Slate "New York magazines global-warming horror story isnt too scary. Its not scary enough"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/07/we_are_not_alarmed_enough_about_climate_change.html

Alarmism Is the Argument We Need to Fight Climate Change

New York magazine’s global-warming horror story isn’t too scary. It’s not scary enough.

By Susan Matthews

New York’s David Wallace-Wells has a formidable cover story in the magazine this week, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” that dryly details just how bad things could get due to climate change. The answer? Very, very bad. The timeline? Sooner than you think. The instantly viral piece might be the Silent Spring of our time, except it doesn’t uncover shocking new information—it just collects all the terrifying things that were already sitting out there into one extremely terrifying list.

“No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough,” Wallace-Wells writes, before running through the known science and stats that explain why rising seas, the focus of most of our climate panic, are just the tip of the iceberg—disease, famine, economic panic, and civil unrest are coming, too. An argument for freaking out, his piece has been decried for being too alarmist. Actually, it is not alarmist enough. As I read it in bed at midnight Sunday night, for the first time I started to realize just exactly why climate change might be a reason not to have children—because if those children have children, this could be their world. That’s how close to the edge we are.

There’s a contingency of people—good people, people with noble goals—who are responding to this piece in horror. Not horror at the future, though that would be understandable. Instead, they are horrified by the rhetorical strategy of using alarmism to make a point about climate change. Horror at the fact that it could make readers like me pause over the idea of bringing children into the world.

My reservations, in a nutshell:

Despair is never helpful, and this is essentially one long council of despair. https://t.co/UCXT5c5XF2

— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) July 10, 2017
Michael Mann, a renowned scientist who does hard work speaking up about climate change, had the same reaction, writing on his feelings about the piece, which he was interviewed for but not quoted in, on Facebook. In the widely shared post he writes:

There is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness. 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.

snip - much more to read - and important to do so