The world has experienced its hottest day on record, according to meteorologists.
The average global temperature reached 17.01C (62.62F) on Monday, according to the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.
The figure surpasses the previous record of 16.92C (62.46F) - set back in August 2016.
There are people alive today who will witness entire countries disappearing beneath the ocean, so it’s not wrong to describe the climate crisis as a death sentence of sorts.
It’s difficult to explain how dire things have already gotten and how much worse they will keep getting while still acknowledge that even worse outcomes can still be averted.
The death of some land I guess?
I mean, being able to articulate your argument is a key point of determining whether it’s a position worth defending right?
I think you should get really concrete about what exactly’s going wrong and how it weighs against other things happening in the world. Like with COVID we’ve got numbers. With obesity and crack we’ve got numbers. With tsunamis we have numbers. And they’re pretty well-defined (despite some controversy in attributing deaths to covid).
What are the numbers with regard to climate change? I think it’s much harder to define a climate change death, or a climate change life disruption, than it is to define a heart attack death, or a crack addiction.
I feel like that would be easier if we clearly defined it. Like “5 million people have lost their homes to rising sea levels, but if we slow it down we can prevent another 2 billion from losing theirs”.
It’s not that hard to conceive when you get it defined clearly.