As I listen to the weather channel and listen to them describe Phoenix having 112°F weather for a week, Las Vegas something similar and… well you have probably heard the weather reports yourself, I have wondered how long before the migration out of those areas begins. If your kids can’t safely play outside when it is 112°F, and it’s no fun, even dangerous, to sit by a pool at that those temperatures do you really want to live in such a place? Particularly, when you know it is only going to get even hotter as the years go on. We, as a country, and particularly in the Republican controlled Red states, are not doing anywhere near enough to prepare for and attempt to mediate what climate change is going to do to our country. The only thing that is going to change this is to vote in such a way that the Democrats take control of both Houses of Congress, and retain the Presidency. Also that the same happens at the state level. Will Americans be smart enough to do that? I’m not sure.
Illustration: Danielle Rhoda / The Guardian
Round the cycle turns. As millions are driven from their homes by climate disasters, the extreme right exploits their misery to extend its reach. As the extreme right gains power, climate programmes are shut down, heating accelerates and more people are driven from their homes. If we don’t break this cycle soon, it will become the dominant story of our times.
A recent paper in the scientific journal Nature identifies the “human climate niche”: the range of temperatures and rainfall within which human societies thrive. We have clustered in the parts of the world with a climate that supports our flourishing, but in many of these places the niche is shrinking. Already, around 600 million people have been stranded in inhospitable conditions by global heating. Current global policies are likely to result in about 2.7C of heating by 2100. On this trajectory, some 2 billion people may be left outside the niche by 2030, and 3.7 billion by 2090. If governments limited heating to their agreed goal of 1.5C, the numbers exposed […]
