It is April at last, and, though life and work are returning to a new kind of normal after two years of Covid, other enormous troubles loom. Most urgent is the destruction and brutality inflicted by Russia on the population of Ukraine—among the civilians killed are many children—as the citizens choose to resist in support of their democracy.
And just days after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine came more ominous news, in the form of a 3,500-page report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Based on the work of 270 researchers in 67 countries, it is probably the most detailed account of what’s in store for the planet if global temperatures continue to rise unabated: hundreds of millions of people will suffer and die from heat waves, floods, droughts, and starvation, as well as from diseases such as malaria and dengue fever that will spread beyond the tropics, with the poorest nations hardest hit. Said Simon Stiell, environment minister of the island of Grenada, “The report is terrifying. There is no other way of saying it.”
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