Dear Media: In relation to Climate Change, stop talking about temperature.

Dear Media,

When you talk about Climate Destabilization (Destruction), stop talking about temperature. Stop talking about how it was the “hottest year on record” this year, because it isn’t the least bit helpful in either driving the issue home or helping anyone better understand the issue.

It doesn’t matter how often you remind us of the issue, if people don’t understand it, the weight and the impact of it, those reminders are useless.

You are smart enough to know what the cause of and consequently the solution to the problem is; Carbon Emissions. You’re smart enough to know the Carbon Emissions drives Global Heating and communicate how Global Heating is bad. But you can’t seem to communicate the specific details of what Global Heating drives, even though that is the part that matters, the part that is directly going to impact people.

I interned at the Luc Hoffman Institute in Geneva for 2 weeks over the 2019 Summer, an organization that acts effectively as a startup incubator and capital injector for projects that seek to defend against the Biodiversity Crisis being wreaked partially due and alongside the Climate Crisis. As part of my work there, I was tasked with coming up with visualizations of the Biodiversity Crisis for Social Media. For inspiration, I looked to similar data visualizations for Climate Change and Global Heating and discovered something pretty concerning; everything was focused on temperature.

Temperature, from a data scientist point of view, is great for many reasons. It’s easy to interpret, it’s one of the easiest things to create visualizations of (trust me, I did this in a data science course), it’s easily accessible (through comprehensive databases) and we’ve been collecting it for years. It’s easy to point at a graph and show where the trend line takes a dangerous spike. It’s the most direct interpretation for the evidence of Climate Change, and it is undeniable. It is the truth.

We can see what areas of the Earth are warming fastest, where the trends are, and extrapolate. It’s a wonderful visualization.

However, and I cannot stress this enough, rising temperatures are not the direct impact. Rising temperatures are just the mechanism that drives the changes we really should be worried about; Erratic weather patterns that encourage worse, more destructive weather phenomena, hurricanes, floods, hailstorms. Melting ice reducing freshwater availability. Changing Climates worsening the conditions necessary for crop growth while perpetuating new populations of insects, bugs, parasites that feast and destroy those very same crops. Ocean acidification, leading to coral death leading to the death of fish and aquatic crops that feed a healthy portion of the human population. Changing Climates that encourage desertification that is hard to reverse, driving droughts and famines, causing fires that ravage the very environments from which we evolved and that, not long ago, were the places that we lived. New diseases breaking out of incubation under centuries of ice or evolving in the new conditions. All these factors reducing our physical security, our food security, our water security, and everything else the bountiful Earth gives us that we have been able to take for granted until now.

Yes, heatwaves will kill more and more people every year. Yes, we will continue to see hotter summers on record. But this is not the direct impact.

Yes, these everchanging phenomena are being reported on, but only as they happen, as the apocalyptic reality of Climate Change evolves in real time. But we don’t have that luxury of putting together the pieces of the puzzle as it unfolds.

It’s as if we’re analyzing the scene of the crime as we’re in the process of committing our own, murder, slowly piecing the various murder weapons we used against ourselves, which, as it turns out, is more of an accidental suicide. Worst of all, we knew that something along these lines was going to happen, and yet we’re absorbed in proving ourselves right instead of acting on faith in our own, now proven to be feasible predictions.

It’s a disservice to ourselves, to the part of us that isn’t intent on that fate, to be passive and absorbed in our 20/20 hindsight.

Our comprehension of the great impact of Global Heating and resultantly Climate Change is fragmented in individual news stories and reduced to mentions. But this fails to address how this is all linked, and how this will all impact people.

I understand the mass media’s dedication to journalism that highlights the impartial, objective truth. But the truth is only so good as how well it has been explained, and how well people act on it. And so far, by those standards, no matter the accuracy, the truth has failed.

If a gunman was about to enter your house to murder your friends and family, you wouldn’t just say “there’s a man outside with a gun”, you would warn them that the man is going to enter the house to kill them, and if they still don’t move because they’re paralyzed with fear or confusion, you would yell “run!”

It’s not enough to tell people that the planet has been warming for the past 60 years due to Carbon Emissions, you need to tell people what this means, show them what will happen, and tell them what to do. Where is the journalistic conscience?

So stop talking about heat. Start talking about what heat does. Bring people closer to the issue. Help them understand the bigger picture. Help them understand not only the problem and how to solve it, but why we’re fucked if we don’t.