If you keep up on the popular literature on climate change-the long magazine pieces, the books touted in the New York Times, and the studies cited by climate activists and left-leaning politicians-you could be forgiven for panicking. The portrait they paint is dire. Coastal cities drowned by rising sea levels and battered by ferocious hurricanes, entire regions of the globe desiccated by skyrocketing temperatures, an entire way of life cooked, frozen, or otherwise destroyed by our reliance on fossil fuels and the carbon they release into the atmosphere.
