that The Age, The Australian and the Herald Sun did in fact, prioritise this disturbing news and that I simply missed it. After all, it has been quite some time since I was a daily reader of our venerable publications.

I’d be surprised, though, and it would represent a new approach. Usually climate-related news features well down the pecking order. And although I haven’t made a habit lately of watching commercial TV news (or for that matter, commercial TV) I’d be taken aback if it made it to a nightly bulletin.

Since climate change was declared “the great moral challenge of our generation” in 2007 by Australia’s then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a strange phenomenon has taken place. As climate change has continued to impact and become more obvious, both from a physical and statistical point of view, mainstream media attention has not kept pace.

In the case of The Australian and the Herald Sun, this might be because its editors share similar views towards climate change as News Corp’s owners, the notoriously climate-sceptical Murdoch family (Rupert and Lachlan specifically). News Corp columnists (Andrew Bolt is the sine qua non of denialists) often refute the existence of climate change, or downplay its importance.

Perhaps other news outlet editors are fatigued by climate news. Depressed. This must surely be a phenomenon as unenviable records continue to be set. Taken on their own some of these are compelling. Looked at as a pattern, they tell a nightmarish tale. The UN report, as Yale Environment 360 points out, is full of “grim superlatives”. Ocean heat reached a record high last year, as did global sea levels, which are now rising twice as fast as they were in the 1990s. Sea ice continues to decrease: the past three years were the leanest on record in the Southern Ocean.

Last year was the Earth’s warmest on record, with records dating back to 1850. According to NASA, Earth was about 1.47°C warmer in 2024 than in the late 19th century (1850–1900) preindustrial average.

According to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2024 was the first calendar year that has reached more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.

“All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850,” says C3S director Carlo Buontempo. “Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence. The future is in our hands – swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate.”

Not only were the past 10 years the warmest on record. Each of those were individually the 10 warmest years on record at the time.

Also, January 2025 was the hottest global January on record – 1.7°C above pre-industrial levels.

Some climate watchers expected the planet to cool slightly last year given the natural La Nina phenomena, but this was not the case. January 2025’s record demonstrates how human-driven ocean warming is increasingly overwhelming these natural patterns.

“Our planet is issuing more distress signals – but this report shows that limiting long-term global temperature rise to 1.5°C is still possible,” says United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. “Leaders must step up to make it happen – seizing the benefits of cheap, clean renewables for their people and economies.”

The world’s biggest emitter of emissions is acting decisively, alright, but heading in the other direction. President Donald Trump has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, gutted the EPA and NOAA, and ordered the removal of key climate statistics from US websites. He’s permitting logging in US national parks.

Trump also appointed former fracking executive Chris Wright to lead the US Energy Department.

“There is no climate crisis,” Wright said in 2023, “and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

One wonders what would constitute a climate crisis from Wright’s perspective. Perhaps for him it would be one in which conditions were so bad it threatened further extraction of fossil fuels. As it is, melting of the polar ice caps is expected to make access to these mineral-rich areas easier.

June 2023 through August 2024 saw 15 consecutive months of record-high global temperatures, marking an unprecedented heat streak in the global data set.

The streak ended last September, with September 2024 only the second-hottest September in NASA’s temperature record. The month was 1.26°C above the long-term average, which was much warmer than any other September since 1880, aside from September 2023.

Speaking on the inaugural World Day for Glaciers recently, Dr Jeremy Ely from the University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning, issued a warning on the potential catastrophe that awaits in South America should action not be taken to reduce climate change.

“The first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change was published in 1990, and since then, very little has been done to curb the global carbon emissions fuelling climate change,” he said. “Our brief shows that what scientists have been predicting for years is now coming true, and swift action needs to be taken if we stand any hope of saving and preserving the glaciers that so many people rely on as a source of water.

“All the targets that have been set have already been missed and failed, yet the only way to preserve glaciers is to drastically reduce carbon emissions once and for all,” Ely says. “The situation is serious, and it will take global cooperation to tackle climate change and make meaningful difference for the communities around the world most vulnerable from the effects of climate change.”

The global co-operation on Professor Ely’s wish list is unlikely to manifest any time soon. If there is one thing the new US government has shown us it is that finding common cause across boundaries is not high on its list of priorities. And if you take Trump at his word about wanting to corral Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, it could even be said that the opposite is true.

So, yes, there has been a steady flow recently of disturbing climate milestones – grim superlatives if you will. Just don’t expect to read too much about it in our newspapers or see anything at all about it on your nightly news, where it would seem it’s a case of no climate news is good news.