In a Washington Post op-ed, David Ignatius observed:
Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects of global climate change—but that isn’t news, by most people’s measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in the Arctic. We can’t see these changes in our personal lives, and in that sense, they are abstractions. So they don’t grab us the way a plane crash would—even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet.… The failure of the United States to get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond imagining.