According to reports that not even the most ardent climate zealots seem willing to criticize anymore, Greenland is quietly accumulating unprecedented amounts of new ice. Antarctica, inconveniently, appears to be doing much the same. Anyone living in a boreal climate hardly needs a briefing note to confirm this—this winter was viciously cold, and no surprise there: the planet’s two great ice shields are not exempt from the weather everyone else is experiencing.
And yet the headlines keep coming.
They are delicately worded, deceptively suggestive, carefully avoiding the vulgarity of facts. They speak not of what is, but of what could be. Of what might be. Of speculative futures, abstract drivers, hypothetical mechanisms—anything that keeps the narrative intact while allowing the real world to be politely ignored. Weather reports, ice data, lived experience: all negotiable. All expendable.
This rhetorical fog serves a very specific purpose. It allows the believer to negate reality without ever having to confront it. It enables endless narrative construction while shielding the faithful from exposure to something they can no longer metabolize: contradiction. Because reality, inconveniently, is a cruel mistress. It does not cooperate. It does not negotiate. It does not care.
Reality does its own thing, entirely indifferent to what you want, what I want, or what a committee agreed would be preferable. To reality, we do not exist. It simply is, whether we are here to observe it or not.
But of course, that is not the reality most people inhabit.
Each of us lives in a smaller, curated version—a private dream world assembled from headlines, moral certainties, and social reinforcement. And inside that dream world, those headlines are true because they must be true. And if something must be true, then it is true.
Isn’t it? https://grist.org/climate/a-melting-greenland-is-easier-to-exploit-but-also-more-perilous/