These are planning windows, not deadlines that suddenly begin when disasters strike. Many consequences are already occurring and can continue through later periods. Your location, income, health, infrastructure, and available protection determine which risks you should address first.

Climate change can no longer best described as a slow or gradual uniform rise in temperature. The evidence shows a more dangerous pattern: several core indicators are increasing at faster rates, many consequences are becoming more frequent, severe, long-lasting, or widespread, and multiple systems are interacting in ways causing abrupt human disruption.

Here is one of the strangest mysteries in human history: Why do intelligent people and entire societies repeatedly see serious problems coming, understand many of their causes, possess possible solutions, and still allow those problems to grow until they become disasters? This is particularly relevant for why we have not yet solved climate change, but it also relates to war, injustice and the other crisis of today's polycrisis.

Below, you will find the full costs of climate change consequences for the United States and the world from 2016 to 2025. It is a transparent estimate of disaster damage, deaths and illness, lost work, crop losses, infrastructure failures, insurance stress, displacement, and many other cascading climate costs. It also includes projected cost charts for the next 30 years in five-year increments.

Our climate think tank has warned for years that extreme weather consequences from climate change will expand dramatically from about 2026 through 2031–2035, and then move toward far faster increases in severity, frequency, and scale from about 2035 to 2050. It's no longer going to be a steady, slow climb in consequences, as in the past. But what does this new meta-pattern mean?

While there's still much critical climate-change action work to be done, it is also important to define a candid and realistic climate change "right stuff" attitude and perspective to combat the climate-doom or "it's already too late" attitudes many have adopted. The practical, honest, and realistic balance in this climate-change "right stuff" attitude and perspective may surprise you.