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PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILE DUCKE
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By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor
The news is relentless sometimes. While we were wondering whether Henri would become the first hurricane in decades to strike New England, flash floods in Tennessee killed at least 21. While American eyes have been focused on fires in the West, more than 15 million acres of forest have already burned this year in Siberia, as Madeleine Stone writes for Nat Geo—an area nearly the size of West Virginia.
Over the next few decades on the climate beat, there will be a lot more seasons like this one. Things are going to get worse before they get better, the recent IPCC report tells us. A UNICEF report released last week found that a billion children worldwide are vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The “picture is almost unimaginably dire,” UNICEF executive director Henriette Fore said. (Above, a family enjoys the beach despite the think smoke over Yakutsk, in east Siberia.)
History expands the imagination. Picture this planet a century ago: World War I had just killed 20 million people and the influenza pandemic at least 50 million more. The next 25 years would see a global economic depression and World War II, which killed another 60 million. If any period in human history was apocalyptic, it was the first half of the 20th century.
But the second half saw the greatest improvements ever in humanity’s material well-being—especially in child mortality, which plummeted. Globally, it’s about a fifth what it was in the middle of the 20th century.
All that progress was powered by fossil fuels, which means it came at the expense of the global environment—a realization the world is now very belatedly acting on. What form will that action take over the rest of this century? (Below, Elizabeth Yefimova, 18, and Ilya Alekseyev, 20, wear respirators as thick smoke hangs over Yakutsk .)
As Stone explains in another piece for us, the IPCC considered five scenarios. In the first two, global greenhouse gas emissions start declining by 2025, and by the second half of the century we’re drawing massive amounts of carbon back out of the atmosphere. Those scenarios keep global warming below the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees Celsius. Both are decidedly optimistic—but as climate scientist Zeke Hausfather told Stone, “very much on the table” if major countries meet the net-zero pledges they’ve been making.
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