As a father of two small children I feel heartbroken. Will we die together in a heatwave in a few years? Do I flee north now? How should we (can we?) prepare (them) for what is coming. Can the next generation have something close to a "normal" live?
It tears me up inside to think that we might not even have food and water by the time they get there, let alone the level of pretend we have to maintain so that their childhood is preserved now.
My parents grew up thinking they might die at any moment in a nuclear war.
I’m not saying nothing will happen. Obviously we are already dialed into this and it’s physics and it will have effects. I’m also not saying past successes guarantee future ones.
I’m just saying that every generation since WWII has grown up with at least one impending doom scenario and yet here we are.
“May you live in interesting times.”
Personally I think we will be forced to adapt to climate change, and that it will be expensive and in parts of the world ugly. It will drive migration and conflict. It will rob us of dividends we could have spent on better things but instead must be spent on infrastructure mega projects. It will kill and impoverish and start wars.
But we will make it.
People will say never again, let’s never ignore warnings like that again. But we will probably forget that lesson, unfortunately, and future generations will grow up under some other avoidable doom cloud.
Makes me wonder how many times my parents wondered whether we were going to make it/had to pretend everything was going to be okay.
Many of the big estimates of death rates in say 2100 combine the air pollution of continuing to use coal and combustion engines with heat and climate effects.
The good news is that we have cheaper, better, cleaner options for the vast majority of that fuel burn today and they continue to get better, cheaper and cleaner. There's a clear shift in the market, it just takes time to work it's way through.
But if your kid has asthma today then that is probably doing more damage to them than climate change.
Of course, to state the obvious, both problems have the same solution. Stop burning fossil fuels.
They are non-renewable, meaning the more we use them the more we have sunk cost in an energy infrastructure that in the long term can only get more expensive and more scarce. That's the opposite of what you want. It also means there's hard limits to how big they can scale, and the more you scale them the worse their scaling gets. Also the opposite of what you want.
They are geopolitically problematic and bind us to foreign conflicts.
Many of the most virulently anti-American and anti-Western ideologies (like fundamentalist radical Islam) are propped up and funded by petrostates. Domestically a lot of authoritarian far-right ideology (which IMO is also anti-American if you think America should be a free country) is funded by the fossil fuel industry. The term fundamentalism comes from a tract called The Fundamentals published by an oil baron.
Many, many reasons to phase out fossil fuels.
and make the problem even worse. lol. There's only one actual solution to this problem but no one wants to talk about it :)
"Forgive me nature, for I have sinned..."
Obviously, until now the victims have been among the most vulnerable, i.e. old people with cardiovascular diseases.
Nonetheless, there is a non-negligible risk that in the future the heatwaves will become so intense that they could affect even the healthy people.
In most countries the majority of the people cannot afford air conditioning.
Logistically (from wikipedia): Elderly people living by themselves had never faced such extreme heat before and did not know how to react or were too mentally or physically impaired by the heat to make the necessary adaptations themselves. Elderly people with family support or those residing in nursing homes were more likely to have others who could make the adjustments for them. This led to unexpected survival rates with the weakest group having fewer deaths than the more physically fit; most of the heat victims came from the group of elderly not requiring constant medical care; often childless women who lived alone.
Academic source: https://comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/articl...
Multiple studies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48524696