It's 45 degrees in the shade in South Sudan

And nobody has air conditioning.

Part of the West’s runaway narcissism on climate issues is imagining the carbon we emit will determine the future of the climate. (It won’t.) Another is imagining we’ll be the ones to suffer most. (We won’t be.)

There are 12 million people in South Sudan. Fewer than 200,000 of them have access to electricity. Fewer still to air conditioning.

It’s 45 degrees Celsius there this week. 113 Fahrenheit.

It’s unsafe to work outside at that temperature. And almost everyone there lives from farming, herding or fishing, things you do outside. If they don’t do them, they don’t eat.

South Sudan was already on the edge of habitability 40 years ago. For them, +2.0 degrees isn’t the difference between pleasantly hot and uncomfortably hot. +2.0 degrees is the difference between survivable and not survivable.

Climate change is not about us. It’s about them.