Earth is smoldering. From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed swaths of the Northern Hemisphere. One of 18 wildfires sweeping through California — among the worst in the state's history — is generating such heat that it created its own weather. Fires that raged through a coastal area near Athens last week killed 91. Elsewhere, people are suffocating in the heat. Roughly 125 have died in Japan as the result of a heat wave that pushed temperatures in Tokyo above 104 degrees for the first time.
Such calamities, once considered freakish, are now commonplace. Scientists have long cautioned that, as the planet warms — it is roughly 1 degree Celsius hotter today than before the industrial age's first furnaces were lit — weather patterns will go berserk. An early analysis has found that this sweltering European summer would have been less than half as likely were it not for human-induced global warming.
Yet as the impact of climate change becomes more evident, so does the scale of the challenge ahead. Three years after countries vowed in Paris to keep warming "well below" 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels, greenhouse-gas emissions are up again. So are investments in oil and gas. In 2017, for the first time in four years, demand for coal rose. Subsidies for renewables, such as wind and solar power, are dwindling in many places, and investment has stalled; climate-friendly nuclear power is expensive and unpopular.
It is tempting to think these are temporary setbacks and that humankind, with its instinct for self-preservation, will muddle through to a victory over global warming. In fact, it is losing the war.
Insufficient progress is not to say no progress at all. As solar panels, wind turbines and other low-carbon technologies become cheaper and more efficient, their use has surged. Last year the number of electric cars sold around the world passed 1 million. In some sunny and blustery places, renewable power now costs less than coal.
Public concern is picking up. A poll last year of 38 countries found that 61 percent of people see climate change as a big threat; only the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria inspired more fear. In the West, campaigning investors talk of divesting from companies that make their living from coal and oil.
Despite President Donald Trump's decision to yank the United States out of the Paris deal, many American cities and states have reaffirmed their commitment to it. Even some of the skeptic-in-chief's fellow Republicans appear less averse to tackling the problem. In smog-shrouded China and India, citizens choking on fumes are prompting governments to rethink plans to rely heavily on coal to electrify their countries.
Optimists say that decarbonization is within reach. Yet, even allowing for the familiar complexities of agreeing on and enforcing global targets, it is proving extraordinarily difficult.