Scientists and others are pushing back pretty hard against David Wallace-Wells’s doomsday portrait of climate change, the cover story in the July 10-23 issue of New York magazine. (No, not the New Yorker. Nor the New York Times Magazine either.) New York also published an “annotated edition” here.

“[N]o matter how well-informed you are,” says Wallace-Wells, “you are surely not alarmed enough.”

Just a taste of the Disaster Porn within: A cover line proclaims that the Earth could become too hot for humans in our children’s lifetimes. My favorite horror story: The increasing carbon dioxide fraction in the air we breathe might deplete our essential oxygen so severely that, by century’s end, human cognitive ability could decline by 21%.

Like we aren’t already stupid enough.

WRONG DATA, WRONG STRATEGY

Some retort that Wallace-Wells got his scientific facts wrong. Others argue that the Armageddon approach to persuasion is just an idiotic strategy, counterproductive.

The well-known climate scientist Michael Mann did a little of both, first in a Facebook post and then in a Washington Post op-ed co-authored with Susan Joy Hassol, who directs a climate outreach nonprofit, and editorial cartoonist Tom Toles.

They say, for instance, that Wallace-Wells exaggerates the threat of greenhouse gas release from melting permafrost. And climate doomism, they argue, “is in many ways as pernicious as outright climate change denial, for it leads us down the same path of inaction.”

It’s true that Wallace-Wells was cherry-picking worst-case scenarios, which he acknowledges. But at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer argues that spinning out the riskiest outcomes just isn’t realistic. Take the permafrost example: “Melting permafrost will emit methane, and methane is an ultra-potent greenhouse gas, but scientists do not think so much it will escape in the coming century.”

Indeed, Meyer says, many scientists think the warmer world will look much like today’s, only more unequal and more impoverished. Sounds as if he’s not serene about living there, though. He asks how many small wars need to start before they fuse into one? Who needs to fear planet-killing methane when 9 countries possess 15,000 nuclear weapons? “Does that world sound like a safe and secure place to live? Does it sound like a workable status quo?”

CLIMATE CHANGE FOR SCIENCE WRITERS

Mann’s and others’ critiques of worst worst-case scenarios are a wake-up call for journalists, says Rachel Becker at The Verge. Wallace-Wells told her that complacency is a bigger problem than fatalism. “[I]n general the public doesn’t appreciate the kind of threat we face.”

Becker notes that research on the effectiveness of scare tactics is mixed, but it leans toward the conclusion that dire warnings are just not potent motivators. People don’t want to think about Doomsday. To be effective, claims about future dangers have to be tied to people’s specific self-interest and coupled with practical action plans.

At Ars Technica, John Timmer described Mann’s critique. But he also tracked responses to last year’s academic declaration that, even if we stopped carbon emissions right now, warming would increase by 5 degrees Celsius.  That’s far above most estimates. (The consensus critique was that the paper’s calculations had been done wrong.) NASA’s Gavin Schmidt told Timmer, “There are of course uncertainties in the science, but that neither means we know nothing, nor does it imply that anything goes.”

David Roberts was mostly in Wallace-Wells’s corner at Vox. (The hed on his post: “Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good.”) He picked fewer scientific nits than many other commentators, even defending Wallace-Wells’s wording of the widely-trashed claims of how much methane would be released from melting permafrost.

Roberts also battles those who declare that the Doomsday approach is “not useful.” He argues that research does not support the conclusion that fear never works. “Second, even if it’s true that fear only “works” when it is joined with a sense of agency and efficacy, that doesn’t mean that every single instance of fear has to be accompanied by a serving of hope.”

What’s more, “‘Things stay roughly as they are’ is just as improbable as the worst-case scenario he [Wallace-Wells] lays out, yet I’d venture to guess it is believed (or more importantly, envisioned) by vastly more people.”

Some of Roberts’s critiques of the post-publication science commentary strike me as less persuasive than some of the commentary itself. Still, if you read only one other consideration of Wallace-Wells’s New York piece, I recommend Roberts’s. He summarizes most of the arguments, excerpts many tweets, and links to several other comments. And, for the science writers among us, he also tackles how to write about climate change. “Scientific data are not the only medium of communication or its only currency. Narrative and emotion matter too.”

OK, let’s close on an attempted cheerful note from The Onion.

Not terribly amusing, is it?