Good Climate-Change News Is Fit to Print – WSJ

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. He now says: Just a few years ago climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic. He acknowledges a new consensus that has 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.

via www.wsj.com