This year, California recorded its deadliest wildfire in state history. The combined intensity and duration of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans' tropical storms and hurricanes reached a new recorded high. Worldwide carbon dioxide emissions are projected to break another record this year.

It's time to take a clear-eyed look at the science behind these developments - the political science. The data shows that, for all the evidence that climate change is real, man-made and dangerous, and despite wide public acceptance of those propositions, people in the United States do not necessarily want to stop climate change, in the sense of being willing to pay the cost - which is the only sense that really matters.