Our own flavour of climate avoidance — why science journalism can’t save us [Part 2]

If something goes BANG, our nervous system fire-hoses our bodies with red-hot stress hormones before our brain’s senior management has a chance to think through which of the first responders it should send out to deal with the emergency.

The reason our species is still here after a few million years of evolutionary tweaking is because our ancestors handed us a good get-out-of-danger startle response.

BANG = fight, flight or freeze has worked well so far. Another handy evolutionary tweak is that we tend to focus on immediate threats to our survival, before we stare down the more remote ones, be they distant by time or geography.

This explains why so many people – even smart, well-read people – are in a dream state regarding how bad the climate crisis is.

Science journalists are not immune to the same survival responses. This might explain why climate change was on the agenda at the recent World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ), held for the first time on the Africa continent, right here in Pretoria, in early December.

Climate collapse wasn’t.

Science journalists are in survival mode

Journalists are humans before we’re societal watchdogs, and we’re subject to the same ailment that’s gripping the rest of society as we confront the climate situation: we either lurch towards a state of fight [active, gloves-on denial: “it’s not that bad’], flight [head-in-the-sand denial: “oh, look, pretty sparkly, distracting things”], or freeze [wide-eyed paralysis: “… !!!”].

Front-and-centre in most journalists’ minds at the conference was the more immediate existential threat to our professional survival, both to our collective craft and to our individual ambition to put food on the table. The loss of newsroom revenues to the tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley has brought a global cull to the science journalism beat. First, social media has taken over the news and information ecosystem, and commandeered the ad revenues that go with it; and now AI is churning out the very content that’s increasingly going to fill up that ecosystem.

It’s hard to fret about the distant threat of a heatwave or hurricane or wildfire to other people, when we don’t know how to pay the bills this month. That’s how grave the situation is for many of us.

The talking points throughout the conference were of shrinking newsroom budgets, where science reporting is often the first to get the chop. The non-salaried, no-benefits freelancers once again surfaced as those living the more precarious existence. Because we’re such niche content specialists, many science journalists are freelancers.

We were also all confounded by what AI means now, as our craft suddenly looks like it might be on the brink of redundancy.

Climate change: societal collapse will come before ecosystem collapse

There were a few slots on the WCSJ programme that were framed by how to report effectively on climate change. But none that framed how serious the climate crisis is.

Did anyone at the conference mention that we’ve blasted through the 1.5°C safety barrier of average global heating, and that we’re hurtling into climate incognita? No one raised the alarm about how extreme the extreme weather events are that we’re reporting on almost daily, already.

These disasters are arriving far faster and with much greater severity than modelling suggested they would once we reached the 1.5°C guardrail that marks the edge of the safe climatic zone we’ve enjoyed for the past 12,000 years or so. None one spoke about what this means for societal collapse – when the rule of law comes undone; commerce crumbles along with the financial system; when populations crash; and cultural norms go into freefall.

Societal collapse will come before ecosystem collapse, according to Dr Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. In it, he studies what he calls “Goliath” societies – a more appropriate framing, he argues, than to use the term great “civilisations” when referring to empires such as the Greeks, Romans or British – and compares them to us today.

Kemp argues that the rise-and-fall patterns of these Goliath societies are similar throughout: gross inequality, the downtrodden rise up, the grotesquely wealthy elite unleash the dogs of war so as to keep their hold on power and privilege, the society collapses and reorganises. Sometimes, the collapse and reorganisation is for the greater good, and the broader citizenry gets a fair shake again, while the elite are put in their place.

Where is our current Goliath society, now that we’ve blasted through so many planetary boundaries, not just the 1.5°C guardrail?

We openly need to look at the rise of authoritarian strongmen around the world. Case in point: the US’ recent sabre-rattling as it hijacks oil tankers, threatens an illegal takeover of Greenland, launches imperial manoeuvres in Venezuela and commandeers shipping routes through the increasingly ice-free Arctic.

Kemp reckons we’re roughly three-quarters of the way down the path to collapse, and that we’ll see it happening within our lifetimes.

The difference between today’s collapse and the historic cases Kemp studies in his book, though, is that in the past, the dogs of war only had axes or rifles, and conflicts were local.

Today, the dogs of war have nuclear warheads. Hashtag: mutually assured global destruction.

Do science journalists know how bad it really is?

In the closing session of the 2025 WCSJ, the South African Science Journalists’ Association and the local organising committee – who did an outstanding job hosting the event – handed the torch over to the Association of British Science Writers ahead of the next conference set to take place in London in 2027.

But during the wrap-up, a question from the floor pondered if it was appropriate for us to be racking up this many air miles, and dumping even more carbon pollution into an already overflowing atmospheric “sewer”, for a nice-to-have get-together? The moderator seemed a bit confounded by the notion, and somewhat dismissive. The theme for the 2027 event, which will be held within reaching distance of Westminster, is framed around building global networks for a stronger profession.

Our profession is struggling now more than ever, with our beat being the first to get the chop as newsrooms around the world face grave funding cuts. We do need solidarity; we need strong networks. But should it come at the cost of a stable climate? How can science journalists wake up the public to the seriousness of the climate crisis, and hold policymakers accountable as rigorously as the emergency demands, if we’re in a state of denial or avoidance ourselves? DM

Leonie Joubert is on a multi-year mobile journalism project that’s investigating how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime. Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism.