A study published April 7 in Geophysical Research Letters reduces climate injustice to brutal arithmetic: the cumulative lifetime emissions of roughly 1.2 average US citizens are enough to push one additional person into compound hot-dry extremes by 2100. Not heat alone. Heat and drought together, collapsing water and food systems simultaneously, concentrated in low-income tropical countries that barely register in the emissions ledger producing them.
Monica Ionita, the study's senior author at the Alfred Wegener Institute, expected the findings to show maybe 10 or 15 percent of the global population affected. The number came back at nearly 30 percent. "By the end or middle of the century, maybe my children will not be able to experience the life that I have now," she said. A climatologist running the models and finding her own family inside them.