How we are leaving behind an unliveable planet for our children by refusing to act on climate change | Mint

There’s no better representation of the fact that we’re living in an upside-down world than the fact that it’s children and young adults who are the realists about climate change, while the adults engage in magical thinking. It’s not that children asked for this burden. But the constant vacillation, verging on the total abnegation of responsibility, among adults means that those between the ages of 0-20 are being left a world that’s turning increasingly unliveable. The adults are effectively saying that yes, it is a right old mess, but we are not going to fix it, you will.

As the world blows past deadline after deadline to stop burning fossil fuels, we are in effect leaving behind a very different world from the one that we grew up in.

Let’s break this down.

The world has warmed up by around 1.3 degrees Celsius since the beginning of the industrial era, about 100-150 years ago. Right now, it is warming at the rate of 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. The only way to stabilize and then stop this runaway warming is to stop the source, which is the burning of fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas for our energy needs.

The latest climate science is pretty clear—at current rates of warming, and without drastic action to move to renewable energy (RE), we are staring at a warming of 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, perhaps even earlier. There’s a safety mark, which is to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But in order to reach that goal we have less than two years to stop all fresh fossil fuel emissions (i.e. planet heating gases like carbon dioxide and methane). But with emissions actually rising year-on-year, that is clearly not going to happen.

Where does that leave young people? The year 2080 or 2100 might seem far away to us, but a child born in 2025 will only be in their seventies then. A child born during covid would be 80. That’s one lifetime. One lifetime in which he or she will see a change in atmospheric heat that is comparable to the heating that happened at the end of the ‘glacial maximum’ of the last Ice Age, nearly 20,000 years ago. The Earth had heated up then to give rise to the current Holocene epoch, but that heating took 7,000 years, not a single human lifetime.

Because it is not just about the how much the world is heating up, it is also about how fast the world is heating up.

This is happening fast enough that when someone born in 1980 reaches the age of 80 in 2060, their environment will bear very little resemblance to when they were in their teens, the 1990s.

Drastic as that is, it will pale beside the experience of those in their teens today. We still had a few decades of relatively stable climate with predictable seasons, snow and ice in the Himalaya, polar ice caps, thriving coral reefs and stable coastlines. According to the UN’s premier climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), children aged 10 or younger in 2020, will experience a five-fold increase in extreme climate events with 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Even the “safe” limit isn’t really safe. With a warming of 1.5 degrees by 2100, those same children will still experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme weather events.

And we are in effect leaving it to them to figure out how to lead a life in a hothouse planet, under conditions that humans have never experienced as a species. Already, nearly half of the world’s 2.2 billion children live in one of 33 countries classified as “extremely high risk” due to climate change impacts by Unicef.

No wonder children are worried and angry, and are suffering from eco-anxiety. Earlier this year, a Greenpeace UK poll of children under 12 found that 78% were worried about climate change. Last year, a study analysed the climate-related questions asked by 1,500 Australian school children. 27% of them had extreme existential worries, asking questions like “Is it too late?” 40% were focused on climate action, asking questions like “How can people our age act on climate change?” It’s a heartbreaking question really, because adults are the ones who should be acting.

They are instead focused on magical thinking and fairy tales. The magical thinking crowd are worried about the climate, but somehow think that it’s someone else’s problem to solve. At the extreme end of this cohort are those that believe that climate change isn’t real, or that there will be enough time in the future to act on it; let’s burn some more fossil fuels right now.

And the fairy tales crowd is busy looking at technology to provide an instant cure, like solar geoengineering, or colonizing Mars. The problem is that both these categories of people are the ones who are making government policy right now.

Well, there is, because of the fact that a silent majority of the world’s adults acknowledge that climate change is very real and that governments need to act urgently to stop it. In April, a media project helmed by the journalism collective Covering Climate Now, published a series of articles in the world’s leading media outlets showing how an overwhelming number of people around the world (89%) support the move to renewable energy.

But are the “89%” mobilizing to force governments to act? Until that happens, they are equally to blame for their children’s futures.