The latest UN climate report is gloomy, with some sunny patches

peculiarly modern form of the uncanny which Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher, dubs “solastalgia”. It is an uneasy feeling that what you took to be the natural way of things has been changed, without your consent, and that your life does not fit into it as once it did. It is the sort of feeling you might expect if, say, what used to be an unusually wet year was now merely typical. It might be dismissed as the “new normal”. But it does not feel normal, and it never will. Before you get used to it, it will have changed yet again.The vast new overview of the impacts of global warming published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change () on February 28th paints a picture of a planet where solastalgia is the norm. Half a billion people, it says, most of them in medium or high latitudes, live in places where the average year is now wetter than wet years were in the 20th century. In low latitudes, by contrast, there are 160m people living where the reverse is true.