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 and next, it’s high time for news coverage to catch up with science and make the “climate emergency” a leading topic in the national political conversation. To be sure, climate change has gotten much more attention in 2020 than in previous campaigns; the first night of the Democratic convention featured several overtures towards climate action. But by and large, climate is still treated as just another issue. That’s partly because most candidates still don’t say that we face a climate emergency (though Joe Biden comes closer than any major party nominee in history). But it’s also because many news outlets still seem not to recognize climate change as different than the other political subjects they cover. This one has a strict, rapidly closing time limit: wait too long to take aggressive action, and the climate emergency accelerates beyond resolution.