Putting the Reports About the Thwaites Glacier Into Perspective

Last month reports that the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is likely to collapse within a number of years (as few as three in some of the reports) made the rounds of the news, along with projections that the event could by itself raise sea levels by two feet, and lead to further collapses producing a ten foot sea level rise, inundating all the world's coastlines.

The tone in which all this was reported, of course, made "could" seem like "will," and does not disabuse anyone not reading closely of the impression that the maximum sea level rise anticipated here will happen instantaneously.

Even worse than most in this regard is the title of the piece in Rolling Stone--"'The Fuse Has Been Blown,' and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All."

This flatly tells us not that something potentially very bad may be happening not very far from now, or even that something actually very bad is inevitably happening, but that the worst has already happened.

That is, of course, not actually the case--as the article itself makes clear if one reads it rather than just Retweeting the headline. In spite of Rolling Stone's propensity for "collapse porn" (it was through their pages that I became acquainted with the writing of James Howard Kunstler, whom Leigh Phillips has described as "hav[ing] a veritable hard-on for the end of the world, imagining with relish . . . collapse . . . retreat from modernity and an embrace of the Medieval"), Jeff Goodell's article is considerably better-informed, more factually grounded and intellectually nuanced than the great majority of the other items on the subject I have seen thus far. Goodell (who, by the way, writes that collapse may come inside a decade--rather than the five and even three year periods so many others are talking about) acknowledges that the report's findings are not the surprise much of the media seems to think it is (Goodell himself wrote a noted piece on Thwaites back in 2017), and that there are enormous uncertainties not only regarding when and even if Thwaites will crack up, but what would happen afterward. He notes that this does not completely exclude scenarios where it may not make the (already pretty terrible) picture too much worse. And even the really bad ones (ten feet of sea rise) would likely be a matter of a century.

The result is that the title is a real shame--but all too revealing of how the media has tended to report on this subject (as it does on a great many others), prioritizing shock and fear over comprehension, and getting away with it because of what passes for "reading" these days. Still, even this piece lacked something that I think we should be seeing more of, hearing more of, when discussing matters like the Thwaites glacier and climate change generally--solutions. Obviously reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (decarbonizing our energy-transport system, planting more trees, etc.) is central and indispensable to the ultimate, bottom-line, long-term solution to the larger problem of global warming, and no one serious about the matter suggests not doing so. Yet there has also long been discussing the use of other ameliorative strategies that can help us cope with particular effects of such warming as we seem unlikely to be able to avoid, like saving glaciers through engineering efforts (and indeed, the idea of rescuing Thwaites specifically in this manner specifically is not unprecedented). There is no doubt that the schemes are ambitious, relying on unproven technologies--but it would certainly seem that given the stakes we should be hearing A LOT of calls for programs to develop and deploy anything that will help. However, the championing of such ideas is exactly what we do not see when we look at coverage of the issue.

Of course, it is the media's job to be skeptical--but it goes about that job in awfully "selective" fashion. Consider, for example, the New York Times Magazine's 2019 piece on hypersonic missiles. Hypersonic missiles, certainly, are a radical, far from proven technology--but that does not stop the NYT Magazine piece from being hawkish in the extreme about the claims of such missiles' development being a national priority for the United States. I cannot think of a single occasion when I saw an article in the Times and its associated publications, or any other media outlet of comparable standing, try so hard to sell its readers on the importance of a specific technological program that could help with our environmental problems, or show so much respect for the proponents of such a program, or so uncritically embrace their optimism about the feasibility and value of that technology, as they do in the case of those missiles. Instead they strain for any excuse to dismiss such a project, and close on a note of "Don't get your hopes up." And that says everything about the media's prejudices, not least that preference for fear-mongering and defeatism on the subject--to the very great cost of the dialogue on these matters, and our chances of actually dealing with the problem.