ABSTRACT: David Wallace-Wells’ July 2017 New York magazine article on climate change effects entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth” gained a large and drastically polarized readership whose reactions veered from horrified appreciation to utter rejection of the author and the several scientists he cites. This publishing event put on display contemporary mistrust of science. The analysis of trust and authority demonstrates that these terms conceal a great deal of ambivalence. When authority is corrupted, the effect is not ambivalence but disorientation. If trust is often impossible, as it appears to be in contemporary climate debates, a suitably pessimistic politics can be found in Fisher and Ury’s phrase “proceed independent of trust.”