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You are lost in a small town, late for a vital appointment somewhere in its streets. You stop a friendly-looking stranger and ask the way. Generously, he offers to give you a small map which he happens to have in his briefcase. The whole town is there, he says. You thank him and walk on, opening the map to pinpoint a route. It turns out to be a map of the whole earth.

The wrong scale. A scale (from the Latin scala for ladder, step or stairs) usually enables a calibrated and useful extrapolation between dimensions of space or time. Thus a “cartographic scale” describes the ratio of distance on a map to real distances on the earth’s surface. To move from a large to small scale or vice versa implies a calculable shift of resolution on the same area or features, a smooth zooming out or in. With climate change, however, we have a map, its scale includes the whole earth but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc., the map is often almost mock-