Donald Trump, an adamant climate change denier, is the most relentlessly anti-environmental president in modern U.S. history.
Credit: OLIVIER DOULIERY VIA GETTY

Sometimes blindness is an act of will — and a revelation of character. So it is with those who deny the terrifying reality of climate change.

We experience it in our own lives, through friends and family and via television screens. Californians choke on smoky air from terrible fires. East Coast residents flee towns overcome by catastrophic hurricanes. Our summers are hotter, our storms more intense.

It’s feckless to imagine all this as some grand climatic coincidence; extreme weather events are ever more frequent and dangerous to landscape and life. Last year’s inventory: Heat waves killed people from Montreal to Karachi to Tokyo, drought hit the Horn of Africa, the largest and deadliest wildfires in the state’s history swept California, another set of wildfires made the air in Portland […]