Excerpt:
The emerging genre of climate fiction is portraying — in ways that nonfiction can’t — the perils of a scorching planet.

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.

Sure, news reports and scientific texts about climate change have presented a clear-eyed view of what we’ve done to the planet over the last century and where that’s left us. The most recent United Nations report, for instance, painted an alarming portrait of Earth in the grips of climate change. But even those warnings may not capture the full extent of the brewing catastrophe: According to a Washington Post investigation published in November of last year, numerous countries continue to underreport their greenhouse gas emissions. In any case, the more recent warnings quickly faded from the news cycle, replaced by coverage of the crisis in Ukraine. While the war in Ukraine is a unique event, the loss of focus on our climate crisis is anything but.

So when will we be frightened into action..?