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ous dinner with the Comte de Buffon—climate change returned as a live issue in American
politics. As in the age of Jefferson, climate change continues to be a subject peculiarly fired
with controversy, passion, and no small amount of ignorance. Twenty-first-century Americ-
ans, like their predecessors in the early republic, take climate very personally. As this chapter
has shown, climate pessimism has never been popular in the United States, whose citizens
long ago embraced Jefferson's sunny optimism at the expense of the icy prognoses of the
Comte de Buffon. To suggest that the American climate is bad or getting worse is, in this his-
torical sense, unpatriotic.
But patriotic or not, Buffonian climate pessimism now enjoys its modern revival, in
drag, as global warming. The twenty-first-century climate emergency, as we all know, in-
volves not lack of heat but too much, while higher volumes of water vapor destabilize the
carbon-charged atmosphere. A new era of Frankenstein's weather—heat waves, droughts,
wild storms, and floods—are increasingly part of the fabric of American life. Cascading ex-
treme weather events, of ever-greater size and frequency, now loom as a serious threat to the
agriculture and prosperity of the nation—its Jeffersonian core. No longer an historical foot-
note, climate pessimism has returned in full, bounding and ferocious, like the dog who will
have its day at last.