Not already bummed out enough by recent events? Well then, New York Magazine has just the thing for you! In a very lengthy cover story this week, David Wallace-Wells paints a bleak picture of an all-too-near future: The Uninhabitable Earth.
Through nine sections, Wallace-Wells lays out a “schedule” of what warming will bring humanity over the coming decades. While he does make it clear that his “schedule” may change if we alter our emissions trajectory, and though scientists like Dr. Michael Mann have pointed out some accuracy issues with Wallace-Wells’s assumptions, the piece is already rattling cages and causing mild panic and depression. With good reason: as Wallace-Wells describes coming heat deaths from just being outside in the tropics, Arctic melt awakening ancient plagues and socioeconomic breakdowns, the story is a vivid description of a worst-case scenario.
But is that helpful? Or does it just create more deniers? All politics aside, on a psychological level, the more harrowing and hopeless the situation, the easier it is to throw up your hands and busy yourself with distractions. Why waste your time and emotional capacity on something you’re so powerless to stop when there’s such good TV to watch?
So the piece really could have used something to cut the despair. You would think that in a 7,000+ word piece, the author could discuss solutions. Yet the words “solar power” or “wind turbine” appear nowhere, despite news that their prices are falling so fast the US could meet its Paris commitments despite Trump. Wallace-Wells concludes by referencing the unlikely optimism of many of the climate scientists interviewed, and their knowledge of what it will take to meet the Paris goals. But it doesn’t explain why they’re optimistic, other than a passing explanation that they think we’ll find a way to reduce emissions, “because we must.”
Now obviously a story about solutions would be a different one altogether, and the decision to put a cheery capper on an otherwise depressing story would be an editorial choice they’re free to make (or not, in this case).
Either way, there is something of a rebuttal to be found, though this one is fictional. NY Mag’s pop culture blog interviews director Luc Besson about his upcoming sci-fi thriller Valerian. In the piece, the interviewer notes how Besson’s films provide remarkably utopian visions of the future in this otherwise rather dystopian era. “If we are not happy with the future that we see,” Besson explains, “let’s change it.”
So, in so much as people are going to look at the climate schedule laid out by Wallace-Wells and see it as a warning of what will happen if we fail to act, great. In that respect, let’s hope the public finds his chilling portrait of a warmed Earth to be a... moving picture.
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