The Problem With <em>The New York Times</em>’ Big Story on Climate Change
The New York Times Magazine has tried to make the release of its new article, which details a decade of climate history, as momentous as possible. It has devoted the entire new issue of the magazine to just this one story, which is written by Nathaniel Rich. It has even produced a video trailer for it.
Having read the story, I am left to wonder: What was the point?
The article tells the tale of three men who, between 1979 and 1989, helped turn climate change into a major political issue. At the beginning of this period, few Washington officials knew much of anything about global warming. By the end, President George H.W. Bush was close to signing a United Nations treaty to address it. Rich writes with gripping, novelistic detail, and he captures the comedy and frustration of scientists struggling to shape the political sphere.
The story is bookended by a prodigious amount of material. There’s: “The second part, covering the period from 1983 to 1989 … is the part readers will be likely to find most frustrating.” And there’s a prologue and an epilogue, in which Rich makes sense of his own effort. He sees this sweep of time—this first decade in which climate change was understood to be political—as tragic in the Aristotelian sense. Some small group of men glimpsed humanity’s tragic flaw—but, woe unto us, they could not convince an intransigent and ignorant public before it was too late:
