Reading the Tide Charts
How to hold enormous, slow-moving information without going numb — a working method for climate news.
The hardest part of following a slow emergency is not the information. It's the shape of the information — huge, granular, arriving daily, resolving never.
Our method has three parts and it is deliberately boring. First, pick a horizon: one place, one system, one decade. Second, choose two numbers you will track and ignore the rest. Third, read on a schedule rather than a feed.
What this buys you is a sense of direction instead of a sense of alarm. You start noticing which levers actually move your two numbers, and how long they take to move them.
Numbness is usually a sign that the frame is too wide. Narrow the frame until you can act inside it, then widen it again when you can.
