Some climate scientists are pushing back against a bleak portrayal of the coming climate apocalypse that was published Sunday night in New York magazine. The cover story’s vivid and doom-heavy forecast won’t help the fight against climate change, some scientists argue. In fact, it’s possible these scare tactics could do just the opposite.
The story, the “The Uninhabitable Earth,” trails the four horsemen as they thunder after runaway carbon emissions. Natural disasters will become so common that “we will just start calling them ‘weather,’” journalist David Wallace-Wells predicts. New and long-dead viruses will emerge from thawing ice. Famine and mass migrations will fuel wars. And parts of the Earth could become almost uninhabitable by the end of the century.
“Truly scary information has a nasty tendency to get ignored.”
To put it mildly, it’s an unsettling take on the future of our planet — and people are paying attention. The story has been shared more than 375,000 times on Facebook, Crowdtangle reports. But some climate scientists say that the piece describes extreme and unlikely worst-case scenarios. And just as there’s a danger in understating the risks of climate change, climate scientist Michael Mann wrote on Facebook, “[T]here 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.”
What’s written’s actually beyond worst possible case. THIS is the “alarmism” we get accused of. It’s important to speak out against it.
— Eric Steig (@ericsteig) July 10, 2017
This critique is a wake-up call for journalists, like me. Covering climate change can feel frustratingly like screaming into the void. In the face of climate denial, the temptation is to yell louder about more frightening consequences. “I look at the world we live in now and it seems to me like complacency is just so much of a bigger problem when it comes to responding to climate change than fatalism,” Wallace-Wells says in an interview with The Verge. “There are probably some people who are ‘burnt out’ or who have ‘given up,’ but I think the much bigger issue is that in general the public doesn’t appreciate the kind of threat we face.”