The report last week that children born today will face climate extremes on a scale never seen before was not totally surprising. Neither was the aspect that the poorest in the populace would bear the brunt of the crisis. In an analysis published May 7 in the journal Nature Climate Change e,g.
The effects on children | Nature Climate Change
of human exposure to climate change extremes, i.e. heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, cyclones and crop failures), researchers found that children born in 2020 are two to seven times more likely to face one-in-10,000 year events than those who were born in 1960. 1 in 10,000 year events include deluge scale flooding, hurricanes even more violent than Camille in 1969, and heat waves lasting months.
If the world warms even faster - i.e. failing to stabilize below the critical 1.5C limit (so reaching 6.5 F (3.5 C) by 2100), 92% of today's 5-year-olds will experience deadly heatwaves, 29% crop failures and 14% cataclysmic floods at some point in their lives. Lead author Luke Grant, a physical scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis, said in a statement:
"By stabilizing our climate around 1.5 C [2.7 F] above pre-industrial temperatures, about half of today's young people will be exposed to an unprecedented number of heatwaves in their lifetime. Under a 3.5 C [6.5 F] scenario, over 90% will endure such exposure throughout their lives.
The same picture emerges for other climate extremes examined, though with slightly lower affected fractions of the population. Yet the same unfair generational differences in unprecedented exposure is observed,"
But even before the release of the Nature report, major worries were afoot amongst kids from last year. According to a New Scientist piece from Aug. 24, 2024 (p. 14):
"global warming is especially concerning for young people, who have more years ahead of them than older people."
The authors of the piece added: "Beyond existential worries, exposure to extreme heat in early childhood has been linked to brain changes which may harm mental health."
So I have tons of sympathy for my 20-something nieces and nephews who will have to live in an ever more intolerable hothouse world - overcome by heat as well as endless monster hurricanes, tornadoes, floods - as well as diseases and pests - while I might have barely 5 years left if I'm lucky. So the kid in the top graphic holding the sign reading: "You will die of old age, I will die from climate change" is likely spot on.
Eco-anxiety currently is even more rife among children, with nearly 4 in 5 children aged under 12 worried about climate change according to a You Gov commissioned by Greenpeace .The effects of climate breakdown, and the human suffering it causes, are already evident unprecedented heatwaves, drought, wildfires, droughts and floods taking place around the world.
Granted, quantifying the hardships that changes to Earth's complex climactic systems will foist on future generations remains difficult. But it is possible to arrive at a rough picture by combining demographic data for each location on the planet, combining population projections and life expectancies with climate model projections for the three IPCC emissions scenarios given 4 years ago.
According to that IPCC report:
"Crossing the 2°C global warming level in the mid-term period (2041–2060) is very likely to occur under the very high GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5), "
In that SSP5 -8.5 scenario we would see an increase of 5.7
C by 2100, which is the level expected by the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists - which noted that an earlier IPCC
climate report understated the threat.
So one's best bet- given how Trump’s policies will set
us back decades- is to project the most dire SSP5-8.5 scenario on the
temperature change- which means 5.7 to 7.0 C or effectively runaway greenhouse
level. Again, conforming to the projected increase in CO2 concentration
by 2100.
The incorporation of the IPCC emissions scenario enabled the Nature researchers to arrive at rough estimates for
the number of people in each generation who will experience unprecedented
climate events. And the results they arrived at were stark — 52% of children
born in 2020 face unprecedented heat exposure compared to 16% of those born in
1960 under the most limited global warming scenario of 2.7 F (1.5°C) by 2100,
rising to 92% if warming reaches 6.5 F (3.5 °C).
Exposures to crop failures, wildfires, droughts, floods and
cyclones also rose significantly. For example, in a 6.5 F (3.5 °C) pathway 29%
of those born in 2020 will face unprecedented lifetime exposure to crop
failures, with the risk expanding for those around the United States, South
America, Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia.
And those most socioeconomically vulnerable, especially children born around the tropics, are set to be the most strongly impacted. Under current policies, 92% of today’s five year olds born into low-income groups are exposed to lifetime risk compared to 79% of those from wealthier backgrounds. Lead author Luke Grant again:
"Living an unprecedented life means that without climate
change, one would have less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of experiencing that many
climate extremes across one's lifetime. This is a
stringent threshold that identifies populations facing climate extremes far
beyond what could be expected without man-made climate change."
Grant et al note that their study is far from complete — they didn’t model climate change’s impacts on fertility, mortality or migration. This means that the effects of climate change in sparking mass migrations and resource wars were not accounted for in their analysis, and neither were the various tipping points our warming world is edging toward. See e.g.
Five Major Climate Tipping Point Manifestations & What They Mean
In an accompanying News & Views article, Rosanna
Gualdi and Raya
Muttarak , from the Department of Statistical Sciences at the
University of Bologna, Italy, wrote that the findings "reveal an alarming
intergenerational gap" in exposure to climate extremes. They wrote:
"If greenhouse gases continue to be emitted into the atmosphere at current rates, global warming will intensify and today's children will be exposed to increasingly frequent and severe climate-related hazards,"
And that's assuming warming continues under current policies to reach 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit (2.7 degrees Celsius) by 2100. But we know after the Trump- Musk DOGE cuts, to NOAA, NASA, etc. as well as cratering fossil fuel regulations that is no longer the case. Which is why I predict a runaway greenhouse by 2100.
See Also:
The Intelligent Irrationalists: Why So Many High IQ Folks Deny Sound Science
And:
And:And:
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