Climate allegories in "The Last of Us"

Climate change is such a vast, all-encompassing topic that it is difficult for the human mind to fully grasp. Try to discuss the catastrophic implications of a 2-degree Celsius increase in average global temperature to an uninvested stranger, and you're apt to see their eyes roll back in their head. It's just a number or a temperature graph. What does it have to do with anything? Even many climatologists to whom I've spoken, whose job it is to study global temperature trends, struggle to picture the enormity and cascading consequences of this slow-moving disaster. It boggles the mind; and yet, no one is acting fast enough.

Unless a wildfire or flood is serious enough to splash across national headlines, the day-to-day effects of climate change aren't exactly in your face. A heat wave here, a crop failure there. These are slow, often isolated changes, sometimes referred to with abstract terms like "anthropocene," attached to seemingly distant dates like 2050 — a year when, if we change nothing about energy policy, greenhouse emissions are projected to increase by 50 percent from today. Sure, we're going in the wrong direction — but that's roughly three decades from now. This can all be easy to ignore.

So it is remarkable when a piece of art comes along that makes the incomprehensible comprehensible. The new HBO drama series "The Last of Us" is not only a masterful adaptation of an innovative video game universe, it is an (almost) perfect metaphor for climate change. The show helps visualize a difficult to grasp concept through the use of an infectious fungal disease without being preachy about it — which sets it apart from films like "Don't Look Up," which used a deadly comet as a stand-in for climate change.