The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing The Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate By David Archer, Princeton University Press, 180 pages, $22.95 Forecast: The Consequences Of Climate Change, From The Amazon To The Arctic, From Darfur To Napa Valley By Stephan Faris, Henry Holt and Co., 256 pages, $25.00 "Timescale" is a word one hears regularly from climate scientists like the University of Chicago's David Archer and rarely if ever from journalists like Stephan Faris. Reporters -- and I am one of them -- talk of time spans, time frames, time lines, and, of course, deadlines. But "time scale " conjures up an expanse of time so immense -- not just decades or centuries but millennia and beyond -- that it is alien to everyday human concerns and news media demands. Journalism is episodic and event-driven, always in search of the dramatic and the new. Global warming repeatedly fails that standard. A reporter cannot say "it happened today" of a phenomenon that is slow moving, incremental, and...

Is it any wonder that progress on global climate change has been so slow? As the University of Washington ethicist Stephen Gardiner has recently argued, nothing in human experience has prepared us to deal with a problem that has such far-flung causes and uneven and momentous effects. No one source of emissions is to blame: Global warming springs from many acts of energy consumption over many years in many places across the planet. And if and when the temperatures and the seas rise, the toll will fall on some nations (mainly poorer ones) more than others, while the costs of any policy to avert warming will be distributed differently and require present generations to make sacrifices for future ones. Scientific uncertainty complicates matters still further, as does the lack of strong global institutions capable of tackling something this big and complex. Add in massive social inertia, and, as Gardiner puts it, global warming amounts to the "perfect moral storm." Perhaps, though, there's...