Burning Man (Woman, and Child)

“Considering that we all depend upon fossil fuels for our existence, I suspect a healthy future is not in our cards. Even though ‘reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade,’ I doubt political leaders will be compelled to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. The current President of the United States refers to anthropogenic climate change as a hoax. He has plenty of company.”—Dr. Guy McPherson

Planetary Hospice

By Dr. Guy McPherson

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”—Greta Thunberg

“This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion . . . All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”—Donald Trump

BELLOWS FALLS Vermont—(Hubris)—January/February 2026—The more I look, the worse it all seems. Adding fuel to the fire, a major report finds that heat kills a person on Earth every minute.

From The Guardian on 28 October 2025 comes an article titled Rising heat kills one person a minute worldwide, major report reveals. The subhead reads: “Biggest analysis of its kind finds millions are dying each year from combined effects of failure to tackle climate crisis.”

That lede is followed by four additional paragraphs that flesh out the horrible story: “Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed. It says that the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires, and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.

“The report, the most comprehensive to date, says the damage to health will get worse with leaders such as Donald Trump ripping up climate policies and oil companies continuing to exploit new reserves.

“Governments gave out $2.5bn a day in direct subsidies to fossil fuel users and producers in 2023, the researchers found, while people lost about the same amount because of high temperatures preventing them from working on farms and building sites.

“Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, the report says, and renewable energy production is rising fast. But the experts say a healthy future is impossible if fossil fuels continue to be financed at current rates.”

Considering that we all depend upon fossil fuels for our existence, I suspect a healthy future is not in our cards. Even though “reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade,” I doubt political leaders will be compelled to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. The current President of the United States refers to anthropogenic climate change as a hoax. He has plenty of company.

The major report referenced by The Guardian was produced by 128 scholars and published by The Lancet and ScienceDirect on 28 October 2025 and 29 October 2025, respectively. This peer-reviewed article is not open-access. However, sufficient information is freely provided to make a compelling case. (I will here cite the ScienceDirect version because its layout is clearer than that of The Lancet.)

The peer-reviewed article begins with an Executive summary: “Driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is increasingly claiming lives and harming people’s health worldwide. Mean annual temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above those of preindustrial times for the first time in 2024. Despite ever more urgent calls to tackle climate change, greenhouse gas emissions rose to record levels that same year. Climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends.”

Apparently, we are still hanging onto the idea that we only recently surpassed the 1.5°C mark. However, governments of the world agreed we passed the 2 C mark in October of 2023. Claiming we passed the 1.5 C mark for the first time a year later is disingenuous.

The second paragraph of the Executive summary adds to an excellent overview: “Authored by 128 multidisciplinary experts worldwide, the 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change is the ninth—and most comprehensive—assessment of the links between climate change and health. The data in this report reveal that, as the health risks and impacts of climate change break concerning new records, progress is being reversed across key areas, further threatening health and survival. However, the evidence in this report also exposes important opportunities to accelerate action and prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”

I have my doubts about those “important opportunities to accelerate action and prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.” After all, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded more than six years ago that Earth is amid the fastest rate of environmental change in planetary history. The IPCC concluded this rapid rate of change is irreversible. It results from humans burning fossil fuels. It will almost certainly lead to the loss of all life on Earth. I’m not a fan. I’m also not a fan of hiding evidence from people.

Beneath a subsection titled “The growing human costs of delayed climate change actions,” we find evidence of the threat imposed by anthropogenic climate change: “The health threats of climate change have reached unprecedented levels. Of the 20 indicators tracking the health risks and impacts of climate change in this report, 12 have set concerning new records in the latest year for which indicator data are available.”

The details that follow are daunting: “On average, 16 (84 percent) of the 19 life-threatening heatwave days that people were exposed to annually in 2020–24 would not have occurred without climate change. Infants younger than 1 year and adults older than 65 years (the most vulnerable age groups) were exposed to a record high number of heatwave days in 2024, with infants younger than 1 years being exposed to 389 percent more heatwave days each on average, and adults older than 65 years being exposed to 304 percent more heatwaves days each on average, compared with the average exposure in 1985-2005 . . . The higher temperatures and the increasing size of vulnerable populations have led to a 63 percent increase in heat-related deaths since the 1990s, reaching an estimated 546,000 yearly deaths on average in 2012-2021 . . . The impacts of heat exposure on an individual’s ability to work or exercise outdoors, and on sleep quality have already reached concerning levels, affecting physical and mental health . . . ”

I realize this is bad news. I also realize most people prefer good news. In addition, I realize that people deserve to know when they have a life-threatening condition. Hiding such information from people is unethical.