El-Niño: A Social Media Analysis

In this essay I will assess the Medias representation of the UK’s predicted winter of 2015/16 in association with El- Niño and compare with the scientific knowledge of this topic. The media is the leading source of communication globally, with the British public dedicating 6 weeks of their lives talking about the weather (Daily Mirror cited in Gavin et al, 2011, p.423). The media’s tendency to simplify and overexpose information has often resulted in repudiated claims because of misrepresentation. However, it could be argued that simplifying information in order to model/represent complex material is something well practiced in scientific fields; which is also vital for the media, as a healthy democracy has a general interest in scientific issues (Hargreaves et al cited in Gavin et al, 2011). Global weather is an open system in a dynamic equilibrium, this means that all weather systems interlink and has impacts over latitude due to atmospheric and oceanic changes caused by El-Niño. El-Niño is a natural variability of the climate …show more content…
Through analysis of previous winters it can be put forth that the most extreme winters (1890 and 2010) occur due to the absence of south-westerly winds and present discrete pressure patterns (Burgess and Klingaman, 2015). El-Niño should be considered as a possible factor for the fluctuations of climate in the UK because tropical convection occurs in the tropical Pacific region (where El- Niño happens), which controls the distribution of heat globally driving atmospheric temperatures. However because of the geographical differences of where El- Niño occurs in association to the UK the magnitude of such impacts are less dominant than what the media