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…