Whether or not carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere.

There’s no denying that novelists are warming up to the subject. From Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear,” which claimed that we’re being hoodwinked by faulty data, to Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Fifty Degrees Below,” which imagined Washington encased in ice, popular fiction about climate change has been as nuanced and illuminating as a shouting match on Fox News.

Now I don’t know what’s sadder about this paragraph. Is it that Ron Charles, the fiction editor for the ever-shrinking “Book World” section of the Washington Post, is simply unaware of the single most established fact in the entire arena of climate science?

Or that not a single person associated with putting together the final product of the Washington Post print piece edition apparently knew this most basic of climate facts.

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