Call it the calamity of climate journalism. After 40 years, writers are still serving up a binary issue, with idiotic back-and-forths over who is a denier in ways that work, sometimes deliberately, to undermine clear thinking and any concession to the changing science. Better can be done and last weekend a newish New York Times writer, David Wallace-Wells , in his customary excess of words, reprised his own concession since writing a 2017 New York Magazine article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth.” He now says: “Just a few years ago climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic.” He acknowledges a new consensus that has reduced expected warming to “between two and three degrees” Celsius, or less than half the forecast of, say, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment.

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