 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released a new 3,500 page report, and in essence, it concludes that we are essentially doomed as a species. Obviously, that's an oversimplification, and I'm being a little bit facetious here, but this is a pretty bleak reading this. And when I see this, I read this as kind of a forecast as to what's to come. Now they still leave a little bit of room for hope, but essentially, what they make very clear is that disaster at this point is inevitable, and what we can control is essentially minimizing the scope of the disaster. How much disaster do we want to see? How catastrophic do we want climate change to become? Because it will be a catastrophe, but how bad? And that's at this point, what we have in our control. Now, obviously, I don't think many of us have time to read all 3,500 pages, but there's a lot of really good summaries out there, and I'm going to turn to a report from the Washington Post where they kind of give us the 5 main takeaways from this report. This was written by Brady Dennis and Sarah Kaplan, and here's the 5 main things that you should know about this report. First and foremost, a certain amount of suffering is inevitable, although adaptation can help. Number 2, every incremental increase in temperature will lead to dramatically more disease, death, and frequent, costly disasters. Number 3, climate change is battering the places and populations least able to adapt, and that is all but certain to continue. Number 4, global warming is wreaking havoc on plants and wildlife. Number 5, for many locations on earth, the capacity for adaptation is already significantly limited, even as it becomes more critical. So a lot of this isn't necessarily going to be surprising to a lot of you. We already know that climate change is bad and will be bad, but we're learning with more specificity how it's going to impact certain places in the world, certain species. So, when it comes to point number 1 about the adaptation helping, that's a really important point. To the extent that we can adapt to climate changes, we should do that, but certain crises will be inevitable. Now, one of them is deaths due to climate-related illnesses such as extreme heat and childhood malnutrition. And because of this, we will see a quarter of a million more deaths within the next, or in three decades. So, that's one thing to keep in mind, more deaths because of climate change. Number 2, every incremental increase in temperature will lead to dramatically more disease, death, and frequent, costly disasters. Now, when you think about the difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius, that's ostensibly insignificant, right? Not in the context of climate change, because it's probably going to be the case that we're not going to meet the 1.5 degree goal. We're not going to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. I don't even know if we're going to keep it to 2 degrees, but the difference between 1.5 degree and Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius is laid out here, and it is really, really drastic. So, first and foremost, if we keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to 2 degrees, that's 65 million less people exposed to extreme heat waves every five years. That's just a 0.5 degrees Celsius difference. If we don't reach 1.5 degree warming, if we don't limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, that's 65 million more people exposed to extreme heat waves every five years. That's an additional half billion people living in areas with water scarcity, a number that will increase over the years, and certain areas won't be able to produce crops. Outdoor work will just not be feasible in these areas, and this is all if we can't keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and we're probably going to surpass 2. So, yeah. Now, here's what is really alarming for parents if you have a young child. So, coming generations will inherit a much harsher planet than the one their parents knew. For instance, people younger than 10 in the year 2020 are projected to experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme events at 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming and a five-fold increase if temperatures rise by 3 degrees Celsius or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. So, they're going to already see disaster, but it's going to get much, much worse for them. It will be much worse for them if we don't keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Point number three. So, climate change is battering the places and populations least able to adapt. See, developing countries, they did not contribute to this crisis, but yet they will bear the brunt of the disaster of climate change. And what they are estimating here is a refugee crisis, the likes of which humanity has never seen. We're talking about the displacement of 31 to 143 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia. I mean, people are not going to be able to stay in their homes because of climate change. And when you have this mass refugee crisis, that in and of itself is absolutely horrific, but then you think through the political implications of that. Will there be a wave of xenophobia, new political movements that erupt against these refugees? How is this going to impact countries? There's so much to try to think about here, and they're not giving you a political analysis. They're just saying 31 to 143 million people. We don't know how much in particular, but a lot of people will be displaced. Prepare for that. Now, when it comes to point number four, global warming is wreaking havoc on plants and wildlife. So they estimate that 10% of all plant and animal life faces extinction if we do not limit warming to two degrees Celsius. Now, this doesn't just mean that cute animals and pretty plants will go bye-bye. This disrupts the entire ecosystem. This affects humanity as well. So it's not just sad that they're going to cease to exist permanently. This affects us as well. And on top of that, because of the effect that this will have on animals, so they cite an increase in the chance of disease jumping from animals to people as animals become displaced, which I can only assume means that pandemics will become a more common phenomenon. So if you thought that COVID was bad, have fun dealing with multiple pandemics in the future. Bleak. Bleak, shit. I warned you. I warned you. Now, finally, for the last point, many locations on earth, you know, they speak about the capacity for adaptation being limited. So to the extent that cities have tried to adapt to the changing climate, it's been really incremental. But areas where they've not adapted at all are developing countries. They do not have the resources needed to adapt. So the developed world, rich countries are going to have to help poor countries. If people in these countries are going to survive, if we're going to expect them to be able to live in their countries, which I believe they very much want to do. I mean, who wants to be displaced? Who wants to leave? So we should be assisting them and we're not. We're not. That's very clear here. We're not even helping ourselves. We're not really doing much to adapt. But they should be the ones who we are prioritizing because they will deal with climate change the worst. Sub-Saharan Africa is basically going to be hit or one of the hardest hit areas in the world. And we're just kind of wishing them luck. All of this is incredibly grim and bleak and it's hard to not get depressed reading this. But, you know, it feels like at this point we've collectively decided as a species to just say, fuck it. The people in power just don't care enough. They've prioritized short-term profits over the long-term survival of the human species. And they're just telling climate change, let it rip because our profits currently are just, they're too sweet. So we're not going to do shit about it. But it's already the case that generations today, people born, my nephews, my niece, they're going to experience a four-fold increase in extreme events. So all of these new things that we're seeing increased severity of hurricanes and increased frequency of extreme weather events, annual fire events, where we see these mass wildfires along the West Coast, this will all increase four-fold. So the world is going to look very, very different in the next few decades. And that's even if we do everything that we need to do. But really the question here, what we can control as a species is how bad will we let this get? Will we let it get so bad that it will almost certainly lead to our annihilation as a species? Or are we going to fight it and actually stop? And it seems like the former is what we've chosen as a species. And, you know, I say that not just because lawmakers are choosing to not act because of reasons, the deficit, special interests contributing to them, but because people just don't care about climate change. I mean, this video, I guarantee it, will perform worse than all other videos that I put out this week. And it's because people have either checked out because they feel hopeless or because they just don't care. They feel as if it's not going to impact them in the near term. So why worry about climate change when there's all these other issues? And I get it. There's a lot of crises that we're dealing with currently. But we're talking about the most important issue, the survival of our species. So if you feel as if this issue was boring to you, force yourself to pay attention because future generations can't afford us to be ambivalent here. We have to be active and we have to put pressure on lawmakers to take action. Otherwise, we're doomed as a species.