“I thought that was it, that I was going to die. We could see our neighbours waving flashlights. In just a few moments, the lights went out, and they had disappeared.”
Words from the BBC reporting on the Libya floods
At work the other week I was compiling headline summaries of the major climate impacts across 2023 for a report.
It was devastatingly easy to draw up.
At 1.3 degrees of warming, climate devastation is already scaling.
Earlier this year, my colleagues in North America were talking about how they couldn’t leave their homes because of the air pollution from wildfires, and how schools were shut so they were working around not having childcare.
This summer, I was following some of the horrendous stories of families whose holidays had become a hellscape, and imagining what it would be like to shepherd your petrified children to an emergency shelter on their school break.
And in the past week, I have been trying to fathom the scary graphs of sea ice in Antartica hitting record lows. 1.5 million square miles of sea ice are missing.
I had a recent conversation about climate change with a parent of three young kids. It’s something they are concerned about, they say, though not for their own kids because they are well-off, and it will be others who are affected.
I didn’t really know how to communicate the response I wanted to. The effects of climate change will become so much more pervasive in coming decades that every child born today will live a life that is indelibly shaped by this new era of an unstable climate. (This seemed like not a sentence you could say at a wedding breakfast).
Similar to how (though relative wealth shielded people from some of the worst outcomes) the pandemic affected everyone’s lives, changes to the earth’s climate will inevitably affect everyone.
We have become used to walking into supermarkets stocked with an incredible range of food on demand, and being able to travel where we want. So much of modern life is dependent on the fact of globalisation, which is in turn premised upon a stable climate.
Even in the UK, climate change threatens much of our infrastructure – whether it is railway tracks melting, flooding blocking roads, drought stressing the provision of water to homes, or increasing storms knocking-out the power system.
In the 2003 pop hit ‘Millionaire‘, Kelis sings “I ain’t rich, til he is rich, and she is rich”. You might think that an early noughties pop hit is an interesting source for a morally important sentiment… but the sentiment stands. Even if I thought that I and the lives of those I know would be unaffected by climate change, it deeply matters to me that the lives of millions of people alive in my time will be transformed and even ended because of it.
Even though I work in this area, sometimes when I’m just visiting friends or going about my everyday, I find it easy to pretend that climate change isn’t real. When I feel jarred scrolling social media and seeing a multitude of holidays and travel plans undertaken by friends, I tell myself I’m being a bit overdramatic.
But then I see the reporting coming from the Port of Derna. And I think of people crowding on rooftops in the dark as water rushes by so powerfully that it carries their neighbour’s buildings away. That should be nobody’s lived reality. Thousands of people dead, tens of thousands displaced, and in just a couple of days.
That matters.
thejoyofrachel 
you are absolutely right to be so concerned. The future looks increasingly bleak. Until most of the worlds authorities /governments act together intentionally and fully commited to reducing the effects then we are doomed. It is a similar situation to the second world war which I experienced as a boy, There we did co-operate.
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Hi Rachel I saw your email and then read this news story about UK firefighters needing training from Spain in order to combat wildfires. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/22/uk-firefighters-go-to-spain-for-wildfire-training-as-number-of-blazes-doubles-aoe Well done for all your work.
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