Throughout 2006 and 2007, just after my son was born, I used to walk in the park with a much older communist friend. He would amuse the baby by feeding acorns to the squirrels, and he’d provide me with much-needed grownup conversation. A lifelong radical, active in the National Lawyers’ Guild, and an invaluable font of information on revolution in Nepal, my friend was emphatically unconcerned about at least one issue: climate change. He didn’t have any kids or grandkids, he explained, and by the time problems began to arise, he’d be dead. “I just don’t have any stake in it,” he’d say

Hardly any serious political person thinks this way anymore.

Humans have had access to the science on global warming since the 1980s at the latest. But the 2010s were the decade when climate change lost its abstraction, even to those of us living in rich countries.