But the discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow, limited almost invariably to the matter of sea level rise. Climate change was reported, of course, and even with some tinge of alarm. My file of stories grew daily, but very few of the clips, even those drawn from new research published in the most pedigreed scientific journals, seemed to appear in the coverage about climate change we watched on television and read in newspapers. And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the rest of south Asia вЂ“ 140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, more than 10 times the Syrian crisis.

The likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create 10 times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further destabilised by climate chaos вЂ“ and, one suspects, less receptive the browner those in need. Beginning in 2011, about a million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought in a very real sense, much of the вЂњpopulist momentвЂќ the west is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants. But of course climate change is not an allegory. At first, it seemed the news was inventing a new genre of allegory. That is, the scale of human life itself.ДЄ few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, many of them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their research centre on an island also populated by a group of polar bears a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass that had been trapped in permafrost for many decades. In these ways вЂ“ many of them, at least вЂ“ I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and wilfully deluded, about climate change, which is not just the biggest threat human life on the planet has ever faced, but a threat of an entirely different category and scale.

IвЂ™m not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but IвЂ™m also not about to go vegan. IвЂ™ve never gone camping, not willingly anyway, and while I always thought it was basically a good idea to keep streams clean and air clear, I also accepted the proposition that there was a trade-off between economic growth and cost to nature вЂ“ and figured, well, in most cases IвЂ™d go for growth. IвЂ™ve lived my whole life in cities, enjoying gadgets built by industrial supply chains I hardly think twice about. I donвЂ™t even think of myself as a nature person.

And your world will burn