I think the heat is doing it, in the sense of engaging more people. That’s why I titled my book The Heat Will Kill You First. Some people were saying, you’re an idiot, no one’s gonna read a book like that. That’s alarmist. That’s scary. I’m not an alarmist. I’m a person who wants to communicate the scope and scale of what we face. I think a lot of coverage about climate is about futures and alternate futures. We all struggle to make it feel more real. But I really wanted the title to be about you and me and our neighbors and what’s happening right this minute.
The heat wave is doing that for people in a visceral way. My book aside, it’s kind of freaking people out a little bit. It’s very different than talking about the Doomsday Glacier or, you know, Greenland ice melting or even crop failures and things like that. It’s like, what the fuck, I can’t even go outside and check my mail. It’s too hot.
One of the things that I’ve been really struck by—and even the good climate reporters do this—is this tendency toward binary. I can’t tell you how many interviews, we’ll have a smart conversation, and then they’ll end with, “OK, so one last question: Are we doomed or not?” Or, “Is there anything we can do?” Some of it is obviously media shorthand, but it’s also this tendency toward casting this story in this sort of binary way.