Science: A Six-Year-Old Today Will Experience About 3X The Climate Disasters Their Grandparents Did
Last edited Mon Sep 27, 2021, 04:21 PM - Edit history (1)
Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and inventing a robot that can pull pollution out of the air. She wants to become the kind of grown-up who can help the world. Yet human actions have made the world a far more dangerous place for Adriana to grow up, according to a first-of-its-kind study of the impacts of climate change across generations.
If the planet continues to warm on its current trajectory, the average 6-year-old will live through roughly three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, the study finds. They will see twice as many wildfires, 1.7 times as many tropical cyclones, 3.4 times more river floods, 2.5 times more crop failures and 2.3 times as many droughts as someone born in 1960. These findings, published this week in the journal Science, are the result of a massive effort to quantify what lead author Wim Thiery calls the “intergenerational inequality” of climate change.
EDIT
The Science paper was partly inspired by Thiery’s three sons, who are 7, 5 and 2. But its implications are not restricted to children. Anyone under 40, he said, is destined to live a life of unprecedented disaster exposure, experiencing rates of extreme events that would have just a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening in a preindustrial world. “It used to be a story of, like, ‘yeah we have to limit global warming because of grandchildren,’ ” he said. “This study is making clear that climate change has arrived. It’s everywhere.”
The numbers provided in the study are almost certainly an underestimate, said co-author Joeri Rogelj, director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. Data limitations, and the complexity of the analysis, meant the scientists didn’t assess the increased risk of some hazards, such as coastal flooding from sea level rise. The study also doesn’t take into account the increased severity of many events; it only looks at frequency. On the other hand, he noted, countries also have a chance to adapt to the changes that are coming. If the world invests in making communities safer — for example, installing flood barriers, adopting fire-safe building codes, providing shelter for people at risk from deadly heat — disasters don’t have to be as destructive for future generations as they are for people today.
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/09/26/change-disasters-kids-science-study/
= new reply since forum marked as read
