Yet it is worth pausing to reflect on why it took the media ten years to understand where the centre of gravity of informed opinion on climate change lay. The basics of the science have, after all, changed little since the mid-1990s. There are worrying signs that some of the reasons for this delay – above all, a well-intentioned deep affection for sceptical opinion – could impede public debate on the next and vital stage in the climate-change debate as we work out what political and economic steps to take.

Journalism has struggled with the topic from the start. The history of climate-change reporting is one of a long period of passivity punctured by a more recent burst of alarmism. Before examining how the journalistic scepticism employed was largely to blame for the delay, it is essential to recognise that climate change is, by its nature, a very tricky issue to cover.

Due to its lack of a news peg from the early 1990s until 2005, the view within the environmental press corps was the story didn't break, it “oozed”. Certainly, it would have helped editors if they had been clear to whom the story belonged: reporters on science, economics, business or politics? All of these bring relevant expertise, but there is, to date, only a handful of journalists who can bring the kind of judgment and nuance that the issue demands. Climate change, after all, is a complex story, fundamentally about risk. Risk-stories require some technical expertise, and an understanding of the way scientific information is debated and conveyed, as well as skilled judgments about how much complexity the public can take. The result for many years was that editors would respond to their specialist environment journalists' pleas to cover climate change with more depth and regularity with a quizzical and generally passive air.

But the journalistic obligation to scepticism distorted media representation of climate change at least as much as any demanding features of the science. Guided by their ritual doubting, journalists have until recently sought to present what they believed to be a “balanced” picture of the discussion. In this way, the British media long forced the issue into a comfortingly familiar adversarial format, pairing “experts” to “debate” whether climate change is real or not. This resulted in the pitting of leading climate-change scientists, backed by substantial records of peer-reviewed research and drawn from a cast numbering hundreds, against so-called “climate sceptics”. As ours and other research has shown, these sceptics currently number fewer than than a dozen, and with only one exception (Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT), have no track-record of peer-reviewed science in the field. Hence such “balanced” reporting resulted in years of distorted coverage – well-documented in academic research on both sides of the Atlantic – which impeded the emergence of a difficult and urgent topic into political and public debate.

A practice of scepticism

It failed mainly because the media did not ask this basic question of themselves: how representative of the balance of expert opinion on climate change were the cast of characters they summoned? Had they asked this they would have been driven to another question, one they signally failed to ask during 15 years: how many scientists are there who are sceptical of the notion of human-induced climatic change? For a profession usually set on getting the facts and figures down accurately, this is no small failing.

A 2005 study by American academic Myanna Lahsen pointed to ten sceptic scientists in the U.S. and “one or two” in the UK and other countries (although the media use the term “sceptic” more loosely, in Lahsen's study it refers specifically to scientists with relevant training on the topic of climate change). During research for this article, key protagonists in the debate were asked last year how many sceptics they thought existed. Sir John Houghton, a former co-chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), science working group, while not wanting to commit himself to a specific number, told us he believed at the time there were fewer than five sceptics in the world who were “climate scientists and have made a serious contribution to climate science or the science of climate change”. Thomas C Schelling, the Nobel Laureate who had explored the economics of climate change in the context of sceptic political scientist Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus process, told us he believed there were four or five sceptical scientists against a thousand mainstream scientists. Well-known UK sceptics, such as Benny Peiser and Philip Stott, with backgrounds not in climate science but in anthropology and biogeography respectively, also agreed that there were only “a few sceptics” who question the human contribution to the current warming.

The fact that the simple numerical question was rarely asked, or effectively answered, is in large part explained by the media's limited understanding of the practices and culture of the research community. The non-specialist media have consistently failed to appreciate the centrality of the process of “peer review”, a practice at the core of the maintenance of academic standards of rigour and originality. According to this process, two or more researchers critique a piece of work anonymously. The UN's IPCC is no more than a very large peer-review process – in fact, the largest in the history of science. Its workings are transparent: all scientists are invited to comment and review the document, and its summary is arrived at word-forword by consensual agreement of every UN government. The importance of peer review in establishing scientific credibility has not been noted by journalists, who have rarely queried the peer-reviewed publishing record of sources and contributors, or their claim to specific climate-related expertise. Had the media checked their sources in this way, we might have arrived at the current level of public debate precious years earlier.

Now that the main features of the science of climate change have been accepted and communicated by almost all news media outlets in the UK, journalism faces a new challenge. We are entering a period when careful interpretation and communication of the economic, political and social dimensions of climate change will be vital. Failure to tell these aspects of the story could be of even greater significance than the painfully slow arrival at the basics of the science. The media will offer the context within which we decide the If, How and When of transforming energy-hungry lifestyles and economies. And it is through the media, above all, that people and politicians will process ideas about how to adapt to climate change.

Enormous media profile

He said: “The problem was that the whole thing was meant to be a budgeting process... it turned out that none of the three who made presentations on climate change ever talked about what you could do if you had the money to spend... Bjorn Lomborg, the organiser of it [the Consensus], had not made it sufficiently clear to the people who wrote the papers that this was a budget-selection process. They might have argued you could spend five, ten, fifteen billion on new technology or carbon sequestration but they didn't. So I unsuccessfully argued that we should delete the reference to climate change... in the end he [Lomborg] had his way.”

Despite its inbuilt methodological bias, the Consensus was far more widely reported than perhaps any other social-science-based story of the year, and allowed one of the most influential weekly news publications on the planet to conclude, at a critical juncture in climate politics, that action on climate change was a poor bet. If the journalists covering the story had had a better understanding of climate-change challenges they would have known that posing an economic question as a spending trade-off between sanitation and fresh water provision against the mitigation of climate change is meaningless. A failure to reduce carbon emissions will ensure that fresh water and public health problems will be greatly exacerbated.

Certainly times have changed. This is reflected above all in the contrast between the deep-seated scepticism regarding action on climate change expressed in The Economist's initial enthusiasm for Lomborg, and the more recent reception by Britain's quality media of Nicholas Stern's review of the potential costs of climate change. Stern's report – and the much wider exercise to which it is contributing – is no less ambitious in its way than the work of climate scientists. He was, after all, trying to make sense of how both the climate system and the economy might behave over the decades to come. The reduction of that work to a headline that clarified the likely costs of inaction and a sub-head that identified some economic benefits of action is politically important, and for anyone knowledgeable about climate change, represents the right call. But the largely uncritical nature of the reception of the report suggests a worrying tendency within the media that could prove problematic as we enter a phase of the climate debate where the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change moves centre stage.

We suggest one reason why the report was received without the same degree of scepticism as the IPCC climate science has been for the past decade is derived from the meek credulity with which the media treat economics. This reverence has sustained in the eyes of the public a wholly inaccurate sense of the role of the discipline. The economics of Stern should be contextualised properly. It is not an exercise in the production of solid facts, but should be considered to be a thought-experiment. Stern and colleagues are engaged in an attempt to extrapolate future trends and behaviours which is bounded by the quality of the analysis of past experience and the limits of our imaginative construction of plausible futures. Journalism's role in this should surely be to parallel the kind of circumspection and particularly academic quality of scepticism that it displays, not to veer to-and-fro between complacency and hysteria.

What lies ahead for the media is no small task. The proposed transformation of the political economy of carbon is on a scale parallel with the industrial revolution. The economics and politics of action to mitigate climate change will require boldness and experiment in terms of market measures and regulations. There are plenty of stories in all this, but journalism will need to sustain a sharply sceptical tone as it interrogates proposals for carbon sequestration schemes, switches to biofuels, and the getting and spending of “green” taxes. Their principal question should be: Will this help to reduce emissions dramatically, or is it a way of only denting the status quo?

Most politicians are frightened

Of course, even the best journalism can often achieve no more than noble failure. The media can only hope to “fail well” in reporting the complexities of a distant war, a big fraud case or a story rooted in ethnic or religious difference, in the context of a couple of minutes of broadcasting or a 1000- word piece. The issue of climate change intensifies this problem. As we enter a new phase of climate debate it is essential that the media accept the reasons for their painfully slow recognition of the significance of climate-change science. Journalism has helped to bring much of the British public to a new understanding of its precipitous relationship with its environment. It now has a key role in provoking and presenting the political and economic debates about how we can progress towards an ecologically sustainable society. Noble failure by the media, based on an informed, ecologically-literate scepticism, may be sufficient to allow the rest of society to talk this big problem through.