Good Climate Change News Is Also Fit To Print

Call it the calamity of climate journalism. After 40 years, writers are still serving up a binary issue, with idiotic back-and-forths over who is a denier in ways that work, sometimes deliberately, to undermine clear thinking and any concession to the changing science.

Better can be done and last weekend a newish New York Times writer, David Wallace-Wells, in his customary excess of words, reprised his own concession since writing a 2017 New York Magazine article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” [bold, links added]

He now says: “Just a few years ago climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic.”

He acknowledges a new consensus that had reduced expected warming to “between two and three degrees” Celsius, or less than half the forecast of, say, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment.

If the name Wallace-Wells is familiar, almost three years ago, when he was writing for a different publication, this column welcomed him aboard the successful effort to junk a worst-case emissions forecast, known as RCP 8.5, that everywhere was presented as the objective climate future.

Now I can offer concessions of my own. I once complained the term RCP 8.5 never appeared in the Times’s print edition. Now it has. I said it might be five years before the paper recognized the less-dire warming consensus. It’s been less than two.

One of my snarks still holds up, though. I said when the predicted climate catastrophe fails to materialize, activists would credit themselves.

Mr. Wallace-Wells attributes half of the improved picture to the abandonment of the faulty RCP 8.5 and half to technological advances, but this is problematic at the very least.

Technological advance is usually assumed. A quirk of RCP 8.5 was that it specified stagnating technology except, strangely, for the technology to allow a sextupling of global coal consumption.

He also leaves out a second reason that, again, has nothing to do with climate activists and everything to do with science correcting its errors.

The consensus-bearing U.N. climate panel, after 40 years, modified its all-important “climate sensitivity” estimate using real-world temperature trends to corral its discordant and unreliable computer simulations.

Result: lower expected warming and lower estimated risk of worst-case warming.

All of this is so completely the opposite of new or news that you can only roll your eyes, but at least the truth is reaching Times readers.

This brings us to a second lengthy and instructive rumination in the Times, by a former Journal colleague who stands on a Greenland glacier and discovers himself moving along some nonspecific spectrum from less worried to more worried.

I’ve stood on glaciers in Alaska and Iceland but doing so left my climate questions unanswered. Already known for decades was that faster warming was observed at the poles.

For just as long, scientists worried that poorly understood processes might cause faster-than-expected melting and sea-level rise.

But his piece is timely and significant for a different reason. With the consensus that modeled outcomes won’t be as bad as previously thought, researchers are already shifting their concern to the possibility of unexpected, low-probability, high-consequence tipping points and doom loops.

Rapid ice-cap melting is one such speculative scenario. Thermohaline inversion as dramatized in a mediocre 2004 Hollywood blockbuster is another. A dangerous permafrost-methane feedback response is a third.

For years the late Martin Weitzman of MIT and Harvard insisted the known unknowns were our real concern.

The problem with outlier climate scenarios, however, is the problem with all uncertain end-of-the-world scenarios, like those usefully listed by Richard Posner in a 2004 book that reports that “the number of extreme catastrophes that have a more than a negligible probability of occurring in this century is alarmingly great, and their variety startling.”

Which of these low-probability, high-consequence disasters should we spend resources preparing for at the expense of things people need and want now?

A sign of the conversation shifting from climate certitudes to climate uncertainties is a new paper from Cambridge’s Luke Kemp and colleagues. It offers a recommendation about “bad-to-worst-case” climate scenarios: Study them more.

In a countering article, Matthew G. Burgess, Roger Pielke Jr., and Justin Ritchie also endorse more research but warn against marching such low-probability scenarios to the center of the conversation to mislead voters and policymakers.

This brings us to a third, epic-length piece of climate-related journalism, posted on Substack by the liberal political analyst Ruy Teixeira.

He touches on all the same matters and mentions many of the same names, on the way to describing the political and policy disaster his fellow Democrats created for themselves by adopting the overdone and unscientific “climate crisis” stylings of Greta Thunberg.

Call it progress. I won’t rehearse why a carbon tax that was simultaneously pro-growth and anti-carbon would have best served global society in adapting to an uncertain climate future. From any kind of politics, authoritarian or democratic, it’s unrealistic to expect ideal policy outcomes.

Yet I can’t help but wonder how events might have been different if climate news coverage over these many decades had not veered into moronic nonsense, from which it is only fitfully starting to emerge.

h/t Jake R.

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