Far beyond the fires raging across Europe and North America, the smoke, dangerous to breathe, hangs in the air, dimming the view, changing the very color of sunlight into something grimly unsettling.

An estimated 20,000 are said to have died in the extreme heat in Europe earlier this year, and heat is climate change’s quiet killer, compared to the dramatic violence of death by fire or flood. In eastern Washington, 600 homes have just burned down, and in both Europe and North America, firefighters have died in the effort to contain the climate-fueled firestorms.

Once, across much of the the world’s temperate zones, we looked forward to summer as a time of delights, from summer’s bounty of fruits, long days, warmth, school holidays, activities like camping and swimming, travel and adventure. Now many of us dread it.

Summer was the sweet season celebrated in poetry and song, often pictured as a gentle goddess; now it is too often a threat and a misery. All this makes me think of Bill McKibben’s 2011 book Eaarth, a proposal that we can understand climate change as equivalent to moving to a more perilous, unwelcoming planet than the gentle, stable one we evolved over the 12,000 years since the last ice age.

I know that there are parts........

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