A Defense of Climate Tragedy, or What the Scientists Got Wrong about ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’

This is an essay about the furor over David Wallace-Wells’ New York Magazine article “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which conjures a specter of a planet so ruined by global warming in our children’s lifetimes that it no longer sustains, but destroys human life. 

By his own account, Wallace-Wells (DWW from here on out) wrote “The Uninhabitable Earth” 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 lengthly post on Climate Feedback — a site that publishes scientific assessments of representations of climate change in the popular press — these 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 “business as usual” path that we are currently on. It is this Climate Feedback post, entitled “Scientists explain what New York Magazine article [sic] on ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ gets wrong,” that I want to discuss.

Read the piece by an author and climate activist with a PhD in Renaissance Literature who is also a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality,  Genevieve Guenther  -  “A Defense of Climate Tragedy, or What the Scientists Got Wrong about ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’.”

Yes, I am a climate alarmist. Global warming is a crime against humanity

Most of us have wondered about the human context of past crimes against humanity: why didn’t more people intervene? How could so many pretend not to know? To be sure, crimes against humanity are not always easy to identify while they unfold.

‘We are the bystanders who must choose to intervene or be defined by our failure.’ 

We need some time to reflect and to analyze, even when our reasoning suggests that large scale human suffering and death are likely imminent. The principled condemnation of large scale atrocity is, too often, a luxury of hindsight.

I’m a climate alarmist because there is no morally responsible way to downplay the dangers that negligent policies – expected to accelerate human-caused climate change – pose to humankind.

There can be no greater crime against humanity than the foreseeable, and methodical, destruction of conditions that make human life possible – hindsight isn’t necessary.

Read Laurence Torcello’s story on The Guardian - “Yes, I am a climate alarmist. Global warming is a crime against humanity.”