![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/environ-doomsday-clock-bulletin-1024x393.jpg\")
<\/a>Illustration by Gaby D\u2019Alessandro<\/p><\/div>\n
Spring 2020 – <\/em>I<\/span>n November, just before I went to see Jerry Brown at the annual meeting of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/i>, some eleven thousand climate experts signed a statement declaring \u201cclearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.\u201d At eighty-one, Brown, the former governor of California, was retired, but not really, having committed himself to fending off environmental disaster. Recently, he had testified before a House subcommittee, calling an attack by President Trump on California\u2019s auto emissions rules \u201cjust plain dumb, if not commercially suicidal.\u201d A month before that, he\u2019d announced the creation of the California-China Climate Institute, a bilateral research and training initiative \u201cto spur further climate action.\u201d And just before finishing his last term as governor, he\u2019d signed on as the executive chair of the Bulletin<\/i>, which was eager to stake out territory in the climate fight.<\/p>\nI\u2019d arranged to interview Brown about his choice to join the Bulletin<\/i>, a nonprofit magazine founded in Chicago in 1945 by conscience-stricken alumni of the Manhattan Project. The Bulletin<\/i> covers all things nuclear and is best known for its annual Doomsday Clock announcement, which draws on expert opinion to report just how close we are to the \u201cmidnight\u201d of man-made apocalypse. But the publication\u2019s original remit\u2014to help \u201cformulate the opinion and responsibilities of scientists\u201d and \u201ceducate the public\u201d about the many \u201cproblems arising from the release of nuclear energy\u201d\u2014has broadened considerably. It now devotes equal attention to the threat of the climate crisis, including in the setting of the clock. <\/span><\/p>\nIn this regard, the Bulletin<\/i> and a post-gubernatorial Brown were an ideal match. The meeting I attended, at the regal University Club in downtown Chicago, was Brown\u2019s second with the science and security board, a group of subject-matter experts who set the clock and advise the editorial staff. (The Bulletin<\/i> also has two other boards: the governing board, a corporate and philanthropic fundraising body, and the board of sponsors, which boasts thirteen Nobel laureates.) A few hundred people arrived, palling around and getting ready to talk all things apocalypse. The dress code for the event had called for business attire, but Brown turned up in crumpled slacks and a navy-blue sweater\u2014a suitcase screwup, he explained.<\/p>\n
Why the Bulletin<\/i>? I asked. \u201cNumber one is, of course, the reduction of the nuclear threat, but climate is another huge threat to humanity,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the Bulletin<\/i>, by linking the two threats, can increase public awareness, get people thinking about the big threats that humanity faces.\u201d Brown complained, in his jocular, pugnacious way, that the American news media\u2019s \u201cservitude to the concept of the news of the day\u201d is partly to blame for public ignorance about climate change. He asked me repeatedly, \u201cHow can journalism cover something as diffuse and general and gradual as climate change?\u201d As we chatted, searching for answers, I thought of the untold amount of carbon we\u2019d all combusted to get to Chicago. <\/span><\/p>\nI next saw Brown at the opening luncheon, in the buffet line among Bulletin<\/i> funders and fans. The crowd resembled that of a classical-music concert: old, white, intellectual. The day included three sets of workshops, led by eminent scientists and policy wonks, then a closing plenary session and dinner banquet at Chicago\u2019s Palmer House, a grand hotel dating to the late nineteenth century. At the dinner, Brown delivered an energetic, free-flowing speech. \u201cThe worse it is, the more excited I am,\u201d he said, the it<\/i> being our current geopolitical, nuclear, and climate morass. \u201cLet\u2019s get it done!\u201d<\/p>\n
That second it<\/i>\u2014the avoidance of total destruction\u2014aptly distilled the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s mission. Since the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the magazine has tried to convey the grave danger we\u2019ve imposed on ourselves. Today, though the possibility of nuclear war remains real, the climate crisis feels just as daunting and consequential. Environmental scientists know this, as do journalists who report on global warming. Yet the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/i> may be the only publication to cover climate change with an approach that is explicitly existential.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.cjr.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/TammyKim_LexeySwall_Bulletin_800-800x537.jpg\")
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What time is it? At the 2020 announcement of the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin\u2019s leaders declared us closer than ever to midnight. <\/strong><\/p>\nLexey Swall Photography \/ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nI<\/span>n 2017, during a seemingly endless, ever-escalating row between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/i> was permanently tabbed in my browser window. What some were calling a new \u201cNorth Korean nuclear crisis\u201d wasn\u2019t really new or even a crisis so much as the crackling of a rather constant fire. Still, as a Korea watcher with family on the peninsula, and given the \u201cstatesmen\u201d involved, I felt frightened and looked to the Bulletin<\/i> as a vital source of news and commentary. The magazine had, after all, invented the nuclear beat.<\/span><\/p>\nFrom the very first issue, a slight, mimeographed newsletter published on the fourth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bulletin<\/i> appealed to America and the rest of the world to eliminate nuclear weapons and establish \u201cefficient international control\u201d of atomic energy. Progress \u201cwill be useless if our nation is to live in continuous dread of sudden annihilation,\u201d the editors said at a conference in Moscow. \u201cWe can afford compromises, disagreements, or delays in other fields\u2014but not in this one, where our very survival is at stake.\u201d A few years on, the Bulletin<\/i> published the text of a speech by Albert Einstein, delivered to journalists at the United Nations, in which he asked why global cooperation hadn\u2019t yet staved off the threat of apocalypse. Perhaps it would be different, he suggested, if the atom bomb were not \u201cone of the things made by Man himself.\u201d Einstein later founded the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s board of sponsors.<\/p>\n
The Bulletin<\/i> evolved from a newsletter into a magazine, headquartered at the University of Chicago, and Martyl Langsdorf, a landscape painter and the wife of a Manhattan Project alumnus, designed a symbolic cover: an analog clock, set at 11:53pm, to represent the imminence of our self-destruction. In 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device, Eugene Rabinowitch, the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s coeditor, decided to animate Langsdorf\u2019s clock, winding it four minutes closer to midnight. It has ticked forward and backward ever since\u2014through the proliferation of ballistic missiles; the catastrophes at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima; and the adoption of and American withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The Nuclear Notebook, a research column of hair-raising erudition, has appeared in every issue since May 1987 and is second only to the Doomsday Clock in Bulletin<\/i> influence. Each Notebook installment analyzes a category of stockpile\u2014tactical nuclear weapons, for instance, or the Chinese nuclear arsenal\u2014down to the quantity and types and locations of various arms and fissile materials.<\/p>\n
The interests of the magazine have always overlapped with those of environmentalists. Early Bulletin<\/i> scientists expressed a desire to make atomic energy a clean, limitless alternative to fossil fuels. That did not, of course, come to pass; more apparent were various kinds of long-term damage, from nuclear tests to plant meltdowns to radioactive waste buried on- and offshore, all of it documented in the Bulletin<\/i>. There\u2019s still no consensus on nuclear power. At the annual meeting, Robert Socolow, a member of the science and security board and a Princeton professor emeritus, said in a presentation, \u201cI\u2019m still going back and forth on nuclear energy, because of the coupling of nuclear power and nuclear weapons.\u201d There is always \u201csome probability\u201d of disaster, he added.<\/p>\n
Atomic energy, in any case, never came close to rivaling fossil fuels, and the subject of climate change appeared in the Bulletin<\/i> as early as November 1961. \u201cClimate to Order,\u201d an article-cum\u2013thought experiment by H.E. Landsberg, a German climatologist, described geoengineering\u2014that is, hacking the atmosphere (reflecting sunlight, injecting chemicals into the stratosphere, etc.)\u2014avant la lettre<\/i>. In theory, Landsberg wrote, it would be great to customize our environment, but \u201cWhen we are changing the climate of the whole world, a mistake could be disastrous.\u201d In 1970, the Bulletin<\/i> ran another piece on geoengineering, this time in relation to \u201cpolar ice\u201d and \u201cman\u2019s inadvertent influences on global climate.\u201d By 1972, a long, poetic account of the loss of forests and arable land would warn, \u201cThere is plenty of evidence that man is the principal cause of this change.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I visited Rachel Bronson, the CEO and president of the Bulletin<\/i>, in the magazine\u2019s Chicago offices, she plucked a bound library volume from her shelf and opened it to February 1978. \u201cIs mankind warming the Earth?\u201d William W. Kellogg, a meteorologist, queried in the magazine\u2019s first climate-change cover story. \u201cThe answer is, I believe, an unqualified \u2018yes.\u2019\u2009\u201d Kellogg\u2019s article might have been written today, so salient are its arguments against delayed action and the conflating of extreme weather and atmospheric transformation. He included a message to colleagues who \u201cmaintain that we should not publish any conclusions about the response of the climate to anthropogenic influences until we have done more homework,\u201d expressing his disagreement \u201cwith such a conservative and noncommunicative attitude because the stakes are so great, the issues so fundamental to the future of society and most of all because some decisions are upon us that depend on every scrap of insight we can muster.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBy the end of the Cold War, most scientists were aware of the dangers of climate change and its relation to atomic and geopolitical concerns. Around the time Bill McKibben published The End of Nature<\/i>, the first mass-market account of global warming, in 1989, the Bulletin<\/i> was running pieces on the science of climate change \u201cside by side with heated denials that global warming posed any threat at all,\u201d historians David Kaiser and Benjamin Wilson observe in a special seventieth-anniversary issue of the Bulletin<\/i>. The magazine also recast the debate over nuclear energy \u201camid new apprehension about greenhouse gas emissions and implications for global warming.\u201d Len Ackland, the editor from 1984 to 1991, told me that it became clear \u201cwe needed to address longer-term environmental dangers.\u201d To that end, he commissioned new artwork from Langsdorf: in her cover illustration for the October 1989 issue, the circle of the clock encloses a blue-and-white map of the world, the minute and hour hands radiating out from the North Pole. In 1992, the Bulletin<\/i> published a major speech by Mikhail Gorbachev that set out environmental priorities for a post-Soviet world: \u201cThe prospect of catastrophic climatic changes\u2014more frequent droughts, floods, hunger, epidemics, national-ethnic conflicts, and other similar catastrophes\u2014compels governments to adopt a world perspective and seek generally applicable solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bulletin<\/i> has vacillated in style over time, toggling between academic journal and science magazine, but has always maintained a certain seriousness. When I spoke to Bronson, she told me that tradition and expertise are no longer enough. \u201cIn the moment of populism in which we\u2019re now operating, we\u2019d better inform the populace,\u201d she said. \u201cOur power will come from having an educated and devoted following that\u2019s larger than it is right now.\u201d Recently, the Bulletin<\/i> has adjusted its idioms; leaned more on interviews, explainers, personal essays, and multimedia; and stretched beyond an author base of older white male technocrats from Europe and the United States. There\u2019s the Voices of Tomorrow column, which ran a moving essay by four teenage activists, including Isra Hirsi, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar\u2019s daughter: \u201cAdults won\u2019t take climate change seriously. So we, the youth, are forced to strike.\u201d There\u2019s elegant multimedia reportage, such as deputy editor Dan Drollette\u2019s \u201cTilting toward windmills,\u201d about a test wind farm on Block Island, Rhode Island. And there\u2019s refined polemic: for example, \u201cLet science be science again,\u201d by Yangyang Cheng, a Chinese physicist based in Chicago, on science advocacy in the age of Donald Trump. A popular video series, \u201cSay What? A clear-eyed look at fuzzy policy,\u201d produced by multimedia editor Thomas Gaulkin, demonstrates that, even though the Bulletin<\/i> is nonpartisan, it\u2019s religiously pro-science.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome decisions are upon us that depend on every scrap of insight we can muster.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.cjr.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/TammyKim_BulletinCovers_Bulletin_800-696x600.jpg\")
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Ticktock: Martyl Langsdorf, a landscape painter and the wife of a Manhattan Project alumnus, designed a symbolic Bulletin cover: an analog clock that would represent the imminence of our self-destruction. That clock would become the magazine\u2019s visual touchstone. Courtesy Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nI<\/span>n recent years, the Bulletin<\/i> website has more than quintupled its traffic, from about 42,000 visits per month in 2013 to 236,000 per month today. The audience remains small but is also\u2014judging from the comments section and social media\u2014well connected and atypically informed: scientists, graduate students, journalists, the kinds of people who subscribe to Scientific American<\/i> and Foreign Affairs<\/i>. In response to a recent article on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that debunked the supposed coming of a \u201clittle ice age,\u201d commenter Cjones1 wrote: \u201cYou forgot to mention that less solar radiation allows more cosmic radiation which effects [sic<\/i>] cloud cover. The IPCC predictions have been less accurate than a bone throwing shaman.\u201d Fifty-five people responded to this with a thumbs-up. <\/span><\/p>\nThe Bulletin<\/i> discontinued its print edition in 2008 but maintains a distinction between its paywalled bimonthly magazine and other articles. A yearly subscription costs eighty-six dollars and comes via Taylor & Francis, a profitable British publisher of scholarly books and journals. Since 2011, John Mecklin has served as the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s editor in chief. He supervises six editors, spread out across the United States, who commission and write; seven other staff members handle administration, public relations, and fundraising. Collectively, they aim to grow the magazine\u2019s readership, assign more illustrations, and invest in narrative and investigative journalism. \u201cI\u2019m in the process of commissioning a story right now, paying somebody two to three dollars a word,\u201d Mecklin told me. \u201cThe Bulletin<\/i> is doing well financially, but I can\u2019t pay what The New Yorker<\/i> pays somebody, or I can\u2019t do it for very many stories a year.\u201d Most pieces are written for nothing\u2014\u201cdonated,\u201d as Mecklin put it\u2014by experts with day jobs. One of Mecklin\u2019s predecessors, Mark Strauss, recalled compensating at least one contributor with a Bulletin<\/i> T-shirt.<\/p>\n
When Mecklin took the job, climate represented just \u201ca quarter or 30 percent\u201d of the magazine, he told me; it\u2019s now \u201cmore like 40 percent nuclear, 40 percent climate.\u201d As he explained, \u201cWhat has evolved and changed since I\u2019ve been editor is that there are now three areas of focus: it\u2019s nuclear, climate change, and this area we call disruptive technologies\u201d\u2014such as artificial intelligence and disinformation\u2014a sort of \u201cthreat multiplier of the first two.\u201d Both Mecklin and Bronson described this expanded mission as logical and necessary, and in line with the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s history of tackling the impacts of cutting-edge science.<\/p>\n
When I listened in on a recent editorial meeting, via Skype, I was struck by the magazine\u2019s simultaneously banal and illustrious character. The editors did what all editors do: they evaluated pitches and commissions, reviewed social media statistics (e.g., an \u201cSUV shaming\u201d story, by contributing editor Dawn Stover, that was \u201cdoing well on the interwebs\u201d), brainstormed story ideas, and planned coverage. But every so often, someone would refer to a famous politician or scientist (e.g., Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford physicist who has personally inspected North Korea\u2019s nuclear arsenal) not as a dream subject or occasional source, but as a friend and adviser to the magazine. On questions of climate, for instance, they might consult Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning New Yorker<\/i> writer who sits on the science and security board. This is a publication with extraordinary history and reach. I thought of something Mecklin told me when we first spoke: \u201cWe want to be read in the White House, at the Kremlin, and at the kitchen table.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nAmong the prominent scientists closely involved with the Bulletin<\/i> is Raymond Pierrehumbert, a lavishly bearded and tweeded physicist, not of the nuclear sort. He joined the magazine\u2019s science and security board while across campus at the University of Chicago. He has since moved to Oxford, but remains heavily involved. In his work on \u201cthe early Earth\u201d and planets around other stars, he applies the \u201csame physics we use to quantify the greenhouse effect on Earth,\u201d he told me. \u201cIf you\u2019re a climate scientist or paleontologist, you\u2019ve studied the role of CO2<\/sub> in the Earth\u2019s past history\u2014you know that what humans are doing to the Earth\u2019s climate is truly disturbing.\u201d For his part, he said, \u201cIt would be irresponsible to stay in the lab.\u201d Pierrehumbert once wrote a lively column on science and politics for Slate<\/i>; he also contributed to the website RealClimate<\/i> and appeared in a well-intentioned rap video titled \u201cWe are climate scientists, Chicago style.\u201d (He\u2019s better as a folk musician.)<\/p>\nIn a recent cover story for the Bulletin<\/i>, \u201cThere is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis,\u201d Pierrehumbert argues in dramatic language against geoengineering. To pursue that strategy, he writes, would commit \u201cgenerations yet unborn to continuously run a mechanical process, over a time-span longer than the age of the pyramids.\u2026 And if our offspring don\u2019t, or simply can\u2019t, do so at some point in the future, then they will suffer the consequences of an unimaginably huge climate shock, accumulated over vast amounts of time.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\nWhen I saw Pierrehumbert at the annual meeting, he was sheepish about the sin of his flight to get to Illinois. Yet he seemed energized by the company of his colleagues: fellow physicists, national-security experts, and politicians, including Jerry Brown, whom he admires. A few years ago, Pierrehumbert told me, he\u2019d raised concerns with Brown about coal exports. If California allowed a proposed coal export terminal to be built, Pierrehumbert had said, it would increase demand in China, putting all of our carbon reduction goals in jeopardy. The problems were confounding, the answer frustratingly simple: \u201cWe need to put fossil fuel companies out of business, or at least their traditional business,\u201d Pierrehumbert told me. \u201cWe will need to write down carbon to zero.\u201d Brown heard him out, Pierrehumbert recalled, but \u201cit was not on his radar.\u201d<\/p>\n
In November, Pierrehumbert had California\u2019s cap-and-trade program on his mind. A flaw of that and related markets, he told me, is that they apply an inaccurate equivalence \u201cstandard, mass for mass,\u201d to methane and carbon dioxide, thereby exaggerating the role of methane in global warming. But \u201cif we reopen the debate\u201d\u2014that is, rejigger the math of cap-and-trade\u2014\u201cwe could lose the benefit on carbon dioxide. It\u2019s politically complicated. I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s worth the risk,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s too bad that Jerry Brown is no longer governor.\u201d Even if he didn\u2019t act on everything Pierrehumbert told him about, he had, at least, listened. Gavin Newsom, the new guy in Sacramento, has yet to show up to a Bulletin<\/i> meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to be read in the White House, at the Kremlin, and at the kitchen table.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.cjr.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/TammyKim_GabyDAlessandro_01_800-452x600.jpg\")
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Illustration by Gaby D\u2019Alessandro<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nA<\/span>t the start of 2020, Bronson and her staff flew to Washington, DC, as they do every January, to announce to the world what time it is. At the press conference, livestreamed to maximize virality, Bronson wore a scarlet dress and stood at a podium bearing the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s somber black-and-white logo. In 2018 and 2019, the clock was set at 11:58, the direst assessment by the science and security board since 1953, after both the United States and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs. This year, alongside Brown; Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland; and Ban Ki-moon, a former UN secretary-general, Bronson delivered an even grimmer report: the world was now a hundred seconds from apocalypse\u2014\u201ccloser than ever to midnight,\u201d as CNN would write.<\/p>\nThe Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s accompanying statement, authored by Mecklin and addressed to the \u201cleaders and citizens of the world,\u201d is a seven-page, reader-friendly recitation of man-made horrors and suggested mitigations. Humanity is facing \u201ca state of emergency that requires the immediate, focused, and unrelenting attention of the entire world,\u201d it reads. The reasons are many. On the nuclear side, the US, Russia, and China retain their stockpiles; Iran retreated from international cooperation, in response to America\u2019s withdrawal from their nuclear deal and its assassination of a top Iranian military commander; the INF Treaty is no more and other arms agreements are soon to expire. In terms of climate change, the US officially left the Paris Agreement; Brazil is allowing its precious rain forests to be destroyed; and greenhouse gas emissions are on the rise, zero-carbon rhetoric be damned. All this is made worse by a \u201ccorrupted and manipulated media environment\u201d in which truth, let alone scientific reality, becomes increasingly unknowable. Still, the Bulletin<\/i> statement offers shards of hope. \u201cClimate change has catalyzed a wave of youth engagement, activism, and protest,\u201d it observes. If we multiply this \u201cmass civic engagement,\u201d it states, \u201cthere is no reason the Doomsday Clock cannot move away from midnight.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\nIf the clock announcement invites sober reflection, it\u2019s also an occasion to push for political action. Throughout its history, the Bulletin<\/i> has balanced its journalistic mission with various forms of advocacy. As soon as the atomic scientists in Chicago founded the Bulletin<\/i>, they joined with colleagues in Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Manhattan to lease an office in Washington, forming a Beltway collaboration that eventually became the Federation of American Scientists. Last year, just after the clock announcement, Bronson, Brown, and former defense secretary William Perry, who now chairs the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s board of sponsors, met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer\u2014to lobby not for a specific candidate or bill, but for arms control, diplomacy, and nuclear and climate policies rooted in science. Bulletin<\/i> staff transmitted the ominous details of the clock statement: North Korean nuclear proliferation, increasing carbon dioxide emissions, and information warfare. This year, alas, Congress was busy with impeachment proceedings.<\/span><\/p>\nThere is a tension, in such conversations, between fear and hope. How much is too much apocalypse talk? \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to find the words, even, to express the moment we now are in,\u201d Brown said, during the clock announcement. \u201cI myself am a person of limitless words, but I can\u2019t find how to say it in such a way that it can be heard.\u201d Back in November, at the end of the closing plenary session, a tall, bespectacled woman in the audience raised her hand: Elizabeth Talerman, a strategic-communications expert, who offered some advice on framing. It\u2019s best to avoid phrases like \u201cexistential threat,\u201d she said, because they bum people out. The Doomsday Clock certainly has its skeptics, mostly on the right. See: \u201cJust skip the doomsday predictions, guys\u201d (the National Review<\/i>); \u201cGoose eggs: No climate change doomsday warning has come true\u201d (the Washington Examiner<\/i>); \u201cThe Climate Doomsday Trap\u201d (the Cato Institute). Strauss, the former editor, told me that the Bulletin<\/i> has played just as important a role in debunking \u201coverhyped threats\u201d\u2014for example, \u201cfears that terrorists might start massive forest fires\u201d\u2014as it has in playing up actual perils. <\/span><\/p>\nWhen I asked Brown how the Bulletin<\/i> should convey the urgency of the climate crisis, he didn\u2019t have an easy answer. He brought up a document from 1992, a one-page \u201cWarning to Humanity\u201d published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit whose members and staff often write for the Bulletin<\/i>. \u201cA great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated,\u201d the statement reads. Brown\u2019s point was that every climate messenger, not just at the Bulletin<\/i>, struggles to balance gloom and motivation. Meaghan Parker, executive director of the Society of Environmental Journalists, told me, \u201cIt\u2019s not so much about the emotion\u2014are you a doom writer or a solutions-and-hope writer?\u2014but talking about the specific, lived changes of real people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some Bulletin<\/i> articles punch and flail; others coax. Many do both, traipsing from seemingly intractable problems to optimistic solutions. In its March 2019 issue, the Bulletin<\/i> examined \u201cclimate change action\u2014from the right,\u201d including an interview with Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush, and an article about a Christian group, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Mecklin\u2019s editor\u2019s note offered practical guidance to \u201cungenerous corners\u201d of the American left: \u201cRepublican officeholders are not likely to agree to substantive action on climate change until they feel it is clearly in their best political interest to do so. The best people to explain those best interests to Republican congressmen and women? Republicans who believe in climate action and vote their beliefs.\u201d Recently, when I sat down to read a tall stack of Bulletin<\/i> articles, I felt a confusing combination of terror, depletion, and productive rage. <\/span><\/p>\nPerhaps this is how the original atomic scientists felt, trembling from guilt, trying to pull us away from the abyss. Nuclear war, so overwhelming a concept, once needed its own metaphors to be understood. When the Bulletin<\/i> first took on climate change as an area of focus, it might have seemed an odd fit. \u201cAs they say, nuclear can do us in in an afternoon; climate change will take much longer,\u201d Kennette Benedict, the Bulletin<\/i>\u2019s former director and publisher, who oversaw the inclusion of climate change in the clock-setting, told me. But the two crises are now an inseparable apocalyptic pair. If memories of fallout shelters and air raid drills make rising sea levels and extreme temperatures feel more pressing, then so be it.<\/p>\n
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E. Tammy Kim is a freelance reporter and essayist whose writing has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, the<\/em> New York Review of Books, the<\/em> New York Times, and many other publications. She coedited 2016\u2019s <\/em>Punk Ethnography.<\/em><\/p>\nGo to Original – cjr.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists may be the only outlet whose approach to climate change is explicitly existential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":168445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[1812,686,401,993,493],"class_list":["post-168444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-bulletin-atomic-scientists","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-global-warming","tag-paris-climate-agreement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>