The year is 2100—and three quarters of our state’s beaches have disappeared. That’s a future we could be facing, according to a New York Times article published on Oct. 19, 2026, analyzing California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment.

Dire findings and predictions about the climate have dominated news cycles, public forums and classroom discussions over the last decade and beyond, and not without reason. But despite the constant warnings and legitimate concerns, the precision with which these issues are portrayed and discussed in our popular discourse varies.

In the article, the New York Times highlighted the three quarters statistic from the climate assessment, but didn’t mention the full context. A little digging reveals that it comes from a 2023 academic paper that used a model to predict that 24% to 75% of California beaches could become completely eroded due to different sea-level rise scenarios. In other words, the three quarters prediction is an upper bound, which is a significant distinction to make when we’re weighing a policy response.

To be clear, this is no warning to skim over, and the New York Times has an obligation to illuminate potential catastrophic climate outcomes. But when our environmental discourse becomes dominated by headline-grabbing statistics that can make issues feel overblown or imprecise, we lose the habit of close reading and analysis that often reveals—as in the case of beach erosion—a more complicated situation. Forming effective responses to climate precarity requires us to be sure we know exactly what we’re facing, and from there we can decide how to act.

Like many social issues, climate discourse has been given its own vocabulary of buzzwords in recent years. Terms and labels like ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘sustainable’ are used often, but are exponentially broad and don’t have much to say on their own about the potential trade-offs we face when responding to climate issues with our scarce resources.

Even students at Santa Clara University have noted a susceptibility to the terms used to describe something’s effect on the environment, calling into question whether University sustainability initiatives like using biodegradable utensils are truly effective, or just examples of greenwashing.

The solution to a discourse laden with such imprecision is not activism, per se. Environmental protests are important for prompting initial engagement, but they ultimately fail to engender a rigorous conversation because they reward minimally nuanced positions. On its own, holding a sign or simply saying “save the beaches” accomplishes little because it fails to recognize the constraints we face as a society—we’re naturally limited in the resources we can devote to protecting beaches because of how many other things we also care about.

Instead, we need a more academic process that digs into details—like how the 24% to 75% spread impacts our policy response—and is willing to honestly challenge conventional wisdom. Caring about the climate is great, but what’s crucial is contributing to a conversation about how, considering our constraints, we can optimize our impact—the right amount to spend on mitigating sea level rise and coastal erosion isn’t zero, and it’s not ten trillion.

Santa Clara University’s own level of engagement with environmental issues is laudable. In 2022, the University launched its Sustainability Strategic Action Plan—part of its larger Impact 2030—that outlines a holistic approach to climate change over the next decade. One of the plan’s five main goal areas is academics, where the University specifically aims to have a sustainability learning requirement by 2032.

Beyond the classroom, The University’s Center for Sustainability is the epicenter of climate discourse on campus, with research symposiums that highlight emerging academic work on the climate.

“If you have access to information—the science of it—you can form your own opinion,” said Linsdey Kalkbrenner, the senior director and founding sustainability officer at the Center for Sustainability. “When we’re having discourse and dialogue, we’re going to be basing our conversations on facts.”

The infrastructure for nuanced climate discussion—meaning respect for empirical evidence and curiosity for new perspectives—exists at Santa Clara University, and it’s our responsibility to execute it. The strength and accuracy of broader climate discourse depends in large part on our commitment as an institution of higher learning to dispassionate academic analysis, and less so to protest, where we’re prone to imprecision.

Environmental issues are emotional issues, and there’s no avoiding that—people, rightfully so, are deeply invested in the wellbeing of the planet. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we need precise portrayals and precise solutions, and these come not from hiding behind vague terms or repeating incomplete information, but from furthering real conversations.