Climate change is causing a lifetime of warming for today’s children.

Today’s new generation will face heat waves unlike any seen before the burning of fossil fuels began to raise global temperatures.
More than half of children born in 2020 will be exposed to heat they have never experienced before – even under the most robust projections of climate change over the next 75 years.
This number will rise to 92% of today’s five-year-olds under the worst climate projections, compared to just 16% of children born in 1960 under future climate scenarios.
The findings, published in the journal Nature on 7 May, highlight the heavy burden that climate change is placing on today’s youth – and the importance of mitigating climate change to protect future generations.
“Many people my age have young children and the weather is very bad,” said Wim Thierry, a climatologist at the Free University of Brussels, born in 1987.
The fact that children and young people are the most affected by global warming is not new. But this new study is one of the first to identify the generations and numbers of people who will face “unprecedented health impacts” from extreme heat, Thierry said (see “Children face extreme heat”).
Scientists call this the lifetime limit of exposure to extreme weather, which a person living in a country without climate change has only one chance to experience. “Beyond this limit, it seems unlikely that many weather events would occur without climate change,” Thierry said.
Thierry and his colleagues use climate models to determine thresholds for different regions and types of weather, including heat waves, floods and wildfires For instance, Brussels is experiencing six “extreme” heat waves, which would normally only happen once every century in the absence of climate change. This is an unusual occurrence.
They then used demographic data to calculate the percentage of each generation that would reach this threshold in their lifetime, and to calculate how this percentage changes under different climate change scenarios, for a range of generations born between 1960 and 2020 around the world.
The percentage of each generation expected to experience “unprecedented health” in terms of heat exposure varies considerably. Of the 81 million people born worldwide in 1960 – who are now over 60 – only 13 million, or 16%, will reach this threshold in their lifetime, regardless of climate. But of the 120 million children born in 2020, 58 million (about 50%) will be exposed to this level, even in the most optimistic scenario in which scientists estimate global warming of 1.5°C by 2100 compared to pre-industrial temperatures. Heat waves have increased by 92%, which is 35°C more than the global warming for 1 million people (about 1 million).
The researchers also found that the impact of climate change on today’s children is uneven – those with higher levels of deprivation are more likely to experience extreme temperatures during their lifetime. “It’s not just a generational difference, but also a difference between people who are at high risk,” Thierry said.
Caroline Hickman, a psychiatrist at the University of Bath in the UK who has written about young people’s concerns about climate change, says: “We are more aware than ever of the impact of climate change on children.”
He said there was a tendency among older people to ignore climate change because they do not face the same risks, which this research could help change. “Adults are supposed to protect and safeguard children’s lives, and we are failing in our duty if we ignore that.”
Emma Lawrence, who studies mental health and climate change at Imperial College London, said it was important for society to make changes to protect future generations from the heat, and to reduce its use of fossil fuels as much as possible, thereby protecting itself from climate change by building green homes, renovating and providing cool places to live.