This academic year, the Holy Cross administration decided to have all incoming freshmen - a group whose opinions in the political climate in college are still up in the air - read an appallingly un-academic book that spews controversial science as dogma and goes out of its way to paint a depressing apocalyptic view of the world. It would be impossible to provide a comprehensive refutation of every supposed fact in this work, but instead I would like to explain why The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells is an appallingly unscientific book where facts are replaced by obscure controversial research that he spouts out in the hope of scaring the ill-informed into action. Additionally, I would like to discuss the abhorrent way some of the Holy Cross faculty handled the discussion, in which they endorsed the views in the book wholeheartedly without leaving much room for discussion.
The point of this book is to scare readers into action - that is its whole purpose. Wallace-Wells forges together a make-believe apocalyptic fantasy hellscape where he presents what he sees as a great existential crisis while he professes our impending doom, which is the focus of about half of the book. The longest of the four sections, “Elements of Chaos,” gives a non-stop barrage of separate doomsday scenarios fueled by conflicting statistics that suit that particular scenario to create the most terrifying situation one could imagine. He talks about every natural disaster he could think of whether that is floods, wildfire, intense heat, etc.
Additionally, Wallace-Wells will also take shots at anything or anyone right of Bernie Sanders. At one point, in his section on drowning and floods - in an attempt to inflate perceived magnitude - he uses the Black Sea deluge hypothesis as a reference point, and just so carefully includes a quick sentence about how Noah’s Ark was not an event but rather a fictional story prompted by the deluge itself. He also repeatedly brings up the supposed present-day oppression of people of color without much reason. As a book about climate change, it's hard to see how these other leftist ideas are necessary without some further political agenda beyond just climate change.
Wallace-Wells also occasionally sneaks in certain paragraphs, in an attempt to seem scientific, admitting that climate science is completely unreliable in most cases, which is a nice gesture but completely undermines his primary agenda. In his “Drowning” section, he discusses how it would be foolish to “take any of [these predictions] to the bank.” Wallace-Wells wouldn't bet on any of his own predictions, the same predictions on which his whole book is predicated, even though he presents them as facts to fit into his climate change hellscape narrative. This appears to be a theme of his, in an attempt to try and seem more legitimate as he, earlier in the “Heat Death” section of the novel, called projecting future warming a fool’s game. It would seem that what Wallace-Wells calls foolish is the same thing off of which he bases his entire fantasy world. Additionally, his flip-flopping from statistic to statistic based on different projected degrees of warming from different sources that seem convenient in the moment exposes not only his non-commitment to delivering an accurate prediction of what might happen, but also his commitment to skewing the data in a questionable manner to fit his political agenda.
The problem is not so much that the book is a terrible attempt at disinformation, as that can be easily addressed and rebutted, but that the Holy Cross faculty in charge of the discussion did not bother to address any counterargument, but rather opted to present a partisan charade where manmade change climate change, and the apocalyptic result from it, are presented as fact. The faculty instead decided to focus on what we as students can do to prevent climate change.
Many Holy Cross professors skipped the climate change debate and went straight to the partisan question that they, as partisans, seem to be most focused on. They are interested in how to solve manmade climate change, regardless of whether or not it is real or poses a significant threat to the human race. Though I am in the Divine Cluster in the Montserrat program, I spoke to students in other clusters who shared the same experience. Students in other clusters believe that opinions of the faculty were thrust upon us as mandated truth. At a required Montserrat event, faculty in charge took science as fact, and even invited the leadership of Eco-Action to speak to us for an extended amount of time, giving them an unopposed platform to impose their political opinions on the freshman class. The job of any college faculty is to present the grounds for intellectual discussion on any assigned reading, but instead all we got was a lecture on what to do with the suspected inevitable terror of an apocalyptic world fueled by the Wallace-Wells book.
To be clear, I have no problem with Eco-Action and I am not looking to pick a fight. I may disagree with what they do, but I have no problem with them operating as a student organization. What I do have a problem with is the faculty forcing us to listen to a partisan organization with no contradictory opinion being given the same platform. And to those who would say that Eco-Action isn't partisan, I would like to refer them to their mission statement, which is easily accessible on the Holy Cross website, which makes a clear mention that they work alongside political campaigns for what they refer to as “environmental” progress and supportive of “social justice.” The Holy Cross faculty in a required event, in a required class, gave a platform to a partisan group and endorsed their opinions whole-heartedly. That is my problem.
I am not going to make the same mistake as Wallace-Wells and not give solutions to this problem, which he neglects to do in his book. There is no way to change or fix the past in this situation. After the writing of this article, I will move on and most likely never think of this book or the actions that the faculty took ever again. But to prevent this situation in the future, I would suggest that the subject of climate change ought to be addressed in a way that allows the correct set of ideas to flourish (whether that be on either end of the debate), rather than a monopoly on the platform to speak by those convinced the Earth is in a state of impending turmoil as we supposedly destroy ourselves.
On a final note, just last October, 500 climate scientists wrote a letter to the UN saying that there is no climate emergency and that climate change has not caused any increase in natural disasters, but Wallace-Wells or the Holy Cross faculty would not tell you that. Instead, they would force a malleable group of people to read an unacademic book trying to scare them into having an existential crisis about climate change. The book may very well have been a disguised effort to impose a political opinion on the masses. There was no attempt to hold a discussion around the topic, and in the end it made the situation uninhabitable for those who seek to question what others say and think for themselves.