Children born today will see unprecedented climate events

A new study suggests that children born in 2020 will face a much tougher climate future than older generations. The findings - which have been published in Nature - show that more than half of these children will live through extreme heatwaves never seen before - even if the world cuts emissions. Mark Maslin at UCL is the author of Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction, and he’s agreed to take a look at the study, and its implications, for us…

Mark - The take-home message is really reiterating what we've said for the last 20 or 30 years, which is as climate change gets worse in the future, then the next generation will be having to deal with a lot more extreme weather events. Now, they focus on things like heat waves, crop failures, river floods, droughts, wildfires, and tropical cyclones. And what they're trying to do is see what is the difference between now and what they're going to be exposed to in their life when they were born only, say, five years ago.

Chris - The thing is that the world's a big place, and climate change is going to manifest differently in different places. So how have they captured that?

Mark - They've been very sensible. What they've done is they've taken the world as it is and then looked at the risks for children born in different countries. They show that, of course, if children are born in a more derived country, then they're going to have a much higher chance of being exposed to these extreme weather events. The ones that are poorest, they will be doubly affected because of that impact of poverty.

Chris - The headline number that I've seen written about the paper is that a child being born today, roughly, is going to see two to seven times more extreme weather events than, say, you and I, born in our cohort. The point you're making is that as a citizen of the UK, for example, our ability to cope is going to be much, much superior than someone who's in very impoverished circumstances. But nevertheless, it's going to be an impact, isn't it?

Mark - So the very rich people that were living in California, their homes were devastated by wildfires. But they have insurance; they have an ability to rebound and to rebuild their lives. And I think that's the key thing, is it's not necessarily the impact of the event; it is whether the people and the society can rebuild quickly enough to minimise the impact. The two-to-seven number is really interesting because it's partly where you live, but it's also about how rich the area is. Anybody living into the future will basically get more extreme weather events, and these will have bigger impacts. But the bigger the impact will be on those who are most poor. This is nothing new. So this paper is very well researched, but basically it says what everybody in climate change has been saying for the last 20 years, which is extreme weather is going to increase; it's going to really impact people, and it's going to impact the poorest most.

Chris - What's the purpose of doing research like this? If it is just telling us what we can probably predict for ourselves based on what climate scientists like you have been saying for a long time, why does having these sorts of numbers in front of us help? I mean, is this all about influencing policy?

Mark - So I think there's two things we have to think about. The first thing is science is always trying to improve. So we're trying to understand how many people are going to be affected, who are most vulnerable because that's partly to understand the impacts of climate change. We really know that there's going to be a huge impact, but we need to know where, when, and who's going to be affected. The second thing is then if we can then put this in front of policymakers to say, look, your country is going to be really affected. Your country is going to be affected by these extreme weather events. I think many of us are hoping that will move policymakers to be more sensible.

Chris - Whenever we do modelling like this, because it concerns the future, and as Niels Bohr famously said, forefather of quantum mechanics, prediction's really hard, especially when it concerns the future. We don't know what is going to happen, but we have therefore uncertainties, and we think the worst-case scenario will be one thing, the best-case scenario will be another. So when we consider between those two bounds, what is the best-case scenario that they present for children of tomorrow, and what's the worst-case scenario?

Mark - The best case is if we keep climate change to the 1.5 degrees. Now, I know that we have just pushed through that for the last 12 months, but if we can either bring it back down or we can actually make sure that we don't get any warmer, then children born in 2020 will be looking at double the risk of extreme weather events into the future. Whereas if we go to sort of like the 2.7 and above degrees warming that we are expecting due to how the politics and economics is going, then you're looking at more like five to seven times the number of extreme weather events. And you have to remember, it only takes one extreme weather event to ruin a person's life.

Chris - Confronted with these data, and looking at our families as they grow up, what should people be thinking we need to do in order to try to reduce those numbers to the best-case scenario?

Mark - The first one is we should be reducing our carbon emissions. We should be moving from a 19th-century burning stuff, fossil fuel-driven economy to a 21st-century electric-dominated, renewable energy-dominated society. And that is already starting to happen; we just need to accelerate it. And the problem is there's a lot of backlash happening in many countries like the US, UK, and in Europe, all trying to go, no, no, no, it was great when we were burning stuff and causing air pollution. And I don't quite get that. So that's the first thing we need to do. We need to do this as quickly as possible, which you and I have had these discussions many times, improves everybody's lives because it cleans up the air, it's more efficient, it's cleaner, it's safer, tick, tick, tick. The second thing we have to do is adapt. We have to support the most vulnerable people in every society, not just poor countries, but rich countries that have extreme poverty like the US and UK, and work out how we can protect those vulnerable people from extreme weather events.