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Let's Stop Talking About Climate Change Like It's Breaking News

Even though climate change is relatively new historically, journalists shouldn't be treating it like Justin Bieber's arrest.

| Mon Feb. 3, 2014 2:36 PM EST

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Here's the scoop: When it comes to climate change, there is no "story," not in the normal news sense anyway.


Don't misunderstand me. Each of the above was reported somewhere and climate change itself is an enormous story, if what you mean is Story with a capital S. It could even be considered the story of all stories. It's just that climate change and its component parts are unlike every other story from the Syrian slaughter and the problems of Obamacare to Bridgegate and Justin Bieber's arrest. The future of all other stories, of the news and storytelling itself, rests on just how climate change manifests itself over the coming decades or even century. What happens in the 2014 midterms or the 2016 presidential elections, in our wars, politics, and culture, who is celebrated and who ignored—none of it will matter if climate change devastates the planet.

Climate change isn't the news and it isn't a set of news stories. It's the prospective end of all news. Think of it as the anti-news.

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Climate change isn't. New as that human-caused phenomenon may be— having its origins in the industrial revolution—it's nonetheless on a different scale from everything else, which is why journalists and environmentalists often have so much trouble figuring out how to write about it in a way that leaves it continually in the news. While no one who, for instance, lived through "Frankenstorm" Sandy on the East Coast in 2012 could call the experience "boring"—winds roaring through urban canyons like freight trains, lights going out across lower Manhattan, subway tunnels flooding, a great financial capital brought to its proverbial knees—in news terms, much of global warming is boring and repetitive. I mean, drip, drip, drip. How many times can you write about the melting Arctic sea ice or shrinking glaciers and call it news? How often are you likely to put that in your headlines?

We're so used to the phrase "the news" that we often forget its essence: what's "new" multiplied by that "s." It's true that the "new" can be repetitively so. How many times have you seen essentially the same story about Republicans and Democrats fighting on Capitol Hill? But the momentousness of climate change, which isn't hard to discern, is difficult to regularly turn into meaningful "new" headlines ("Humanity Doomed If…"), to repeatedly and successfully translate into a form oriented to the present and the passing moment, to what happened yesterday, today, and possibly tomorrow.



Nuclear Dress Rehearsal

Here's the strange thing: we went through a dress rehearsal for this in the twentieth century when dealing (or not dealing) with nuclear weapons, aka the Bomb—often capitalized in my youth as a sign of how nuclear disaster was felt to be looming over life itself. With the dropping of that "victory weapon" on two Japanese cities in 1945, a new era opened. For the first time, we humans—initially in Washington, then in Moscow, then in other national capitals—took the power to end all life on this planet out of God's hands. You could think of it as the single greatest, if also grimmest, act of secularization in history. From 1945 on, at least prospectively, we could do what only God had previously been imagined capable of: create an End Time on this planet.


The US and the USSR were by then locked in a struggle that gained a remarkably appropriate acronym: MAD (for "mutually assured destruction"). During the Cold War, the US built an estimated 70,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of every size and shape, the Soviet Union 55,000, and with them went a complex semi-secret nuclear geography of missile silos, plutonium plants, and the like that shadowed the everyday landscape we knew.


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