How do you talk about an emergency when it seems as if no one is listening? For years, journalists, scientists, and activists concerned with the ongoing horror of climate catastrophe have faced this problem. Arguably the most important issue of our time, climate change is a known ratings killer. If you aren’t already a victim of climate-related disaster, the issue can feel far away, and many readers find the unrelenting rise of global warming too disturbing, or simply too overwhelming, to contemplate. “No one wants to read about climate,” a literary agent once told me, “It’s too depressing.”

LOSING EARTH: A RECENT HISTORY by Nathaniel Rich MCD, 224 pp., $25.00

THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: LIFE AFTER WARMING by David Wallace-Wells Tim Duggan Books, 320 pp., $27.00

For journalists, scientists, activists, and those engaged in “climate communication”—a burgeoning field dedicated to understanding how information about climate change moves through cultural systems—the question of how to tell engaging stories remains open and urgent. Climate change is huge, abstract, and wickedly complex, so it resists the kind of easy narrative that might make it stick in a reader’s mind or suggest concrete policy. By comparison, stories about the threat of nuclear Armageddon, humanity’s other recent existential menace, have been far easier to tell, because the danger literally lay in the hands of a few men with red buttons. Some voices have broken through to mass audiences—Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein—mostly in expository styles geared toward sharing information and analysis. But where, at least in nonfiction, are the storytellers who can sing songs of impending doom, who can bring the horror that is already upon us into focus, and help us see our own places within it?

Two recent articles tried new ways of talking about the emergency at hand, and appeared to resonate with readers. When The New York Times Magazine published Nathaniel Rich’s narrative feature, “Losing Earth,” in August of last year, it was the longest piece the magazine had ever run, taking up that week’s entire issue. Rather than explaining new studies or documenting the plight of people in a disaster zone, Rich locates a moment in the past when, he thinks, there was a chance to avert the crisis. The feature garnered an unprecedented level of public attention for the issue. Except, that is, for the previous year, when New York magazine published David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic climate hair-raiser, “The Uninhabitable Earth.” That feature was based in a simple premise: Take the high-end predictions of warming and paint a picture of what life would be like on Earth at those temperatures. Spoiler: Those of us who survive will basically be boiling in our own blood.

Both pieces quickly provoked impassioned criticism from people who work on climate issues. Responses to Rich’s feature ranged from baffled to withering, with many commentators deriding his understanding of the climate crisis as “naïve.” Wallace-Wells’s piece, too, produced an immediate backlash from the climate intelligentsia, partly because he got some of the science wrong, overstating certain risks, but also because the piece was charged with the cardinal sin of being “alarmist.” People didn’t like how Wallace-Wells was talking about climate change, and the science internet exploded with heated discussion of the “right way” to approach it.

On a rapidly warming planet, one function of climate writing is to get the word out—to spark and help shape public discourse in the midst of ongoing and accelerating catastrophe. We are already too late to prevent some degree of unprecedented change. We know it’s going to be bad, but human activity today could still make the future worse. So it’s true both that we are too late and that there is no time to be lost. Yet if we get the framing of this story wrong—if we see the issue as a matter of individual consumer choice, for example, or choose a purely emotional rather than an explicitly political framing—we risk missing the point altogether.