For three decades now, I have watched Earth warm—not through headlines or politics, but in my own data. Every year, the evidence has become clearer. My colleagues have measured rising CO₂ levels in Antarctic ice cores. We have seen ice caps retreat, permafrost melt, ecosystems shift, and species vanish. Every single working day of my life has been a front-row seat to a planet in rapid transformation.

As a scientist, I’ve had the privilege—and the burden—of seeing this unfolding crisis through precise measurements and peer-reviewed evidence. At the same time, as a mother, I’ve watched my children and their generation protest, demanding a future they can live in. They are right to fight. The data is irrefutable: the planet is warming—fast.

Some argue that Earth has always gone through warm and cold phases. That is true, but irrelevant. Never before in our human history—the time of Homo sapiens—have we been so numerous, so settled, and so dependent on stable coastlines, fertile soils, and predictable weather. When the last Ice Age ended between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, there were only a few humans on the move, following food and shelter.

We are now eight billion souls, rooted in cities and nations that cannot simply relocate as the climate shifts beneath us.

And yet we will see how all that unfolds as the stupidity of human entitlement butts heads with the reality of the laws of nature.

I’d suggest the reality is violence and lots of it as billions try and move and racsim and xenophobia rears it ugly head even further then now, making it all worse. It’s one of the reasons I’m so far south of the equator, on a small island, off the bottom of Australia, at 270m above sea level and not on a flood plain.