'The fog of distance' worsens of perceptions of climate change

Ian Cheney.

If anyone was looking for clarity from the recent United Nations climate talks in Paris, they will have been sorely disappointed. To some people the outcome suggested that human civilization was finally taking some measured steps to readjust the global thermostat. For others, the world remains tethered to a business-as-usual inertia.

And for some climate scientists, the situation is looking increasingly dire.

Should it really be this hard? If puffing gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is warming the planet — and the science is clear that it is — then we ought to just stop the puffing and the problem will be fixed, right? If only it were that easy. The climate problem and its potential solutions are, in a word, big. They are big politically, scientifically, technologically, and temporally, and they are enormous psychologically — even emotionally.

Read Ian Cheney’s story “The Measure of a Fog: Distance.”