I reckon people will be bleating when they suddenly find a billion people displaced by drought, extreme temperatures, floods and extreme weather.

An extract from The Guardian.

Our leaders had a final chance to halt climate breakdown. They failed each and every one of us

So here we are, after 50 years of engineered failure, with not one of the 40 markers of climate action on track to meet the targets governments have agreed. In the first nine months of this year, the seven biggest private sector oil companies made around $150bn in profits. Yet governments continue to supplement this loot by granting oil and gas companies $64bn a year in public subsidies.

There are no longer any feasible means of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating if new oil and gas fields are developed. Yet fossil-fuel companies, with the encouragement of the governments that either own or license them, are planning a major investment surge between 2023 and 2025. The biggest planned expansions, by a long way, are in the US. The soft facts – the vague and unsecured promises at Sharm el-Sheikh about curbing consumption – count for nothing against the hard facts of extending production.

We no longer need to speculate about where this path might lead: we have stepped through the gates. The floods in Pakistan that displaced 33 million people and washed away 3 million acres of soil followed a crop-shrivelling heatwave. This is the whipsaw effect predicted in scientific papers: of moderate weather giving way to a violent cycle of extremes. It’s hard to see how the country will ever recover from the economic shocks of these disasters: as it starts to pick itself up, it’s likely to be knocked down by another one. China this year, though this was sparsely reported in the western media, suffered not only the greatest heatwave in its instrumental record, but the greatest heat anomaly ever recorded anywhere. The devastating drought in the Horn of Africa, now in its fifth year, offers a glimpse of what “uninhabitable” may look like.

The rich world’s governments arrived at the conference in Egypt saying “it’s now or never”. They left saying “how about never?”. We sail through every target and objective, red line and promised restraint towards a future in which the possibility of anyone’s existence starts to dwindle towards zero. Every life is a madly improbable gift. For how much longer will we sit and watch while our governments throw it all away?