Climate change has emerged as a significant issue only in the last few years. Though evidence has been building for decades, it has taken this long to reach a point where Leno & Letterman can joke about it and be understood. Al Gore’s remarkable documentary certainly went a long way in building this awareness, but what left me unsatisfied about it was the lack of a plan of action. What are our options now? Their costs. Probabilities of various outcomes. Etc.

Here is a calm and rational survey article, Warmer, Warmer, by John Lanchester, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, on how we got here, the politics of climate change, our realistic options, viable alternate energies, and the various possible scenarios for the future, including one which might include “breeding pairs, and camels in the Arctic”.

I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it. This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar sensation: someone my age is likely to have spent a couple of formative decades trying not to think too much about nuclear war, a subject which offered the same combination of individual impotence and prospective planetary catastrophe. Global warming is even harder to ignore, not so much because it is increasingly omnipresent in the media but because the evidence for it is starting to be manifest in daily life. Even a city boy like me can see evidence that the world is a little warmer than it was.

Part of the problem is one of scale. Global warming is as a subject so
much more important than almost anything else that it is difficult to
frame or discuss. At the moment there is a global warming-related item
on the news at least once a week. Today, for instance, there are two:
close to home, a judge throwing out the government’s phoney
‘consultation’ process over nuclear power, and further away, at a
conference in Washington, an ‘informal agreement’ marking a new
commitment to ‘tackling climate change’ and resulting in a
‘non-binding’ declaration which reflected ‘a real change of mood’. Just
what the world needs – more hot air. And then the news moves on to
other things, to contaminated Anglo-Hungarian turkeys and gang
shootings and potential schisms in the Anglican Church. There is a kind
of falsehood built into this; at the very least, a powerful degree of
denial. If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason
to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church
fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant to
think about it because we’re worried that if we start we will have no
choice but to think about nothing else.

Warmer, Warmer continued