David Wallace-Wells: I’d written a previous cover story about bee death, but I hadn’t done a ton of straight-ahead climate writing. And in a sort of perverse way, I think that was one of the qualifying things about my background for that story and this book. I was coming at it fresh. I had a different perspective than people who had devoted their lives to it—which is that I don’t actually, like, intuitively care all that much about nature per se. And so [in the story] I wasn’t writing about the plight of the animals or the tragedy of the rainforest. I was focused on people.

In that first piece, I also really focused on worst-case scenarios. I looked at scenarios north of 4 degrees [Celsius of global warming], 5 degrees, 6 degrees, even 8 degrees—and I thought it was very important to introduce those scenarios to the broader public because they were so far from what even the general, engaged, liberal understanding of climate change was.

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It made me think that there were all of these other downstream effects of climate change that even academics hadn’t begun to contemplate. We have this idea over the last few centuries that history may be erratic, it may punish some people here and there, but generally over time, as time marches forward, we see progress, we see lives getting more prosperous and safer and healthier.

While I don’t think it’s safe to say that climate will completely undo that, I think it’s quite likely that it does transform that perspective in some way. It’s certainly within the realm of conceivability that damages accumulate so significantly that we totally drop that idea about history as an arrow of progress and start thinking of it as something that is much less reliable, even something that takes us backward rather than forward.

Meyer: I want to talk about that more, but first I want to follow up on this idea of the “general, engaged understanding” of climate change. I think about that a lot. What do you think the general understanding of the issue is?

Wallace-Wells: It’s actually changing quite quickly. I think that my article played a small role in that, but the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report was a way bigger deal. It really does seem to have awakened a huge amount of alarmism and panic, and it also sort of invited scientists to speak more openly about the issue. But when I first started writing, I was motivated by the divergence between what I saw coming out of academic research and how those stories were being told in most mainstream publications. And that was along three points.

The first point is about the speed of change. The emphasis was always about how slow climate change was, and how it was hard to deal with because there was no urgency to it. But the animating fact to me is that more than half of all the emissions ever produced from the burning of fossil fuels have been produced in just the last three decades. That transformed my perspective—I realized that this is something that we’re doing very much in real time.