28/09/2024
Although I have hear and read many similar versions, not many have put this so poignantly or eloquently.
An excerpt from "The Future We Choose, Chapter 2".
"It is 2050. Beyond the emissions reductions registered in 2015, no further efforts were made to control emissions. We are heading for a world that will be more than 3 degrees warmer by 2100.
The first thing that hits you is the air. In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy, and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You think about some countries in Asia, where out of consideration sick people used to wear white masks to protect others from airborne infection. Now you often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be. Everything might look fine—sunny and clear—but you know better. When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford).
Southeast Asia and Central Africa lose more lives to filthy air
than do Europe or the United States. There fewer people work
outdoors, and even indoors the air can taste slightly acidic,
sometimes making you feel nauseated. The last coal furnaces closed ten years ago, but that hasn’t made much difference in air quality around the world because you are still breathing dangerous exhaustfumes from millions of cars and buses everywhere. Some countries have experimented with seeding rain clouds—the process of artificially inducing rain—hoping to wash pollution out of the sky, but results are mixed. Seeding clouds to artificially create more rain is difficult and unreliable, and even the wealthiest countries cannot achieve consistent results."
