“For the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter—perhaps even to play itself out.” And, over and over, climate change is the big factor that’s reversing progress and endangering the future. If it’s a hoax, it’s the most convincing hoax of all time. The New Yorker’s Bill McKibben reflects on three decades of covering the climate change beat. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet.