Two stories appeared last week that have extremely serious implications. Donald Trump Jr.’s sneering confession of conspiracy may have kept them from getting the attention they deserve, but in any rational world—a place we clearly left some time ago—both would be at the center of public discussion. First, on Monday, there was a paper from the journal PNAS—the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study carries a title that combines the usual complexity of a scientific paper, but with a bit of extra punch: Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines.
Positioned together, and especially in a week in which a trillion-ton iceberg calved from the the ice shelf around the Antarctic Peninsula, the story seems more than a little dire. Biodiversity is falling much more rapidly than we thought, leading to a sixth mass extinction—and not at some time safely beyond our own lifetimes, but right now.
We find that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is extremely high—even in “species of low concern.” …
Our data indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.
Pair that with Wallace-Wells’ climate forecast.
If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. …
No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.
But the response to these has mostly been people complaining about the “D-word.” That includes many well-respected scientists (including at least one in my personal pantheon) who were quick to push back against the predictions of the New York magazine article.
Pennsylvania State University’s Michael Mann, a climate researcher known for skewering skeptics of climate change, took the lead in debunking the Wallace-Wells story Monday, writing, “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.”
Mann was quick to warn that in spinning out his extreme scenario, Wallace-Wells risks so overplaying his hand that the average person doesn’t get alarmed, they get resigned.
The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.
Mann also points out that Wallace-Wells’ claims that scientists have consistently underestimated the increase in global temperatures by a factor of two doesn’t wash, and predictions about a sudden catastrophic release of methane from the Arctic doesn’t match the predictions of the most respected research.
Another climate researcher, Bob Kopp of Rutgers University, commented, “Overall, the article highlights important effects that have been discussed in the literature, but in a manner that is often sloppy and hyperbolic. It would have been helpful had the reporter identified his sources, which makes it difficult to check what he intended in some points.”
However, there has also been some kickback to the kickback, such as this from Vox science reporter David Roberts.
The more I think about the climate community's response to [David Wallace-Wells] big story, the more I'm just ... ugh. Filled with disgust. Okay, "disgust" is too strong. (Off to a great start here.) It has sparked lots of great conversations, etc. But still. A little disgust.
Most people are barely aware of climate change & have no idea how scary & proximate it is. That's the baseline fact, the core problem. Along comes a scrupulously researched, factually rich, and utterly terrifying cover story on climate change in a major publication.
Piece is wildly successful, gets enormous traffic, reaches well outside the climate "bubble," gets people talking. Glorious opportunity!
What do leading climate voices do? Immediately set in w/ onanistic tut-tutting about "doomism" & off-base scientific niggling.
There’s no doubt that Wallace-Wells’ article has been terrifically successful in igniting (so to speak) conversations. It’s “gone viral” in a way that very few science-related articles do, and it’s made many people who were extremely complacent about climate change wake up long enough to rethink their “Eh, it’ll all be after I’m dead” attitudes.
On the other hand, scaring people is not always the best way to good policy. You can demonstrate this with any number of Insert-Name-Here laws. Tell a story of some poor, neglected, or worse yet, abused and murdered kid, and it’s a gateway to passing a law that does far more to erode human rights that it does to protect them.
Crying doom is an easy way to draw eyeballs and “niggling” is what science does.
But—make that BUT—Wallace-Wells’ piece isn’t a shallow attempt to grab you by the throat and make you pay attention. It’s a thoughtful, well-written, and generally well-researched plea designed to … grab you by throat and make you pay attention.
Roberts is right. And Mann is right. And William-Wells is right. And so is James Hansen, who is quoted in the original article.
… the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was;
It’s true enough. Scientists are very often conservative—not so much in the political sense, but in the sense that they present their evidence with a degree of caution and a layer of what can seem to be deliberate obfuscation.
There have been any number of articles, podcasts, books, and television shows bemoaning the fact that scientific knowledge rarely takes off in the public imagination and that scientists themselves are often not featured as great public figures. And yes, that’s a shame. I want my Millie Dresselhaus shirt as much as anyone else.
But if scientists are not busy firing the public imagination and driving public policy, maybe we ought to consider that it’s not their job. At least, it’s not the job as they’re currently forced to practice it. Most scientists work for universities or research firms. They live by the same “publish or perish” rules that affect every other academic. And when those rules say “publish” they don’t mean a lengthy piece on Daily Kos or even a killer article in New York Magazine. They mean a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, one that contains rigorously reviewed statistics, carefully vetted facts, and as close to zero speculation as possible.
There are scientists who also happen to be brilliant writers, and a precious few who are also skilled public voices for their work. But that’s not the test of an awesome scientists. That test is: Doing awesome science.
The way the world works, even a paper that starts with the words “biological annihilation” is unlikely to draw many eyeballs directly to the pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And it didn’t. That’s not to say the article didn’t gain attention. It did. It gained attention because popular science writers, guys like David Wallace-Wells, and David Roberts, and Stephen Andrew and many others take articles like that one in PNAS and bring them to the public.
When we’re lucky, they do an awesome job of turning research into public information, into improving the general knowledge base, into building an informed populace that votes and acts. So let’s hear it for the popular science writers. Maybe, one day, I will get myself that Mary Roach T-shirt to hang next to Millie.
Oh, and one last thing: If doom-crying is an issue, so is being overly cautious in delivering a warning. When you feel that bump on the Titanic, sitting back down to dinner is the wrong thing to do. Screaming fire in the theater is a bad idea … except when the theater is on fire.
A new study from climate scientists Robert DeConto at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and David Pollard at Pennsylvania State University suggests that the most recent estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for future sea-level rise over the next 100 years could be too low by almost a factor of two. Details appear in the current issue of Nature.
