Barely a month goes by without some more bad news about global climate change. The bad news about the impacts of torqueing the climate system is easy enough to understand. Humans are adding increasingly larger amounts of warming gases to the atmosphere, and the climate is now responding. Ice sheets are melting – some irrevocably, it seems – the seas are rising, and weather patterns are changing. Given the size and rate of the human thumb on the climate, the impacts are, for the most part, harmful. The climate is a complex system whose interactions are not understood perfectly. By pushing around a complex system, humans are setting themselves up for unpredictable and possibly horrible outcomes. And since that system is important – nothing less than the planet's life support system – we shouldn't do that lightly.

In recent years, though, a string of bad news has also appeared on the political front. Despite more than two decades of diplomacy and national policy discussions about climate change, there's almost no evidence that emissions – the root cause of the problem – have responded. Global emissions from the energy sector are higher than ever before and not set to reverse any time soon. Sure, a few jurisdictions – notably in Europe – have made cuts, but those have come often at huge cost and concern only a small fraction of the global total. Growth elsewhere, especially in the emerging economies, has been overwhelming.

It is easy to despair. The science around global climate change seems to suggest that the problem is getting worse quickly – with harms that are, on balance, worse than previously thought. And the experts on political systems are finally realizing that solving this problem will be a lot harder than anyone thought.