Turning the climate crisis into a TV love child of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy

In the United States, people who refuse to accept even some of the basic tenets of climate science are calling for a heated debate.

“Who better to do that than a group of scientists … getting together and having a robust discussion for all the world to see,” the boss of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, told Reuters.

And, of course, Pruitt thinks it should be on the telly.

“You want this to be on full display,” he said. “I think the American people would be very interested in consuming that. I think they deserve it.”

That’s right. Pruitt’s respect for climate science would see it reduced to a bastard TV love child of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy.

Pruitt has been pushing around an idea that has been the wet dream of fossil-fuel funded climate science deniers for years now and it is this: there should be a “red team, blue team” process established on the fundamentals of climate change, from its causes to how bad it will be.

In a world that doesn’t have a former reality television star and real estate tycoon as the US president, this process already exists – it’s called the scientific method. The clearest demonstration of the “red team, blue team” method is in the process of peer review.

To borrow from Winston Churchill’s commentary on democracy, no one pretends that peer review is “perfect or all-wise”, it just happens to be better than all the other ways of deciding what the facts are.

What Pruitt and his supporters are envisaging has echoes of the 1925 Scopes monkey trial. Then the state of Tennessee prosecuted a high school teacher, John Scopes, for teaching evolution (they had motion-picture cameras for that spectacle, too).

In Pruitt’s incarnation of the Scopes trial, one team would have scientists representing the central positions of all respected scientific institutions around the world. The other would have a thin sliver of contrarians.

To the viewing public, the impression would be that there is some sort of even split among scientists about the fundamentals of climate change. It would be a test of debating techniques and communication skills, not a test of the evidence.

The reality, of course, is that multiple studies have shown that somewhere between 90% and 100% of climate scientists agree on the fundamental points.

If you ask Americans what percentage of scientists agrees that humans are the main cause of climate change, about seven out of eight underestimate the number (more than one in five Americans think most climate scientists do not think humans are the main cause – but it’s not clear how many of those watch Judge Judy).

One of those people responsible for confusing the US public on climate change is Marc Morano – the head of communications for the so-called “thinktank” the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow – and he’s now touring Australia.

And while Morano wants people to keep thinking there’s a real debate about the basic causes of climate change (it’s his job to keep that debate going), there’s a real and worthwhile conversation going on at the more factual end of the spectrum.

This is a conversation not about whether human-caused climate change is real or risky (yes and yes is the overwhelming consensus on that) but rather just how bad on the catastrophe-scale things could actually get.

In a much-read New York magazine cover story, the journalist David Wallace-Wells chooses to paint the bleakest of pictures. The story’s title “The Uninhabitable Earth” is like one big spoiler alert.

Writes Wallace-Wells:

What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.

So in a world that does next to nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions (an important caveat that you need to constantly remind yourself of as you read through the 7,200-word piece), Wallace-Wells looks around for climate studies that together paint a truly dystopian future.

He brings us unbreathable air, heat incompatible with human existence, submerged mega-cities, wars, famine and economic collapse.

He’s been getting a bit of pushback, with scientists including professors Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler accusing Wallace-Wells of some inaccuracies.

Mann and others say this sort of doomsday styling could lead people to a sense of defeatism and pessimism that’s not reflected in what’s possible.

The veteran climate writer Dave Roberts argues the inaccuracies are very few indeed (he only really counts two among the scores of points made) but says if the article induces fear then this is in any case a key emotion that people need in order to act.

As others have pointed out, it should not be the job of journalists to ignore or underplay aspects of climate change just because it might suck the living hope out of readers.

In reality, the fat end of the risk profile from climate change – where things go really bad – is really very fat indeed.

Take as just a small sampling the prospective loss of functional reef systems that feed hundreds of millions of people, or the trillions of dollars of infrastructure and buildings on flood-risk coastlines, or the disruption of food supplies, or the mass diasporas it could set in train as rising sea levels swallow people’s homelands and their collective history. If that leaves you cold, then there’s always coffee, chocolate and mass extinctions.

No wonder military leaders are so worried about it. Maybe they drink lots of coffee?

At Mashable, Andrew Freedman writes that: “In more than a decade of reporting on climate science and policy, I have yet to meet a pessimistic climate scientist.”

Well, I’ve also had about a decade in climate reporting and my experience is a little different. Many exhibit plenty of pessimism, and they do it often.

In Australia, we’ve gone backwards. More than a quarter of a century ago, a prime minister wanted a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2005.

But those same climate scientists have bits of hope too. The two things can exist at the same time.

Last night the energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, gave a lecture at the University of Queensland.

His speech dazzled with statistics and pragmatism about “solutions” that might aid his ministry’s “trilemma” of delivering energy security, affordable power and a transition to a lower emissions future while still being able to push the country to be the world’s biggest exporter of coal and gas.

There was a “crisis” in our energy markets, Frydenberg said. But he said almost nothing about the other “crisis” – the climate crisis.

A questioner from the back asked that, given future prospects for the world were so dire, did his department have any plans to review potential geoengineering responses to climate change.

The response was that Frydenberg would be “interested to hear more”, as if it were an issue he hadn’t thought much about.

It was an answer that demonstrated the gulf between what a politician thinks is a crisis and what actually is one. And, yes, it’s OK to say things could get really bad.