It is now October of 2020, the homestretch or—God help us—the halfway point of the Donald Trump years. As we flip through our metaphorical national photo album, reminiscing on some of the all-time darkest moments, there are so many to consider. You’ve got Charlottesville, of course, with the marching Nazis holding tiki torches—Trump’s “very fine people.” The peaceful protesters being tear-gassed in front of St. John’s Church. The maskless superspreader event in the Rose Garden. One event that comes up less often is Trump’s California wildfire briefing, early last month. The West Coast was in flames. The skies above San Francisco were red. Smoke and ash blotted out the sun. And the President was on television assuring the public that “it’ll start to get cooler. You just watch.” He added, “I don’t think science knows” the truth about climate change.
Altogether, an extremely grim tableau. But among some environmental activists there was cause for celebration. For once, climate change had broken into the foreground of our insane news cycle. Within a week of Trump’s California visit, there was a pileup of evening TV news segments on the subject. “NBC Nightly News” did a piece about California climate refugees. CNN anchors interviewed the former California governor Jerry Brown about climate change and discussed Trump’s appointment of David Legates—a known climate-change denier—to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Frankly, it was better than anything I’d even dreamed,” the activist Genevieve Guenther told me recently, from her home in the West Village. “I’d been hoping the news anchors would mention climate change. But they didn’t just do that. They talked about it as the emergency that it is. And they gave their guests space to connect it to the Presidential elections and American politics, and even talk about some of the policy solutions.”
Guenther runs a volunteer group called End Climate Silence, which is focussed on combatting something more subtle than the aggressive climate denial espoused by Trump and his allies in government, or on Fox News: when news anchors or weather forecasters breathlessly cover an extreme-weather event—a hurricane, drought, forest fire, or heat wave—without ever mentioning the C-phrase. Instead, they’ll talk around it, using terms like “historic,” “unprecedented,” and “record-shattering.” According to Guenther, this silence is just as pernicious as denial. “There is a name for the unprecedented intensity and scale and relentlessness of extreme-weather disasters,” she said. “Climate change.” She added, “If you fail to mention that, it gives people the impression that it’s not happening—that these disasters are acts of God.”
Until recently, climate silence was the norm on television. In September, as the wildfires raged, the nonprofit group Media Matters published a study showing that only four per cent of ABC, NBC, and CBS news segments on the wildfires the month before had mentioned climate change. On September 10th, Guenther published an op-ed in the Boston Globe, citing another Media Matters finding that there had been a similar silence around Hurricane Laura. (Out of fifty network news segments on the storm between August 24th and August 27th, none had mentioned climate change.) “For too long, journalists have feared that reporting the links between extreme weather and climate change might expose them to the charge of liberal bias,” she wrote. “But the news media should not be influenced by such tactics.” She included data from a poll that her group had commissioned, showing that the majority of Americans—including the majority of Republicans—want the media to highlight connections between climate change and extreme weather. She promoted the findings on Twitter, where she has about thirty-four thousand followers.“I tweeted at the prime-time news shows’ producers and anchors. And I suspect that they did see it, just because of the dramatic shift in coverage,” Guenther said. Or the turnaround could have been driven entirely by Trump. “Whatever it was, I’ll take it.”
Guenther is relatively new to climate activism. Until recently, she was an English professor. She got her Ph.D. from Berkeley, in 2004, in Renaissance literature. Her first book, “Magical Imaginations,” analyzed texts by Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. (Renaissance Quarterly called it “sensible” and “brilliant.”) In 2010, she was teaching at the University of Rochester, where she had a tenure-track job. But she and her husband, a software engineer, had a baby that year, and, as she spent her maternity leave at her apartment, something gradually shifted. Studying Renaissance literature began to seem less important. So did commuting between the West Village and Rochester. Her husband worked at Google, so they didn’t need the money. “I just couldn’t do it,” she said.
She quit her job, stayed home, and planned to write a book on Shakespeare. She spent hours nursing her son while scrolling through the Times on her phone. “For the first time in my life, I started really reading the newspaper,” she said. She lingered on the Science section. “The stories about climate change really stuck with me, and started to make me anxious,” she explained. “The articles were saying that all these terrible things are going to happen by the year 2100 if we do not bring our emissions down to zero.” Equatorial cities exposed to furnace-like heat. New York, London, Mumbai, and Shanghai subsumed by the sea. Wars in India and China as three billion people fight over water from the evaporating Himalayan glaciers. Refugees flooding into southern Europe, which will itself be struggling with food shortages and drought. All these events are predicted to happen if the world is allowed to heat up by three degrees Celsius by 2100—which, mind-bogglingly, it will do if countries merely keep to the pledges in the Paris climate accord. (And no major country is on track to do even that.) “My son was born in 2010, and I knew that his life was going to play out across the twenty-first century. That meant he would see these predictions,” Guenther said.
She put aside Shakespeare and started enrolling in online climate-science courses. Then, in 2017, came an event that radicalized her: the Times hired Bret Stephens, a former Wall Street Journal columnist with a history of questioning climate science, as a writer for its Opinion section. Guenther was outraged. “I thought I could trust them to understand the gravity of this, and not imagine that climate denial was a legitimate position in 2017,” she said. She started an online petition calling for Stephens to be fired. It didn’t work, but Guenther came to the attention of a group of climate scientists who are active on Twitter, including Michael Mann, Peter Kalmus, and Gavin Schmidt.
Guenther began to think that she might have something to contribute to the dialogue. “In Renaissance literature, there’s a rhetorical principle called energia—energy or vividness,” she said. “It means that, if you’re trying to persuade your reader, you need to give them vivid images that will capture their imaginations.” She found most “climate communications” to be energia-deficient. “It was too data-driven and abstract. It would talk about ice and the sea and polar bears—none of the things that made it urgent and personal to me.” Instead of the Shakespeare book, she began writing a book about what she calls “the language of climate change.” It analyzes common words and phrases in the field, arguing that many of them are counterproductive, “misrepresenting the problem and biasing us against the solutions.”
Researchers such as Naomi Oreskes have documented the ways that, over the years, fossil-fuel interests have weaponized the notion of “scientific uncertainty” to manipulate public opinion. In one chapter, Guenther focusses on the word “uncertainty” itself. “For normal people, you hear ‘uncertainty’ and it suggests that you don’t know something,” she explained. “But in climate science ‘uncertainty’ basically means a range of possible outcomes. As in, ‘The uncertainty interval is from 1.5 degrees Celsius to three degrees Celsius.’ The synonym for that is confidence.”
She also dislikes the word “consensus”—as in “the scientific consensus on climate change”—because it gives rise to the vaguely conspiratorial image of a group of scientists getting together and coming to an agreement. “In science, consensus doesn’t refer to a discussion,” she said. “It means knowledge that arises from independent research projects which all achieve the same results.” She prefers the term “discovery.” And she takes issue with the ubiquitous “we,” as in, “We could have stopped climate change in the nineteen-eighties.” “You think this little pronoun is so innocent, but it actually obscures the political reality of the whole problem,” she said, bringing up the vast differences in the carbon emissions of rich and poor countries, and the role of the fossil-fuel industry in blocking solutions. She has written that, instead of thinking of climate change as something that “we are doing,” most people should think of it as “something we are being prevented from undoing.”
Guenther was carving out a niche for herself discussing these ideas in panel appearances and on Twitter, when, in the summer of 2018, she spent a morning stuck in traffic, listening to public radio. In the course of three hours, she listened to three stories: a segment about catastrophic flooding in Japan; an interview with a cattle rancher in drought-stricken Oregon; and an interview with a French-Moroccan futurist. “He was praising the idea of covering the planet with rivers of driverless cars—without ever discussing the fact that we need to entirely electrify our transportation system within the next thirty years in order to hold warming at two degrees Celsius!” Guenther said. She went on, “These three stories were clearly about climate change, but the announcers never even mentioned it once. And this was NPR! I felt like I was in some horror movie where I knew something terrible was happening but everyone was going about their lives in this surreal, almost zombified fashion.” She wrote a rant about the experience on Twitter, where it sparked a discussion among journalists. A couple weeks later, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes was weighing in on the subject, writing in a tweet, “Almost without exception. every single time we’ve covered [climate change] it’s been a palpable ratings killer. so the incentives are not great.” Guenther suggested that, instead of doing segments focussed on climate change, he should make an effort to mention it in the coverage he was already doing. Hayes replied, “That I agree with and it’s something we do.”
