Climate scientists must be wondering what it will take to scare us straight. Watching flood waters submerge 80 percent of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina didn't do it. Nor did videos shot by Australians in 2019 as they fled walls of flame, a hellish orange haze in all directions. Will the deaths of more than 6 million people in the Covid-19 pandemic — a tragedy that has highlighted the links between climate change and infectious disease — jolt the world into action? I wouldn't count on it.
The central problem is that climate change lacks a human face — a vision of the people who will inhabit the world to come, and what they will endure. When we look into the faces of our children and grandchildren, we're unable to form a mental picture of them struggling to survive in the world we've bequeathed to them.
