Did Donald Trump Just Make the Planet Hotter?
The politics of climate change requires constantly comparing the very small and the very massive.
On the one hand, the carbon-dioxide molecule: three atoms, bound together by electromagnetism, that in sufficient quantities can reflect heat energy back to its source. On the other, the whole planet, our island in the sky, Earth: a medium-sized rock orbiting a medium-sized star, veiled in a thin layer of gas that determines when it rains, when it snows, whether it is a good home.
Between these two extremes hangs the entire phenomenon of climate change: a planetwide convulsion in the normal functioning of Earth’s ocean currents and weather patterns. An excess of carbon dioxide in that narrow atmosphere has trapped a century of extra heat—pushing global temperatures higher and higher, reducing the polar ice caps ever recorded, and cooking cities and towns in.
