Science Quote by Mark L. Campbell

“The sky is not burning” is a deliberately theatrical dismissal of climate urgency, borrowing the language of catastrophe only to swat it away. Campbell isn’t just disputing projections; he’s reframing the entire debate as a media ethics scandal. By calling alarm “journalistic malpractice,” he shifts the burden of proof from scientific institutions to newsrooms, implying the real emergency is narrative inflation. The move is savvy: if the audience can be convinced the press is negligent or partisan, they don’t need to adjudicate carbon budgets or attribution science. They can simply distrust the messengers.

The subtext is grievance politics in a lab coat. “The press only promotes” casts skeptics as an excluded minority, suggesting a rigged marketplace of ideas where dissent is suppressed rather than disproven. That claim plays well in an attention economy: it invites readers to see themselves as clear-eyed contrarians, immune to herd panic. It also smuggles in a false symmetry. “Alarmists” implies an emotional, irrational camp, while “those of us who are skeptical” signals sobriety and restraint, as if skepticism is an identity rather than a method with standards of evidence.

Context matters because climate communication has been scarred by two opposing media failures: years of false balance that elevated weak contrarian claims, followed by an era of sharper scientific consensus where skepticism can feel, to its adherents, like exile. Campbell’s intent is to recast that shift as censorship, and to turn a scientific question into a referendum on trust, bias, and who gets to speak with authority.