Did New York Magazine Make Climate Change Too Scary?
OVERSTATING THE OBVIOUS
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​On Monday, the beginning of the first full week of July, New York Magazine published "The Uninhabitable Earth." Before reading any further, it's highly recommended that you read it. If you'd rather not, then you should know that writer David Wallace-Wells consults a great deal of published research and many climate researchers to construct a climate worst-case scenario. In fact, he's very upfront about his intentions:

What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. 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.

[New York Magazine]

Climate change is, well, a very complicated and touchy issue. So it's not surprising that reactions to Wallace-Wells' story were not 100 percent positive. Somewhat surprisingly, however, detractors of the piece are not an army of climate change deniers, but rather climate experts and reporters. The issue is not that Wallace-Wells spends 7,000 words spouting untruths, but rather his examination was too bleak. Too alarmist.

Just how does one go about overstating the severity of something as severe as climate change? Well, let's examine something a little more approachable. Every week here at Digg, we indulge a mundane hypothetical situation in our What Would Happen If series. You see, reporting out hypothetical situations are tricky, because it's hard to say what might happen at every stage of the process. 

Take something as simple as never getting up from your seat — basic physiology says you'll get fatter, weaker and dumber and you'll probably die from a pulmonary embolism. That said, there are a lot of assumptions you have to make in order to say what might happen. Are you getting up to use the bathroom? Are you fidgeting? Are you healthy? Do you smoke? And so on. You could argue that we're painting an overly-alarmist view of sitting down.

This is, essentially, what's going on with the Wallace-Wells piece. Wallace-Wells takes a simple premise — what would happen if we just didn't do anything to prevent climate change — and takes it to it's logical endpoint.

This is the issue climate researcher Michael E. Mann raised shortly after the Wallace Wells piece was published.

I have to say that I am not a fan of this sort of doomist framing. 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.

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.

[Michael E. Mann via Facebook]

In other words, there's a bit of a problem with Wallace-Wells' framing that the Earth would be doomed if we did nothing, because the reality is that, well, we wouldn't do anything. 

And while you could argue that painting a worst-case scenario might spur people into action — think Requiem for a Dream's effect on one's proclivity to trying heroin — climate researchers just find this approach to be, well, unproductive. The New Republic's Emily Atkin spoke with a few researchers, who found that Wallace-Wells' doomsaying to be one step backwards in the herculean effort to get the populace on board with mitigating climate change:

Critics say such doom-and-gloom is unpersuasive and discouraging. "My own experience in speaking to public audiences is that doomsday stories such as this article are so depressing that people shut down and stop listening," Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers, wrote in an email to me. "If there is no hope, there will be no action, and goodness knows we need a lot more action to reign in greenhouse gas emissions right now.

[The New Republic]

Wallace-Wells disagrees. In an interview with Gothamist, he paints "The Uninhabitable Earth" as a conscious effort to shock people into action. His issue with climate change, which he discusses in the piece, is that it's hard for people to imagine the consequences. It happens too slow and the effects are so scattered across the globe that there won't be a singular event — like Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Berlin Wall falling — to galvanize a significant portion of the populace. Maybe, Wallace-Wells hopes, "The Uninhabitable Earth" might do that:

And so I thought even just as a kind of experiment in psychological anchoring, it was useful to say, here's really the worst case outcome that you should be thinking about probably as often as you think about the best case outcome, which is the world that you walk through every day. There's been a sort of general failure of imagination that means we've accepted what's the median-likely outcome as a worst-case scenario. As a result we've been a bit handicapped in thinking about how much action needs to be taken.

[Gothamist]

So, is Wallace-Wells depiction of Earth at the end of the century unrealistic? Probably. Will it hinder a broader effort to curb the freight train of climate change? Well, that all depends on how you might react to an impending apocalypse. And only you can answer that.

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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