“It’s become strangely normal to tell out kids that they’re going to die from climate change.” This is how Hannah Ritchie begins her TED Talk given in April 2023.
That’s a great early line and I can’t fault it for its effective dramatic effect. Basically, though, the rest of the talk is about how we are doing much better than the world of climate crisis would have us believe, and like any good TED-talker, she’s got the charts to prove it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to hear good news, and Ritchie, a data scientist who is well-known in climate change circles—and a terrific contributor to struggles with the climate crisis—has a valid point. There’s been progress on climate change and lower-carbon living, whether in food production or Britain’s drop from 1990 to producing about half of the country’s electricity from coal, to less than 2 percent today.
Early on, Ritchie says, “If the sea-level rise doesn’t get them, then a wildfire will, or a global famine, or crop failures or insect apocalypse or the fishless seas. These are the headlines we’ve all been told will be the end of humanity.” She concludes there should be no surprise that young people today feel crippled with climate anxiety and quotes a “large international survey” asking young people about climate change: More than half said that humanity is doomed, three-quarters find the future frightening, and about a third are hesitant to have children of their own.
She too used to feel that humanity was doomed. But then she plays the data scientist card and chides how the climate crisis is reported, because her data analysis shows how far humanity has come and how quickly humanity is moving toward climate crisis progress, and so her perspective on the doom of humanity has changed.
The manner of reporting on the climate crisis she references may point to doom, but her data analysis is sweepingly optimistic. There is an uncomfortable disconnect between the sense of reality from the developed world’s perspective and the rest of humanity. I’m guessing that the “large international survey” didn’t include all that many young people caught up in Sudan’s conflicts, or Central or South American illegal migrants to the U.S., or the poor choking on polluted air in India’s largest cities.
Well, you get the point.
The fact is that the doomer-versus-techno-optimist spectrum remains irrelevant because, largely, they miss an important consideration, which is how we—as a community, a country, and the collection of countries—act to impart power to avoid making the climate crisis even worse than it is today. The stark facts of climate change research are that we’ve already significantly altered the world, and that even with net zero goals of the Paris Agreement being met—hardly a widely held expectation these days—the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere today will have decades’ and centuries’ long consequences.
Of course, those who cry out man’s doom are just plain silly or given over to unhelpful hyperbole. Humankind is adaptable, and even with the worst climate change outcomes, the species of homo sapiens is going to continue to be a presence, although present for what exactly remains the pertinent question. There are people already dying from heatwaves, and if one can’t with scientific confidence ascribe climate change as cause to any particular heat wave, we know that fundamental conditions of climate change make heatwaves longer, stronger, and more frequent. People will continue to die in greater numbers from violent storms and floods, and sea rise is already a problem and insured (ha!) to grow worse. Crop failures? Been there, done that, and more is a’coming. Climate-generated migration? Been there, done that, too, and we sure as heck can expect more and more, and already this is driving nationalism and far-right authoritarianism in Europe and the U.S.
Will our children be doomed by crop failures or driven from increasingly inhospitable lands? Well, America and Europe are well-developed countries with resources to mitigate a wide range of climate change consequences, but the daily headlines point to problems even in the developed-world paradises, even while most often reporting on typically far worse consequences for other countries. Societies and economies are fragile and complex and we shouldn’t forget this, even as carbon emissions are falling in some part of the world and long-term trends are moving positive.
“We need to refrain sustainability as an opportunity because it is an opportunity,” Ritchie says, adding. “…we need to re-think how we use data. As a data scientist, I take this very seriously. We need data to inspire. To show what the solutions are… and to show real signs of progress.”
Well, amen, sister.
Unfortunately, showing solutions is not the same as working to put such solutions in place. There are real and very powerful vested interests arrayed against carbon emission reduction solutions, and some such interests run countries, some span political parties, and some are driven by business interests and have the wealth to shape how a society thinks about solutions, never mind how a society goes about implementing solutions. The problem with Ritchie’s 2023 Ted Talk and much of her more recent writing is that these become fodder for those who fight against or seek to delay the much-needed fast-as-possible solutions, and these self-interested parties are plenty happy to use any and all means, including using Ritchie’s own words, against climate change solutions. Another example of this sort of rhetorical judo is seen in the selective embrace of Roger Pilke Jr.’s work. Pilke, another scientist, makes a solid argument that a lot of climate change reporting and messaging plays fast and lose with scientific research principles, pointing out that no one can, with scientific certainty, assign any specific weather event to climate change, because, you know and I know, weather is wildly variable, and we have the records to prove it. This acknowledgement doesn’t negate the broader topic, which is that 200 years of our exploding use of fossil fuels to drive industrial and technological advances, along with an exploding population, has obvious consequences writ large in the changes in the world’s climate. Despite what Ritchie and Pilke actually argue, both have become darlings of anti-climate change rhetoricians, even while I’m sure that neither wants to be. But talking sense about the good data out there or how science actually works without addressing the larger context does create problems, and in these cases, it is that the larger context is the climate-changing behavior of man and the actions required is missing.
Certainly, it is not Ritchie’s or Pilke’s fault that there are those who don’t read these authors’ works closely or are otherwise are all too happy to cherry-pick quotes or use these writers’ citations to champion an anti-climate change message. As I wrote in “Statistics, Damned Statistics, and Common Sense,” there are plenty of people who want to wish away climate change, either because climate change is uncomfortable to think about or because such writers—in what I think of as serving as shill—are engaging in specific actions in service to the current masters of the universe who will take it in the proverbial teeth the faster we move away from fossil fuel. We must guard against unwitting aid to anti-climate change messaging, and we must do so by acknowledging the role the obscenely wealthy and their minions—both witting and unwitting—play in slowing the energy transition. Al Gore is right in stating clearly that the fossil fuel companies are our enemies. Not speaking truth to these mighty powers will make it always more likely that progress will be slow.
We all share a propensity to react mostly to fierce immediate dangers and not to act on world-scale and climate-scale timelines. If there is any prevailing reason for the lack of careful application of scientific principles when it comes to writing about climate change, it is that the important part of such stories is the threat is real and hugely significant, and the story isn’t that the journalists citing NOAA statistics aren’t crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s as a trained scientist should do. Drawing the right lines in the sand—that the energy transition is imperative—is critical because of the nature of climate change, which is a relatively long-term process, especially relative to our economy’s fixations on the results of the next fiscal quarter. The sky is falling, but on a day-to-day basis—especially in our own happy lives in the developed world—it doesn’t seem like it is, because the metaphorical object of climate change is falling slowly in our normal perception, but climate change is falling toward us inexorably and the weight of it is incredibly heavy.
That’s why a clear context of the requirements of political action for effective and ongoing climate crisis solutions must be part of any discussion of climate change. Hannah Ritchie is right that there is progress, but this progress to date remains necessary but insufficient, and climate change continues. She is right that doom-howling is neither helpful nor intrinsically reflective of our present reality, but the trouble we are in is increasingly obvious: We are already likely behind the Paris Accords goals of limiting global warming to 1.5 Celsius, and more children will die, more food systems will collapse, more large-scale migrations will destabilize countries, and the more likely it becomes that our fragile societies and economies inch that much closer to upset or collapse, so, Hannah Ritchie, the climate change news is still dire.
Is there hope to be found in progress being made toward building a sustainable world, where carbon emissions fall significantly? Absolutely.
Is there hope, absent effective political action that counters the entrenched and powerful fossil fuel interests of countries, companies, and even individual billionaires, that there will be sufficient progress on solving the climate crisis? Not so much.
An essential part of any climate change discussion is that effective large-scale actions—political actions, that is, changing laws—to mitigate and reverse carbon emissions will bring rewards, and this happening sooner rather than later makes the difference between better and worse outcomes tomorrow, especially remembering that such tomorrows arrive in the next decades and more.