Bangladesh, Jan. 9 -- Climate change is often framed as a technical problem: too much carbon, too little regulation, insufficient political will. But beneath these explanations lies a deeper disturbance—one that the German philosopher Günther Anders diagnosed decades ago, long before climate change became a household term. Anders argued that modern humanity has become obsolete relative to the technologies it has created. We can transform the world on a planetary scale, he warned, without possessing the moral and imaginative capacities to understand—or take responsibility for—what we are doing.

Anthropogenic climate change is the clearest expression of this condition. It is not simply an environmental crisis. It is ...