Foul Is Fair
Kyle Paoletta’s article [“The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday,” Criticism, April] tracks the shifting rhetoric of climate reporting in recent years from extreme pessimism to timid optimism. Is either view correct? Only time will tell, although the idea that journalists missed a Goldilocks middle path between doom and hope benefits greatly from hindsight and exaggerates the substantive discrepancy between earlier and later accounts. The central article in the story, David Wallace-Wells’s “Beyond Catastrophe,” would strike only the most despairing Cassandra as upbeat.
Paoletta says little has changed. But with each year, the ranks of climate denialists have thinned, the will to political action has grown, green technology has improved and cheapened, and the pace of its adoption has accelerated. Perhaps the most profound change—apparently, mystifyingly, known to scientists for a decade—is the view that ceasing greenhouse emissions would arrest warming in as little as three years, not thirty or forty, as has long been believed. This has received shockingly little attention, and it seems to offer hope that we won’t pass a point of no return without realizing it. When we act matters crucially. The great tragedy is the belatedness of our response, and the same logic makes even modest progress today a cause for some modest hope.
The overarching challenge of climate change for us non-scientists is one of imagination: How do we create a shared understanding of a problem so vast, and with so many human and scientific uncertainties? I agree with Paoletta that we will likely look back on journalism’s turn toward advocacy as a mistake. (That our misconception about locked-in climate change was allowed to persist so long is perhaps damning.) But I don’t know how we build a collective model to guide us except through the project of narrative construction and revision that Paoletta critiques. His very sense that our pessimism was too dark and our current optimism too rosy seems to me based on exactly the type of speculation he decries—and that his piece, to its credit, participates in.
Greg Jackson
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Paoletta claims to have identified a clear change in the way that journalists frame the climate crisis. The facts “have remained the same,” he writes, “only the story has changed.” The truth is somewhat more nuanced. We continue to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate, and we must still address the emissions burden of world food production. But recent years have also brought rapid growth in renewable power generation and low-carbon manufacturing. Last year, the United States derived more electricity from renewables than from coal, the very fuel underpinning the “business-as-usual” projections many scientists now shun. That was before the rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act, among the largest clean energy subsidies ever passed by any government.
If we climate journalists now aver that the world might hold global warming below apocalyptic levels, that is because we are witnessing the evolution of the energy landscape and climate politics. That does not preclude us from fulfilling what Paoletta says ought to be our main task: “to document the ongoing mutilation of our planet, and to push citizens, politicians, and corporations to stanch the carnage.” Documenting progress is a necessary part of that work. Every prediction about climate change is, or should be, a statement about a range of potential outcomes. The trajectory of the planet’s temperature is pushed upward and downward by countless forces every day. In other words, the facts have not remained the same. How could they have?
Jake Bittle
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Second Thoughts
The history of measurement is, in many ways, a history of increasing abstraction—a theory illustrated by Tom Vanderbilt’s lucid exploration of the second [“In Search of Lost Time,” Letter from Boulder, April]. As units grow more abstract, they become distant from personal experience, but, as a result, can float more freely across time and space, encompassing a great domain. As Vanderbilt notes, early units of time were “subject to local idiosyncrasies.” It was not until clocks became widespread that time was made uniform; now, the second is defined not with gears and springs but the vibrations of atoms, as removed from human life as the orbiting satellites that house our atomic clocks.
Other units have followed a similar path. The first measures were usually taken from the human body: feet and hands, fathoms and paces. In the medieval period, units sometimes differed not only from country to country, but from town to town. Land was often measured in terms of the area that could be worked in a single day—the origin of the English acre, the German tagwerk, the French journal, and so on. Each of these varied depending on the quality of the ground they measured. Such units were rooted in experience, and encoded information vital to those who used them.
In the early modern period, increasingly centralized states began to better enforce standards of measurement. Governments needed economic information, and variable units frustrated the all-seeing eye of the administrator. During the French Revolution, metrology took on newly political dimensions. If people were to be equal before the law, they must be weighed and measured equally too. The French scrapped local units in favor of the metric system, which they hoped would become universal. Among these new standards was the meter, defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, and so rooted in humanity’s shared inheritance: the earth itself.
James Vincent
London
Meals on Wheels
As Lisa Wells shows in her essay [“Numinous Strangers,” Memoir, April], vulnerability affords people the chance to be kind—something I’ve learned as a veteran of fourteen bicycle trips around the United States. In 2008, at Refugio State Beach in California, a homeless man fixed dinner for me and my companions. He said that he once went without food for eleven days, and he wasn’t going to let us go hungry. He was somehow estranged from his family, and planned to spend the winter in Arizona. When I asked if he was going to take a bus, he was incredulous. He was going to ride his bike, of course: it was only eight hundred miles. On a difficult journey, you might meet a real pilgrim. That is reward enough.
Stan Brown
Victorville, Calif.
Corrections
“Lone on the Range” by Leland Nally [Annotation, April] erroneously described the size of Homestead Act parcels. They could be as large as a quarter of a square mile.
In “The Melancholy Universe” by László F. Földényi [Essay, April], the translator’s name was misspelled. It is John Batki, not John Bakti.
“Signs and Wonders” by Will Stephenson [Review, April] said that the silent-film star Douglas Fairbanks attended a party at Buckingham Palace in 1964. In fact, it was his son, the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
We regret the errors.
