When worried about the grim shape of things to come we are programmed to focus on near term dangers like a second term for Trump, but they pale into insignificance compared to climate change and global warming.

In December of 2023, the UN COP28 Climate Change Conference announced it’s conclusion that the efforts to address climate change mandated by the Paris Agreement of 2016 had been too slow to be regarded as a success. Every needed change was woefully behind including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening resilience to a changing climate, getting  financial and technological support to vulnerable nations. 

Similarly a pledge to move from polluting fossil fuels to nuclear, wind, and solar power by 2030 is also far from coming to fruition. To meet that goal would demand the tripling of renewable energy capacity and the restriction of carbon and methane emissions. By 2050 such a transition to wind, solar, and nuclear alternatives would cost the developing world an estimated $5.9 trillion and much more for the already heavily industrialized regions.

None of the needed changes are happening fast enough to prevent cataclysmic results. Already in Mali in April the average temperature was 110 degrees. In many places the electric grid is so overwhelmed by demand that shut downs are common, the cost of ice has increased tenfold, north of the 45th parallel which runs through Michigan, France, and Mongolia a third of the people may soon face heat previously found in the Sahara. And as temperatures rise so do body temperatures, blood pressure increases, and kidneys and livers malfunction. Farther north in Siberia permafrost unchanged for eons is melting, leading to unprecedented fires and floods. 

The goal of preventing increased warming has not been met but already passed 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average in June of 2023. Now 19,000 weather stations have recorded big temperature increases, in the last ten months the hottest on record. 

NASA scientists warn that even small shifts in atmospheric and ocean temperatures will cause the planet to approach being uninhabitable for species that evolved to survive in the old normal. That includes us, but also many that we rely on for sustenance including plants, animals, and seafood.  

The United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) also warns that as ice melts and waters rise not only will many species of flora and fauna become extinct, but pathogens will thrive. As a result in the next ten years many parts of the earth will become uninhabitable, humans sicker, hungrier, poorer, and life more dangerous. Already we are seeing increasing fires, floods, droughts, and rising seas. 

At least 3.3 billion people, roughly one third of humans, are already vulnerable including much of Africa, Central and South America, and South Asia. Immigrants from these and other imperiled regions are already fleeing to places they imagine to safer, but that may prove to be wishful thinking. 

Such North American states as Wyoming, Minnesota, Illinois, Rhode Island and Maine may temporality remain habitable, as will such cities as Toronto, Ottawa, and Buffalo. But the Great Plains are becoming too arid to support its traditional agricultural plenty, and shorelines and the South will become less hospitable. By 2047 scientists warn that Alaska’s average temperature will be the same as Florida’s is today.

Elsewhere around the world, for the near term, safe places are thought to be the upper Great Lakes, upper New England, parts of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. But how long can such sanctuaries remain safe?

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution prosperity has increased, but at a high price. The burning of fossil fuels has changed the climate for the worse and our dependence on them now threatens our future survival. Yet the cost of retrofitting our lives will be very high, and those who profit from the status quo will continue to resist needed changes, possibly until it is too late. Those regions late to modernity will likely continue to suffer and those addicted to the excesses of plenty will refuse reform as long as possible. As the comic strip Pogo long ago proclaimed — We have met the enemy and he is us.