If you consider that there are a million people forced out of their homes by Katrina, multiply that by 150, and then stick those people in countries who, as inconceivable as it seems, are less prepared than we were to deal with the whole thing.

When you go to China and the developing world, people understand more clearly the dangers that are coming at them because they're living closer to the margin. They don't have any of the false sense of invulnerability that Americans have. People from developing countries also feel that it's their right, if you're talking in terms of justice, to use fossil fuels like we did for a hundred years to get rich. It's hard for them to give up that vision.

One of my favorite places is the Maldives, an all-Muslim nation in the Indian Ocean with a culture that stretches back 5,000 years. But since the highest point in the archipelago is a meter or two above sea level, even the next hundred are not guaranteed. They've committed to becoming the first carbon-neutral nation on Earth by 2020, building windmills as fast as they can.

We spend a lot of time playing defence against bad things. So, in the US, one of the focusses has been this huge Keystone Pipeline project, another has been the coal ports on the Pacific Ocean.

Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.

But tolerance by itself can be a cover for moral laziness.

The most blatant examples are increased power and frequency in hurricanes and the increased depth and frequency of heat waves.