Our fate is both tragic and terribly ironic. As we enter the Anthropocene Age, we ought to be celebrating the triumph of human ingenuity that the science-community-approved moniker represents.

After millennia of cowering in caves, watching loved ones snatched away by illness, and planting seeds only to see the crops shrivel under clouds of locusts, we’ve finally tamed the evil forces of nature. We’ve ascended, innovation by innovation, to the top of the food chain. We are at last fully in charge of our destiny and that of all living things.

And yet … never in human history have God’s creatures, humans included, been so imperiled. Described more than a century ago, the greenhouse effect was identified as an imminent threat back in the 1960s by Rachel Carson, among others. As a magazine editor decades ago, I assigned a cover story on doomsday scenarios, which seemed to be unaccountably multiplying. With tongue in cheek, the writer summarized the top 10 threats (depleting ozone layers, tainted food, the greenhouse effect and so on) so as to arm readers with an intelligent quip or two should one of these dire “menaces” come up at a dinner party.

Why the lighthearted tone? America was in a lighthearted mood, drunk with pride over having defeated the Red Menace. What were all these other menaces compared to that? If we could end communism, we could do anything.

But the implications of the greenhouse effect were not lost on the likes of Exxon Mobil. The oil and gas industry and all the other industries that benefited from its product, from autos to agriculture, conspired to create what I now think of as the politics of denial.

Studies were suppressed. Climate scientists were ignored or their predictions ridiculed. Some lost their jobs. Others found work in industries or academic institutions where they could do no harm. And as the effects of climate change became obvious to all, the new task became not how to fix this but how to “adapt.