The Problem With Climate Doomsday Reporting, And How To Move Beyond It

It’s not often that an article about climate change becomes one of the most hotly debated issues on the internet — especially in the midst of a controversial G20 summit.

But that exact thing happened following the publication of a lengthy essay in New York Magazine titled “The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, Economic Collapse, a Sun that Cooks Us: What Climate Change Could Wreak — Sooner Than You Think.”

In the course of 7,200 words, author David Wallace-Wells chronicled the possible impacts of catastrophic climate change if current emissions trends are maintained, including, but certainly not limited to: mass permafrost melt and methane leaks, mass extinctions, fatal heat waves, drought and food insecurity, diseases and viruses, “rolling death smog,” global conflict and war, economic collapse and ocean acidification.

Slate political writer Jamelle Bouie described the essay on Twitter as “something that will haunt your nightmares.”

It’s a fair assessment. Reading it feels like a series of punches in the gut, triggering emotions like despair, hopelessness and resignation.

But here’s the thing: many climate psychologists and communicators consider those feelings to be the very opposite of what will compel people to action.

Read the Desmog Blog story by James Wilt - “The Problem With Climate Doomsday Reporting, And How To Move Beyond It.”

The obvious officially ignored, but unofficially it was everywhere

University of Melbourne’s
Associate Professor
Peter Christoff

What was obvious for most was officially ignored at Brisbane’s recent G20 Summit.

The world’s twenty most influential economies gathered at Brisbane to talk about growth when even those not paying attention must have realised that such discussions were intimately dependent upon a benign climate.

Save just one small paragraph, the final communique focussed almost entirely on growth, apparently blind to the complications inherent in driving for infinite growth on a finite planet.

Worsening this pointless rush for growth was the apparent ignorance, wilful or otherwise, that the much cherished growth is wholly dependent on the state of earth’s climate.

University of Melbourne’s Associate Professor Peter Christoff wrote on “G20 Watch” about the “Dangerous separation of economics and climate persists”.

Dr Christoff, who teaches and researches climate politics and policy in the Department of Resource Management and Geography, said, “Attempts by Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott to keep climate change off the G20 agenda fizzed - like his much-hyped 'shirt-fronting' of Vladimir Putin, who ended up only wearing a docile koala”.

If a formal sense, climate change was kept well away from discussions, or so it appeared, but informally that appeared to be the focus of a whole event.