Climate change is a tough issue to cover as a journalist. It's like following a slow-motion train wreck, except significant portions of the population dispute whether there really are trains involved and whether they will, in the end, crash.
There's a constant tension between portraying doom-and-gloom scenarios of drowning cities and deadly heat waves, compared to hopeful stories of mayors and governors and world leaders (outside the U.S.) who are working to cut emissions of global warming pollutants.
The science can be scary, but it shouldn't be paralyzing, and it certainly doesn't justify worrying about whether humans will even be able to survive on this planet by the end of this century.
However, a new, widely-read story in New York Magazine by David Wallace-Wells, goes down the doomsday path and never looks back. It's worth addressing here since it's generating so much conversation online, and climate scientists and journalists are being asked to attest to its veracity.
The magazine cover story, entitled, "The Uninhabitable Earth," takes the bleakest climate science projections and assumes the worst from there. It's one of the darkest portrayals of our climate future that's been written recently, at least from a nonfiction perspective.
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In several places, the story either exaggerates the evidence or gets the science flat-out wrong. This is unfortunate, because it detracts from a well-written, attention-grabbing piece. It's still worth reading, but with a sharp critical eye.
In recent years, scientific evidence has solidified around central findings, showing that sea level rise is likely to be far more severe during the rest of this century than initially anticipated, and that key temperature thresholds may be crossed that make life difficult for some kinds of plants and animals to survive in certain places.
Such threshold crossings may even make it tough for humans to live and work in parts of the Middle East, Asia, and tropics.
All of this is scary. However, climate scientists nearly universally say that there is still time to avert the worst consequences of global warming, and that this message needs to be driven home again and again in order to encourage leaders to act. Doom and gloom only leads to fear and paralysis, studies have shown.
The feature story in New York Magazine says scientists, as well as the public, are being too timid in their climate change scenarios.
Wallace-Wells writes:
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination.
One prominent climate scientist, Michael Mann of Penn State University, has posted a rebuttal to the piece on Facebook. Mann says he was interviewed, though not quoted or cited by name in the article, and he is disappointed with the published story.
"I have to say that I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing," Mann said. "It is important to be up front about the risks of unmitigated climate change, and I frequently criticize those who understate the risks. But there is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness."
It's not a journalist's job to serve up a healthy dose of hope in every story. However, it is our job to be accurate, and according to Mann and others, Wallace-Wells' piece falls short in this regard, too.
In his post, Mann says the story fails to back up its claims that parts of the Earth will be uninhabitable by the end of the century.
"The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it," he says.
"The article paints an overly bleak picture by overstating some of the science. It exaggerates for example, the near-term threat of climate 'feedbacks' involving the release of frozen methane (the science on this is much more nuanced and doesn't support the notion of a game-changing, planet-melting methane bomb. It is unclear that much of this frozen methane can be readily mobilized by projected warming: http://www.realclimate.org/…/2012/01/much-ado-about-methane/)."
Mann also pointed out other factual errors in the piece, including the claim that satellite data shows the globe has been warming more than twice as fast as scientists thought since 1998.
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"The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own," Mann said. "There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness. I'm afraid this latest article does that."
Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, also faults the piece for being overly pessimistic and containing a few factual inaccuracies.
"I think the picture painted by the author is probably a worst, worst, worst case scenario that combines the strongest response of the climate system to carbon dioxide, combined with zero effort by the world to reduce emissions," he said in an email.
"While that could happen, I think a more likely scenario is not as bleak. And as someone who talks to climate scientists a lot, I've never heard anyone tell me that they think this is a likely scenario for the planet."
Perhaps Mann, Dessler, and even myself, to some extent, are being too tough on Wallace-Wells. After all, the story does say that it offers up details on where we are currently headed given the pace of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, it's not a guaranteed vision for the future.
"In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself," the article states.
"It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule."
Wallace-Wells does accurately capture the prevailing optimistic attitude of many climate scientists, including those who have been studying this issue for decades.
These people don't have a bleak outlook, and they are not preparing bunkers to shelter in for the end of days.
Instead, it's unfathomable to them that we would continue much further down a path of increasingly painful consequences before veering off, slashing emissions, and working to adapt to the global warming already guaranteed by the delayed response time of the climate system.
As Wallace-Wells writes, "... Climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must."
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate researcher at Texas Tech University, posses the optimism that Wallace-Wells writes about.
"The problem is that we’ve continued smoking long after the physicians have warned us of its impacts, and some of the damage is already setting in," she said in an email.
"Yet the choices we make today will still have a profound impact on our future. The worst and most dangerous outcomes can be avoided, and to do so we need to understand that our actions DO make a difference."
Hayhoe said that doomsday fears won't get us where we need to go.
"The time to act is now -- but not out of fear, with panicked, knee-jerk reactions that burn us out," Hayhoe said. "We need to act based on measured hope and confidence that the science is right, the impacts are serious, and there are solutions to the gravest threats climate change poses if we choose them now."
In more than a decade of reporting on climate science and policy, I have yet to meet a pessimistic climate scientist. Sure, they know better than most people what unfortunate scenarios lie around the corner, but they also have faith in people to work to avert them. They also tend to posses an innate curiosity about the ways the climate system, and society, may still surprise them.
They have plenty of evidence to back up this optimism, including the rapid shift to renewables taking place in global energy markets and the determination to go around the United States in implementing the Paris Climate Agreement.
This isn't to say that climate scientists are sanguine about the future, though.
As Dessler said, "While I don't think the future painted by the author is likely, the more likely scenarios are still personally worrying to me."
Count me in that camp as well.
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