Gradual

Tuvalu, 2021.Climate change is most often understood as an event. Something that happens to a place, at a moment, after a threshold has been crossed. But lived experience rarely follows this logic.

More often, climate change is encountered before it’s understood, registering through cumulative shifts in temperature, seasonality, and environmental reliability rather than as a single disruptive event.

Warmer days. Shifts in temperature ranges, seasonal timing, and environmental reliability that quietly reorganize daily expectations. Small recalibrations are made without assurance that these adjustments will continue to function. What feels wrong doesn’t arrive all at once, nor in a single register. Some changes stipulate attention; others remain just within the bandwidth of what can [hardly] be accommodated. Not because they are harmless, but because they are encountered at the scale of daily life before they are recognizable as a crisis.

There’s an analogy of a frog placed in water that is slowly heated, often used to explain delayed response by suggesting that harm persists because no immediate action is taken. In this account, failure is framed as passivity, as the frog does not jump because it does not notice the danger. The story relies on the idea that danger is, at least in principle, perceptible, and that delayed response is mainly a failure to register or act on that perception. What this framing obscures is the more difficult condition it seeks to describe: change that unfolds without a clear alarm, or amid so many competing signals that no single moment stands out as decisive. The problem is not that action is withheld, but that conditions never resolve into a clearly legible call for response.

This isn’t necessarily ignorance.

It is adaptation under conditions of uncertainty, where the scale of change exceeds the categories through which it’s first experienced. Recognition lags not because people are inattentive, but because experience arrives faster than explanation. Climate change is lived, long before it is named.

This gap between encounter and intelligibility shapes what is often described as climate apathy. What appears as disengagement is frequently distance without disinterest — concern without a clear site of intervention. For some, climate change remains abstract, mediated through projections and data. For others, it’s intimate but incoherent, felt as strain rather than crisis. These differences do not follow a single pattern; they emerge from uneven exposure, resources, and access to interpretive frameworks that make change legible as collective harm.

(l-r) Jamaica, 2025; Pakistan, 2025; California, USA, 2025

Place is often imagined as where climate change becomes tangible. But place is not where climate change begins, nor where it is contained. It’s where multiple processes intersect and are felt unevenly, often without revealing their full origins or trajectories. To experience climate change anywhere is already to be entangled in forces that extend far beyond that location, even when those forces remain difficult to name from within it.

The Anthropocene is often described through scale: planetary limits, geological markers, irreversible thresholds. But scale alone cannot explain delayed response. What matters equally is timing; the misalignment between material change and collective recognition. Climate change alters conditions continuously while offering few moments that feel decisive across different positions at once.

This is where apathy is named, not as the absence of care but as a placeholder for a more difficult reality: the challenge of responding to an ongoing process, and not yet fully intelligible as a crisis.

The images in this essay do not depict disaster. They attend to this interval, where change is underway, but meaning has not settled. There’s no singular rupture point, only evidence of adjustment, strain, and provisional stability. Not permanence, not safety, but simply the uneasy continuation of life under conditions that are shifting faster than our shared frameworks for understanding them.

The danger of warming water is not solely the warming itself. It is that we often recognize what it has become only after we’ve learned to live inside it.

Rachel Carson National Environmental Leadership Fellow Lydia Samuels

Lydia Samuels is a first-year Master of Public Health student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she is pursuing a concentration in Population and Family Health with a certificate in Climate and Health. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at New York University, where she earned a joint B.A. in Global Public Health and Global Liberal Studies with honors, including induction into Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Omega.