The climate crisis is an emergency, not an ‘issue’

IT’S RARE TO HEAR THE TERM “CLIMATE EMERGENCY” in media and political discourse in the United States, even though that is the term thousands of scientists say most accurately describes the situation facing humanity. More than 13,000 scientists have now signed the “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” which begins by affirming that scientists have “a moral obligation … to ‘tell it like it is’” before enumerating all the many “alarming trends [that make] it urgently necessary to act.”

With the Democratic and the Republican conventions unfolding this week...