Todays Children – Tomorrows World

What steps do you take when your child has a temperature? I usually monitor them for a day to see how they get on. If their temperature remains high I reach for the paracetamol to bring their temperature down because a high temperature can be fatal.

It’s amazing how nature works. One minute they’re jumping around, busy wrecking the house. Then with just a couple of degrees change they’re listless, stuck to the sofa, unable to move, looking like death warmed up.

It only takes a couple of degrees to render your child inactive – that’s 2 degrees. A couple more degrees and they could be gone. just like our ecosystem

I wrote this one last year, reflecting on the lives of children in warmer climates and all children on our warming planet.

Todays Children, Tomorrows World

You are so small, you cannot know
Challenges ahead to come as you grow
The climate is changing all over the world
Into uncertain chaos you are being hurled

Life will be wetter, or so they say
Making it harder to harvest wheat and hay
Food must go further, many more mouths to feed
As global population refuses to recede

Meanwhile our brothers they burn in the heat
Sweltering deserts, nowhere to retreat
Drought and famine all around
Crops lying over, dead, in the ground

Water is pungent, toxic to the core
While the oil barons continue to bore
The fish are all dying they cannot evolve
This species extinction man cannot solve

What will you think of generations before
Handing you this fate – your key to the door
Will you look back in anger and ask why on earth
They plundered the planet long before your birth

Will you loathe the inaction, denial and greed
Despise the lack of considering your need
You will be left with the world in a mess
All due to our supposed “progress”

Theresa O’Donohoe – March 2013

It’s a pity there’s no paracetamol for climate change. We’re unlikely to prevent a 2 degree rise in average global temperatures but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing and allow a 4, 6 or 8 degree rise.