In addition to a sentimental stroll down memory lane, the time capsule delivered a surprise I never would’ve imagined: an illustration of how climate journalism has changed in the intervening years.
Most of what we put into the time capsule was deeply personal — letters to our future selves, family photos, unique signatures of that season of our lives (in my case, a pair of my infant daughter’s diapers). Like any good chrononauts, we also placed into the tube a few pieces of media. We included the front pages of the December 31, 2015 editions of The New York Times and the local newspaper, The Bellingham Herald, plus the year-end issue of The New Yorker.
The Times’ lead story from 10 years ago — “Cosby Is Charged with Sexual Assault in Criminal Case” — was pure historical curio. But it was another front-page story that grabbed my attention. “Climate Chaos, Across the Map,” by Justin Gillis, opened with a grab-’em-by-the-lapels lede — “What is going on with the weather?” — and went on to describe a global climate out of whack. “Every kind of trouble that the experts have been warning about for years seems to be occurring at once,” Gillis reported.
The New Yorker issue from 10 years back also featured a climate-reporting blockbuster. “The Siege of Miami,” by Elizabeth Kolbert, delivered a dire warning, in exquisite and excruciating detail, about the risks posed to Miami by sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. “Much of the region may have less than a century more to go,” Kolbert wrote.
Rereading those decade-old stories on New Year’s Eve 2025, I felt the vertigo of time compressed and folded back on itself. Somehow, I’d forgotten the force and feeling of the climate journalism of that past era. Perhaps it was just the effect of a few bourbons, but I also felt the sting of nostalgia: Why don’t we see such urgent climate change reporting these days? What has happened to the alarm-driven prose of the past?
It turns out that my maudlin New Year’s Eve musings were more than just a feeling. Media coverage of climate change is on the decline. The statistics are something of a roller coaster (the pandemic was obviously a low point for climate coverage while the Inflation Reduction Act was a boon) but, in the last four years, coverage of climate change has dropped dramatically.
Rereading those decade-old stories on New Year’s Eve 2025, I felt the vertigo of time compressed and folded back on itself. … What has happened to the alarm-driven prose of the past?
The best numbers on this come from Max Boykoff, who directs the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado, Boulder. According to Boykoff’s careful tracking, world newspaper coverage of global warming climbed steadily through most of the 2010s. It reached its most recent zenith in October 2021, when newspapers around the world published more than 1,100 climate-change-related articles in a single month. After a drop, coverage climbed again in 2022, when Congress passed the United States’ first major climate legislation. But it’s been a downhill slide ever since. By last fall, the number of climate change articles was less than half of its 2021 high — or about 400 climate-related articles published monthly around the world.
The decline in print media’s coverage of climate change is part of a broader pattern. Not a single US television network sent a crew to cover the most recent UN-sponsored climate negotiations in Brazil. The Washington Post reports that in recent years Democratic leaders have gone quiet on climate change, too. The mere mention of the word “climate” by Democrats in social media posts, on podcasts, and in other public statements is a fraction of what it was just three years ago.
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug, and I want to be careful not to pine for some golden age of climate journalism and global warming discourse that never really existed. When it comes to climate politics, 2015 was eons ago. No one had yet heard of Greta Thunberg. The horrors of Paradise, Altadena, and Asheville were still to come, as was the climate movement high point of the September 2019 global climate strike. The Inflation Reduction Act had yet to rise from the ashes before going down in flames. And while it’s frustrating that climate change coverage has dropped in the last four years, the volume of stories today is higher than it was back in 2015, when newspapers around the globe were publishing roughly 250 stories a month on the topic. Even if climate journalism has gone two steps forward in the last decade only to take one step back, that still means we’ve made a stride ahead.
Although today’s climate journalism sometimes seems to lack the urgency and righteous burn of the 2010s, it has evolved in some virtuous ways. As the clean energy sector has matured in the United States, so has a suite of outlets like Canary Media and Heatmap focused on the energy transition. The Times used to have a couple of people on the climate beat; today it has a whole climate desk. The Guardian and Bloomberg have dramatically different political and storytelling sensibilities, but both have made dogged climate journalism a priority. Kolbert is still killing it, and in her wake is a crew of influential independent journalists — a short list would include Emily Atkin, Sammy Roth, and Amy Westervelt — who are using newsletters and podcasts to channel climate frustration and rack up investigative reporting scoops. “Bothsidesism” is on the wane, as most media outlets have stopped giving flat-earther climate science denialists a platform.
I know this is subjective — that it’s hard to put a finger on — but the change in global warming journalism over the last decades is also about tone and vibe, in addition to volume and numbers. Perhaps it’s just me, but the climate reporting of the 2020s feels somehow less insistent and pressing than that of 10 years ago. The warning-bell coverage has morphed into the hum of beat reporting as the impacts of climate chaos pile up.
In a way, the decline in climate change coverage is only natural. Time, famously, heals all wounds; similarly, time has a way of turning what was once crisis into mere backdrop. In 2026, climate change is no longer a threat on the horizon worthy of a front-page splash. It’s part of the daily landscape and so ends up getting buried deep in the A section and dropped from the homepage. Now that blue-sky flooding in Miami is a regular occurrence and “climate gentrification” is already underway in South Florida, it’s arguably less worthy of a New Yorker feature. The disappearance of climate change headlines is part of a larger attenuation, a creeping normalization as we all grow more accustomed to extreme weather and deadlier storms year by year. Time is also an essential element because the effort to detach human civilization from coal, oil, and gas is very much a timed test; every delay increases the risk of failing. But you can’t, of course, solve a time-sensitive problem without talking about it — a truism that turns the media’s recent climate shyness into a case of journalistic malpractice.
The indispensable Yale Program on Climate Change Communication reports that more than 60 percent of Americans are worried about global warming, but just 28 percent say they hear about climate change in the media at least once a week. Our best chance for sustaining (or is it reviving?) bold climate action is in jeopardy of falling into that gap between popular concern and media attention.
You can’t, of course, solve a time-sensitive problem without talking about it — a truism that turns the media’s recent climate shyness into a case of journalistic malpractice.
Anyone can do something to fill the void left by the professional media. According to that same Yale poll, just one-third of Americans say they “discuss global warming at least occasionally.” One reason people bite their tongues is because they worry that others don’t share their views — even though a majority of Americans accept the basic science of global warming and some 80 percent of people around the world say they want governments to take stronger action on climate change. And so silence becomes another negative feedback loop of climate change. Climate conversations of any sort — even small talk about the weather — can help break the self-defeating cycle. If the media won’t do its job, then we all need to become environmental storytellers, each in our own way sharing tales of the climate changes we are witnessing.
In the meantime, I plan to re-bury the time capsule. I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks, and I thought it would be fun to again gather a crew of family and friends to catapult ourselves into the future. As I did the last time, I’ll put some of today’s news into the capsule. When I open it up a decade from now, perhaps it will reveal a different story. I hope that in hindsight this decline in climate media won’t be a chronic, crippling silence — just a natural pause in conversation as journalists and their audiences pause to catch a breath.