We were graced with a virtual visit this week from Gary Greenberg, a contributing editor at Harper’s and the author of a 2024 feature called After the Deluge. The piece is a brilliant tick-tock narrative of two climate disasters back to back. A once-unimaginable natural disaster — a tornado — hit his small New England town followed immediately by a rare, climate-linked flood. Greenberg, who was the town’s leader at the time of both disasters, reckons throughout the piece with two realities: first, that this is climate change coming home to roost in a dangerous way, and second, that nobody in his small, conservative town was willing to engage with that fact. 

Greenberg was invited to speak to our newsroom about the feature — and how he communicated the complicated political reality of a climate disaster with empathy and humour — as part of our ongoing staff feature-writing “book club.” 

There was a lot to talk about. One thing we wanted to discuss, as climate journalists, was how to get through to people who fundamentally........

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