As Hurricane Sandy bore down on the East Coast in late October, everyone from Bill McKibben to Andrew Cuomo declared the storm our wake-up call on climate change. Now we would finally have that serious conversation we’d been meaning to get around to; faced with apocalyptic images of flooded subways and decimated houses, we would be shocked out of complacency and into action. Damian Carrington’s column in the Guardian was typical:

If Sandy — and this summer’s record US heat wave — end up blowing Obama back into the White House with enough wind in his sails to persuade him to make climate change a winning issue, it really could have positive global consequences. If not, I shudder to think what scale of apocalyptic disaster will be needed to destroy the political cowardice among world leaders that is stoking the ever greater climate change storms of the future.

Climate change, as the jargon has it, is “super wicked”: it presents notorious obstacles to action. Unlike air pollution, you can’t see carbon in the atmosphere or feel it in your lungs. The people responsible for the vast majority of emissions are relatively insulated from their impacts. The costs of taking action are immediate, the benefits distant and uncertain — though not as distant as recently thought. Understanding climate change’s causes and possible effects demands a great deal of abstract reasoning, both scientific and ethical. Which is why, despairing that well-cushioned Americans would ever voluntarily reduce carbon emissions at the sight of the steep slope of a line graph or out of concern for the millions displaced in the Global South, many disillusioned activists have darkly predicted that only the immediacy of disaster at home could generate the political will to address climate change.