The consequences of climate change can often feel far off. It can be difficult to register the gradually increasing temperatures on Earth from season to season. Occasionally, the effects of our planet heating up become more obvious through startling photos and videos of glaciers melting or increasingly violent natural disasters, but even these events are intermittent.
A recent TED Talk video presents a bleak fate for our planet several decades from now if humans fail to address climate change in a meaningful way. The speaker, Shannon Odell, lays out what life on Earth might look like in 2050. In some ways, it mirrors our world now, only in a more extreme way, as she explains that reports of wildfires and heatwaves would fill the evening news, and blackouts would be more common. Her descriptions become more harrowing, however, as she discusses how ambulance sirens would fill the night as people suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion would be rushed to hospitals.
Odell also describes drought-like conditions in parts of the United States, Africa, and Australia and how some communities would be unable to cope with them, likely collapsing altogether. Additionally, Earth’s children would be harmed, as higher temperatures and pollutants in the air would cause more infants to be born prematurely, and rates of asthma and other respiratory conditions would also increase.
Odell jumps forward another 50 years to 2100, and the situation has only gotten more dire. Assuming that, thanks to government action, global emissions were to go down after 2050, it would still be too little, too late. Due to rising sea levels, entire island nations become uninhabitable, and climate refugees from all around the globe begin settling in floating cities above their submerged former homes. The video doesn’t end there, but it deserves a watch in order to fully understand the gravity of the situation.
Odell paints a bleak picture for us, indeed. But thankfully, we are not in 2050, and we have not yet reached the point of no return. Through government action and our own efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, we will not be able to stop the phenomenon, but we will be able to slow it down and ensure that our planet remains habitable for more generations to come. Humankind has been extremely fortunate to live and breathe on a Goldilocks Planet, but it is now up to us to make sure it stays that way.
h/t: [Open Culture]
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