Time for adults to finally act like adults on climate change: A report detailing how climate inaction will consign people born today to a lifetime of weather extremes must awaken a sense of responsibility.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01380-w
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Quantifying what climate change will mean for those being born now is an active topic of research. This week in Nature, one group of climate researchers reports findings (L. Grant et al. Nature 641, 374–379; 2025) that must surely make adults take more notice of what younger people are saying.
Building on an earlier study (W. Thiery et al. Science 374,158–160; 2021), Luke Grant, a climate researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and his colleagues report that children and young people born in the present decade face exposure to heatwaves, crop failures, floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones, in a way that their parents and grandparents never did — and that this applies pretty much anywhere in the world.
Most Western countries are facing growing right-wing movements which could arguably be defined by their unwillingness to take responsibility for anything. Their rhetoric always boils down to blaming outsiders, immigrants, and left-wingers who haven’t held significant power for years or decades.
We should care more about what we’re doing to the environment and the consequences it will have for our children and descendants, but unfortunately unless we manage to rapidly swing the pendulum back the next decade or so will be dictated by “If it doesn’t affect me directly I don’t care.”
Too bad the world has decided it’s way easier to mess with the atmosphere than lift a single finger to stop this.