I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe to anyone who cares to read it. Pick up the paperback edition, which has an Afterword not contained in the first hardback edition.

After going through published warnings from the 1990’s and early 2000’s about what a serious hurricane might do to New Orleans, Kolbert ends the Afterword on this note:

All of the studies and news stories were there for everyone to read. But the storm of the future lay in the future, while the costs of preparing for it would have had to be borne in the present. It was easier, both psychically and economically, to turn away from the facts. And so life went on as before, and everyone hoped for the best. (p.199)

Ah, the best. A flooded, devastated Gulf Coast. Similarly: the warming of the future lay in the future.