Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? An editorial

This editorial introduces a WIREs Climate Change Special Collection of nine Opinion Articles, each answering the question, ‘Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)?’ Given the rising sense of urgency--and for some despair—to arrest climate change, these invited authors were asked to develop their own answer to this question, or indeed to challenge it’s framing. What might ‘too late’ mean? Too late for what exactly, or for whom? What effect might the language of ‘too late’ have on the public imagination, on political discourse and on academic research? This collection of essays reveals a diversity of ways of thinking about the relationship between climate and humanity, different modes of analysis and different prognoses for the future, ranging from qualified pessimism through pragmatic realism to qualified hope