{"id":96159,"date":"2017-07-31T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T11:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=96159"},"modified":"2017-07-30T15:05:14","modified_gmt":"2017-07-30T14:05:14","slug":"a-defense-of-climate-tragedy-or-what-the-scientists-got-wrong-about-the-uninhabitable-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/07\/a-defense-of-climate-tragedy-or-what-the-scientists-got-wrong-about-the-uninhabitable-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"A Defense of Climate Tragedy, or What the Scientists Got Wrong about \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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14 Jul 2017 – <\/em>This is an essay about the furor over David Wallace-Wells\u2019 New York Magazine<\/em> article \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth<\/a>,\u201d which conjures a specter of a planet so ruined by global warming in our children\u2019s lifetimes that it no longer sustains, but destroys human life.<\/p>\n

By his own account, Wallace-Wells (DWW from here on out) wrote \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d to frighten people out of their complacency and to inspire them to clamor loudly for immediate action to halt climate change in its petrifying tracks. Yet instead of welcoming DWW as an ally, some climate scientists attacked him, roundly criticizing his article for supposedly inspiring paralyzing sense of doom in its readers and, more importantly, for lacking scientific credibility. In a lengthy post on Climate Feedback<\/em><\/a>\u200a\u2014\u200aa site that publishes scientific assessments of representations of climate change in the popular press\u200a\u2014\u200athese scientists condemned DWW for making factual errors, for exaggerating the projected impacts of unmitigated climate change, and for downplaying the low probability of those impacts occurring even under the high-emissions \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d path that we are currently on. It is this Climate Feedback<\/em> post, entitled \u201cScientists explain what New York Magazine<\/em> article [sic<\/em>] on \u2018The Uninhabitable Earth\u2019 gets wrong<\/a>,\u201d that I want to discuss.<\/p>\n

My goal is not to quibble with the scientific critiques in the piece, for I have no expertise in that regard. I am not a scientist, but a climate activist currently writing a book about the political ramifications of the words we use to represent climate change. I\u2019m also a literary critic whose first book was a cultural history of the idea that art has transformative power. So I know something about how literary texts produce responses in their readers and how those responses have cultural effects. What I can do here is examine how the scientists criticize DWW for using literary language to represent the extreme, \u201cfat-tail\u201d effects of unmitigated climate change in ways that produce terrifying mental images of climate devastation.<\/p>\n

Why bother to do this? Well, for one thing, an examination of the scientists\u2019 criticisms demonstrates that the representation of climate change in \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d isn\u2019t quite as inaccurate as the scientists want us to believe. (\u201cMany\u00a0\u2026 explanations in the article are correct, but readers are likely left with an overall conclusion that is exaggerated compared to our best scientific understanding,\u201d one scientist says. This sort of claim about what a reader might conclude is a kind of armchair literary critique, not a scientific assessment. Here the scientific assessment is that \u201cmany\u00a0\u2026 explanations in the article are correct.\u201d) For another and more important thing, the Climate Feedback<\/em> piece, like the whole controversy itself, raises important questions that need to be thought through as we attempt to halt climate change in our post-truth culture.<\/p>\n

If scientists, and by extension \u201cscience communicators,\u201d must make every effort to articulate scientific truth\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, to make precise, highly qualified claims that describe the world with the highest possible degree of certainty\u200a\u2014\u200amust everyone who represents climate change speak this way? Must writers forego the tools and techniques of thousands of years of literary culture when they narrate what science itself says may happen to us if we do not stop burning fossil fuels right now? Moving forward, will scientists allow<\/em> writers\u200a\u2014\u200aand, by extension, filmmakers, dramatists, painters, historians, \u201ctheorists,\u201d composers, etc\u200a\u2014\u200ato represent climate change in ways that are designed to incite terror and hope and anger and love and all the passions that give people the momentum to fight political fights? Is it possible for the language of climate change to transcend the genre of \u201cscience communication\u201d and become animated by art?<\/p>\n

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Before I continue, let me say that I think there\u2019s some merit to the critique that DWW is a bit \u201cdoomist\u201d in his article. What makes him so is not that he narrates the most harrowing effects of climate change as if they would happen all at once or that he posits a relationship between climate change and extinction. Rather it\u2019s that he silently but strongly implies in his conclusion that even the most alarmed scientists are optimistic that we can avoid climate apocalypse only because they lack the imagination to see what \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d has laid so shockingly before our eyes. \u201cClimate systems,\u201d DWW writes, \u201cdesigned to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us\u200a\u2014\u200aeven those who may be watching closely\u200a\u2014\u200afrom fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we\u2019ve made, [the scientists] say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.\u201d For them<\/em> the alternative is unimaginable, but not for DWW\u200a\u2014\u200awho has imagined our destruction so fully and eloquently in his article\u200a\u2014\u200aand not, now, for us.<\/p>\n

In other words, in \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d DWW casts himself as a kind of prophetic Tiresias to humanity\u2019s blind Oedipus, warning us about what we\u2019re tragically fated to suffer because we\u2019ve recognized ourselves too late (\u201cTwo degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it.\u201d) Further, he implicitly blames the scientists for our ongoing blindness, suggesting we have not yet mobilized successfully against climate change because our concept of global warming has been constrained by the anemic and ineffective \u201cscientific reticence\u201d that produces \u201cthe timid language of scientific probabilities.\u201d I can only imagine how provoking all this must be to climate scientists who, let\u2019s be frank, are heroically dedicating their lives not only to poorly-remunerated research and teaching, but also to fending off the coordinated and unrelenting attacks of climate deniers in government and the media, all while receiving repeated death threats for their efforts. No wonder they went after him! As a friend of mine who works on climate campaigns in the Bay Area wrote me after reading the article: \u201cTo think that even the scientists who are talking about climate change are perhaps not accurately portraying just how dire the situation is\u00a0\u2026 that\u2019s very terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n

But about that terror. To me there\u2019s something a bit metaphysical about it\u200a\u2014\u200aabout the idea that we cannot prevent ourselves from causing our own extinction, as if we, humanity as a species, had an indelible flaw that inexorably led us to destroy ourselves, or as if our nature were to enact a tragedy that won\u2019t even leave anyone behind to enjoy catharsis. (\u201cWe have not developed much of a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation,\u201d DWW writes.) I actually think that such metaphysical thoughts arise inevitably once you start brooding on climate change. I myself have them often. But there\u2019s a political critique of the universalizing, essentializing premise underlying such thoughts. It goes like this: is all of humanity really driving our destruction? Or do the majority of people in the world, and even in America, want to decarbonize the global economy, but are being blocked right and left by the fossil-fuel industry and their minions in governments?<\/p>\n

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As we know, the scientists did not mount that particular critique. Instead, circling their disciplinary wagons, as it were, they attempted both to assure their readers that they have not, in fact, anemically underreported the risks of unmitigated climate change and to insist the reason \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d was so terrifying was that it took literary license representing the facts. Just a few examples. \u201cThe author takes significant literary license to leverage information grounded in truth and paint an apocalyptic picture of extreme future scenarios possibly driven by anthropogenic climate change,\u201d one scientist complains. To which I respond: yes, exactly! Another scientist complains that the article traffics in bad dreams or genre fiction, dismissing the \u201cnightmare scenarios\u201d depicted in the article as \u201cridiculous\u201d and \u201cclumsily wrapped together,\u201d and insisting \u201cthere\u2019s no reason yet to think much of the world will become uninhabitable or look like a science fiction novel.\u201d Yet this same scientist notes that if we don\u2019t stop emitting CO2 now, \u201cfood security\u201d will be \u201can issue at stake\u201d and \u201cpatches of uninhabitable areas (for humans) could start to open up in the tropics.\u201d He also acknowledges that if we continue business as usual the world will warm 4\u20135\u00b0C in eighty-three years (one long lifetime)\u200a\u2014\u200acalling this \u201ca big cause for alarm\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aand he even points out that the convention of ending climate projections at 2100 obscures the fact that our planet will continue to warm after that date. A cursory glance at an IPCC graph which appears elsewhere in the Climate Feedback<\/em> post (and which I reproduce later in this essay) shows that on RCP 8.5, our current emissions pathway, we can expect Earth to warm about 8\u00b0C by 2150 and 10\u00b0C by 2200. 2150 is, of course, only 133 years away. 133 years is nothing. A blink! Less than half the time between us and Shakespeare. About the time between my grandmother\u2019s birth and my current age. Is it really so ridiculous to narrate what terrifying things could possibly happen if the earth warmed 8\u00b0C in 130 years?<\/p>\n

This kind of eye-rolling, defensive refusal to countenance that climate change might actually be scary leads another scientist to accuse DWW of misrepresentation while he, with some irony, misrepresents what DWW actually says. \u201cThe concept of the Earth becoming uninhabitable within anywhere near the timescales suggested in the article is pure hyperbole,\u201d this scientist confidently assures us. But Wallace-Wells never says \u201cthe earth\u201d will become uninhabitable. What he does say: \u201cabsent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts<\/em> of the Earth will likely become close to<\/em> uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century\u201d (emphasis added). Is this really such a hyperbolic claim? One of the climate scientists DWW interviewed for his piece said in his interview (whose transcript New York Magazine<\/em> published): \u201cA good fraction of the tropics are now too warm essentially for human habitation, and there are studies that show that once you warm temperatures by even a few degrees by what they are currently in the tropics, basically you can\u2019t work outside. Productivity plummets, agriculture plummets, basically these regions become unlivable.\u201d Admittedly, the title of the piece, \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth,\u201d implies a planet fully inimical to human life, but science communicators know well that authors are not always responsible for the titles of their articles.<\/p>\n

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Speaking of titles, let\u2019s now turn to the title of the Climate Feedback<\/em> article. \u201cScientists explain what New York Magazine<\/em> article [sic<\/em>] on \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth\u201d gets wrong.\u201d This title itself is a misrepresentation. In reality, the Climate Feedback<\/em> article doesn\u2019t only explain what DWW gets wrong; it also explains what DWW gets right.<\/em> So, as part of my defense of climate tragedy, I\u2019d like to list all the places where the Climate Feedback<\/em> article highlights the accuracy of what DWW represents. (Quoted text is from the article; sentences in italics are DWW\u2019s.) The list is surprisingly long.<\/p>\n