“All politics is local,” Tip O’Neill, the legendary Capitol Hill pol, used to say. He wasn’t talking about the politics of climate change, but he might as well have been. Powerful governments around the world have failed to act in a significant way to fight climate change, and it’s pretty clear why: Their constituents don’t feel in any real sense that climate change is affecting them locally.

This is the fundamental inconvenient truth that advocates of tougher climate action face, and it’s underscored in a new report issued this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a collection of thousands of scientists that stands as the conventional wisdom on the causes and effects of global warming. The report seeks to rally policies that will slash carbon-dioxide emissions by as much as 70 percent, in large part by phasing out the use of fossil fuels. To do so, it musters various scary descriptions about the havoc that global warming already has begun to, and might increasingly in the future, bring the planet. But it equivocates on how climate change will affect specific places at specific times.

That’s as it should be; climate science today can’t make many finely localized predictions. But here’s the thing: Until science can do that, people, and thus governments, aren’t likely to be willing to do the heavy lifting required to curb carbon emissions as much as the IPCC wants.

History is filled with examples of places that solved local environmental problems. Cleveland, where pollution from local factories caused the Cuyahoga River to catch fire in 1969, cleaned it up. Los Angeles, beset with a notorious smog problem that for decades after World War II yellowed its skies and clogged its residents’ lungs, cleaned it up. The U.S. Midwest, showered through the 1980s with acid rain largely from coal-fired power plants, largely cleaned it up. On a grander scale, multiple countries came together in 1989 and approved the Montreal Protocol, a treaty to phase out the use of chemicals that had caused a hole in the planet’s ozone layer. They were persuaded that the ozone hole was jeopardizing their citizens’ health.

Climate change is different. For one thing, the fossil fuels that the new IPCC report says are “extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century” are the substances on which much of modern life depends. They’re systemically important in a way that the chemicals that burned a hole in the ozone layer were not. For another, the effects of climate change thus far don’t strike most people as critical to solve. The most dramatic consequences are affecting critters other than humans, and we, like most species, tend to be most concerned about ourselves. The effects that threaten humans, meanwhile, tend not to incite visceral fear, either because they’re likely to play out first in faraway places or because they will take a long time to play out at all.