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I'm not wild about gotcha journalism. But geez I'd love to ask some of the people writing about climate some basic questions. What are total CO2 emissions per year? What percentage is due to the US? To China? To coal? To power generation?
How does the impact of methane compare to CO2? How long does CO2 last in the atmosphere (& how do we know)? Etc. When reading I often have the sneaking suspicion that the person writing has no quantitative understanding at all of climate.
Good intentions + no detailed quantitative understanding is simply a recipe for bad outcomes, in my opinion.
It's tempting to say "well, people aren't interested in wonkish, number-and-model laden writing". Maybe. But I wonder. In sport, people seem to love it.
I'm trying to imagine writing about basketball that eschewed all quantitative accounts of last night's big game. Most general climate writing seems a bit like discussing how good or bad LeBron looked on court last night, while ignoring points, rebounds, assists etc.
Funny thing is: of course, there's a tonne of great books, online classes etc that are full of this stuff. I've found the IPCC report(s) surprisingly readable and interesting. But it all seems sub rosa from the pov of popular culture.
Is there a good cheat sheet with these kinds of numbers online anywhere?
Good question. Not sure. IIRC the first few chapters of Robert Henson's "Thinking Person's Guide to Climate Change" provided a lot of the basics. Not sure how systematic it was.
You mean "per capita" emissions.
No, I didn't.
I don't disagree, but climate coverage isn't too different from other popular science topics. Popular science writing seems to have always provided just a cursory summary. Think Time mag story on medicine vs a SI story on baseball recruiting. Maybe thats what readers can bear?
Popular science is mostly for entertainment, & it doesn't bug me that it's mostly written that way. Climate is, notionally, about the future of civilization - certainly, many ppl writing about it write that way, even if they're not actually writing seriously.
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