"The Uninhabitable Earth" is a New York magazine article by American journalist David Wallace-Wells published on July 9, 2017. The long-form article depicts a worst-case scenario of what might happen in the near-future due to global warming. The article starts with the statement "[i]f your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible." Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic said it is an "unusually specific and severe depiction of what global warming will do to the planet." Susan Matthews writing in Slate said "The instantly viral piece might be the Silent Spring of our time".
The story received immediate criticism from the climate change community along two fronts: the piece is too pessimistic; or it contains some factual errors. The NGO Climate Feedback summarized reviews by dozens of professional scientists and concluded the majority of the reviewers tagged the article as: Alarmist, Imprecise/Unclear, Misleading.
Some journalists defended the science saying it is mostly correct, "I haven't seen any good evidence for serious factual errors," said Kevin Drum. Emily Atkin said "The complaints about the science in Wallace-Wells's article are mostly quibbles".
The major criticism is that David Wallace-Wells was trying to scare people. This theme was then explored by journalists and commentators with some saying they thought fear was necessary given the reality of the problem, while others thought scaring people was counter-productive. For example, Eric Holthaus said that "scaring the shit out of [people] is a really bad strategy" for getting them to want to address climate change.
In a later interview, David Wallace-Wells said "it didn't seem plausible to me that there was more risk at scaring people too much than there was at not scaring them enough.. my feeling was, and is, if there's a one percent chance that we've set off a chain reaction that could end the human race, then that should be something that the public knows and thinks about."
On November 20, 2017, NYUs Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute hosted a 2 hour long conversation between Wallace-Wells and Michael E. Mann to discuss the controversy around the article
Accompanying the article are a series of extended interviews with scientists. These include paleontologist Peter Ward, climatologist Michael E. Mann oceanographer Wallace Smith Broecker, climatologist James Hansen and scientist Michael Oppenheimer. In addition an annotated edition of the article was published online that includes inline footnotes.
Video The Uninhabitable Earth
References
Maps The Uninhabitable Earth
External links
- David Wallace-Wells (July 9, 2017). "The Uninhabitable Earth". New York. Retrieved July 11, 2017.
- David Wallace-Wells (July 14, 2017). "The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition". New York. Retrieved July 14, 2017.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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