Are you bored by most climate stories? Same! Not saying they're not important. They're just chores, so much of the time. Where's the amazement? The freakiness? Sometimes I feel like they're zombifying me, these dutiful apocalypticas. Bad-bad-bad, science this, science that. I start the story charged up. I end it feeling … drained. Brain-dead.
Then there's Sandra Upson's piece about the AMOC. At first—don't tell her I said this; she's my beloved work wife—I was wary. Some mouthful of an ocean current system (AMOC = Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) is slowing down, slowly? Possibly with catastrophic blah-blah effects many years in the (possible) future? Fine. Whatever. Just another thing that's killing us. Then you read the first section, one kablammo sentence after another. Massive invisible waterfalls! Scary disaster scenarios! By the time two researchers start making insane predictions about AMOC—and getting international shit for it—you can't stop. You remember why we (should) care about this stuff. It's incredible.
Like me, Sandra's a longtime editor at WIRED. She doesn't write all that much. When she does, there's a reason. Maybe she wants to break your heart. Or rewrite a creation myth. Here, she's delivered a piece (which we ended up putting on the cover) that proves the eternal power of the climate story. Because what Sandra understands, better than so many, is just that: It's a story. Probably (sorry, US election) the biggest story of our time. It's a story about people and places, and of forces ancient, deep. Nothing about it is dead. It's all spectacularly, horrifyingly, alive.
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