New Study Reveals Children Born After 2020 Will Face Extreme Climates on a Scale Never Seen Before

The boiling planet is no longer a distant concern or a vague warning from our experts. It is getting quite real day by day. The floods are getting stronger, the heatwaves more frequent, the wildfires more ferocious, and droughts more prolonged. All around the Earth, children are already facing the existing extreme weather as if it’s the new normal. According to a climate study published in Nature, kids born after 1990 are on track to experience climate extremes on a scale never recorded before in history.

The research paints a deadly picture of generational injustice; today’s young ones are inheriting a world that is exponentially more volatile than that of their grandparents and parents. Study lead author Luke Grant, a physical scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis remarked, "By stabilizing our climate around 1.5 C [2.7 F] above pre-industrial temperatures, about half of today's young people will be exposed to an unprecedented number of heatwaves in their lifetime…over 90% will endure such exposure throughout their lives…The same picture emerges for other climate extremes examined, though with slightly lower affected fractions of the population," stated Live Science. The study used advanced climate models with global demographic data to calculate lifetime exposure to various types of climate disasters.

The aftermath of this? If this lethal global warming reaches above limits, 92% of children born in 2020 will face deadly heatwaves in their lifetimes. Compare that to just 16% of those born in 1960. Under the same situation, almost 29% of today’s five-year-old babies will face crop failures and 14% will face destructive floods during their lifetime. Grant remarked, "Living an unprecedented life means that without climate change, one would have less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of experiencing that many climate extremes across one's lifetime…This is a stringent threshold that identifies populations facing climate extremes far beyond what could be expected without man-made climate change," stated Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Now, you must be thinking, if we limit global warming, our story will change. Sadly, no. Even if global warming is under target, over half  (52%) of children born in 2020 would still face deadly consequences.

And, unfortunately, this burden won’t be evenly spread. Children in the tropics and those from low-income communities are set to suffer most. Rosanna Gualdi and Raya Muttarak, from the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Bologna, Italy, wrote, "…The actions taken today to reduce emissions are therefore crucial in shaping the climate future of current and coming generations. Given that the impacts of climate change and the transformations required to decarbonize society are not distributed equally, it is important to consider equity in the transition to net-zero emissions," according to Live Science.

As temperatures spike and climate extremes grow more intense, the gap between generations grows wider. Kids born today are not just inheriting a boiling planet—they’re walking into a living hell curated by decades of inaction.