Mercury Rising

Fortitude is necessary if you’re looking to read today’s climate change books, as they come with such titles as The Uninhabitable Earth, The Plundered Planet, The Super-Fucked World, and The Weather Is Coming to Kill You. (The first couple are real; the other two will, I’m sure, appear in bookstores sometime in 2020.) Add to this cascade of books the daily news reports of California wildfires and Australia wildfires and whatever wildfires have erupted since you began this paragraph. Even reviews now serve as disturbing companion literature. In a February 2019 issue of the London Review of Books, for example, McKenzie Funk opened his assessment of four climate change publications by describing his move to Ashland, Oregon, during fire season, where he soon got “used to wearing my smoke mask in public, grunting muffled hellos to other pedestrians in masks of their own.”

Climate change makes for emotional subject matter — as it should...