David Wallace-Wells is editor-at-large for New York Magazine, as well as a contributor at the New York Times. His 2017 article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” later expanded into a 2019 book of the same title, sparked a heated discussion within the climate science community over the rhetorical utility of appeals to fear and to hope. This essay considers the arguments in light of the communication scholarship.

If we were to identify and list important turning points in the national conversation on climate change over the past two decades, one of these would likely fall on July 9, 2017, with the online publication of David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. Widely shared on the internet and soon to be reprised as a bestselling 2019 book, this essay examined an array of worst-case scenarios, asking just how bad the climate crisis could get if global carbon emission continues apace. Though much climate discourse tends to focus on a range of 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming by the end of this century, Wallace-Wells observed that these figures represent the floor of projected change, and that there is no ceiling. Global warming is likely to pass two degrees over preindustrial levels well before 2100, and will not stop there simply because the calendar flips. To take the climate threat seriously is therefore to examine what may happen if the temperature continues to climb, as it surely will, if global governments fail to act. Wallace-Wells imagined three degrees of warming, then four, five, six, and upward, watching as human beings become unsafe out of doors and millions of equatorial refugees migrate toward the poles, as agricultural systems break down and food becomes scarce, as air becomes unbreathable and plagues arise and spread, as economies collapse, as wars are waged, as oceans die, and, ultimately, as the earth is left uninhabitable.

Though Wallace-Wells’ essay contained plenty of fodder for those who charge the climate movement with alarmism and hysteria, the most interesting dissent came from within the community itself. Writing at Vox, David Roberts (2017) cataloged critical responses from climate scientists and writers who charged Wallace-Wells with sowing the seeds of despair. Perhaps the most prominent of these came from Penn State professor Michael Mann, who took to Facebook to critique what he called the essay’s “doomist framing.” In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer (2017) echoed Mann, writing that, “Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” At the New Republic, Emily Atkin (2017) summarized the criticism with the assertion that, “doom-and-gloom is unpersuasive and discouraging.” She then quoted Rutgers professor Jennifer Francis to that effect. “My own experience in speaking to public audiences is that doomsday stories such as this article are so depressing that people shut down and stop listening,” she wrote. “If there is no hope, there will be no action, and goodness knows we need a lot more action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions right now.”

On Twitter, climate scientist and Project Drawdown director Jonathan Foley called the essay “deeply irresponsible,” charging that Wallace-Wells had been “cherry-picking doomsday scenarios.” Zach Labe, of the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California-Irvine, wrote that, “we can reach a much broader audience by talking about impacts and solutions rather than hyperboles.” Climate activist Alec Steffen wrote that, “Despair is never helpful,” and that the piece was “essentially one long council of despair.” Intercept climate writer Kate Aronoff concurred that the essay was not “helpful,” instead exemplifying a troubling proneness to “nihilism” on the activist left. And finally, technologist Ramez Naam critiqued the essay as being “incredibly bleak,” concluding that, “through a combination of exaggeration and hopelessness, it turns away those in the middle that we need to persuade.” Indeed, “it makes action harder” (Roberts, 2017).

In response to these objections, Wallace-Wells suggested that his approach offers an important counterweight to what he considered the too-rosy tenor of mainstream climate discourse. Asked by an interviewer from the Gothamist whether there was any hope, Wallace-Wells responded:

Oh, I would say there’s quite a lot of hope. The conceit of the piece was to survey worst case scenarios in order to ultimately motivate people to action. But one of the things that I worried about as I put it together was that readers would have a fatalistic response to it and I don’t really think that that’s appropriate. At some point in the piece, I talk about almost all of the damage that we’ve done to the planet, in the sense that global warming has occurred over the course of the lifespan of the Greatest Generation. So ultimately, I think, this could be as short a story as a story of two generations. But at the very least we have another lifespan to figure it out, and to take the necessary actions to forestall at least the gruesome worst-case scenarios that I sketched out in the piece (Fishbein, 2017).

For his part, Roberts (2017) agreed, observing that Wallace-Wells’ emphasis on worst case scenarios functions as a glass of cold water thrown in the face of those focused too narrowly on positive outcomes. He wrote that the popular belief that “Things [will] stay roughly as they are” is every bit as improbable as Wallace-Wells’ worst-case scenario, yet it is believed by vastly more people. “Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy,” Roberts wrote, “it looks just like now! — while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very difficult. It’s especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.”

In other words, if it is in fact a problem that too many people are taking climate change too seriously, it remains an exponentially greater problem that too few people are taking climate change half as seriously as they should.

Read the whole thing in the Pennsylvania Communication Annual.