This One Twitter Thread Lays Out The Many Ways Climate Change Disrupts People's Lives

For some, it can be difficult to accept the impact that humans have on environmental health. That resistance is something that many in the scientific community are well-aware of, and on Monday, a thread of Weather Channel tweets on climate change addressed that challenge. In a series of tweets, the weather network zeroed in on those who reject climate change science by framing the issue around climate-based migration.

The tweets were posted partly to promote their new series, "Exodus," which tells story about people who have to decide whether or not to leave their homes because weather events have made staying untenable. The thread started with images of a world devastated by various traumatic weather events.

"Water comes slowly at first," the thread began. "Skies open up in the afternoon now. People start avoiding certain streets at high tide. The nuisances pile up. Houses get raised, then raised again. Insurance people are talking about 'repetitive loss properties.' Homeowners are worrying."

But the thread swiftly shifts to describe a world where weather has long-lasting impacts on infrastructure, city development, and farmers. In this imagined future, citizens begin to demand change.

"The city stops servicing some of the roads by the beach. And people start saying, 'It’s just not worth it.' Or the water doesn’t come at all. The drought pushes people off their farms or out of their traditional pasturing lands. It pushes them into cities," the tweets read. "Then protests start."

Slowly, the tweets in the thread begin to paint images of lives being altered by climate change, referencing farmers who must "pasture their animals in unfamiliar territory," or an island "swallowed by the sea inch by inch."

"Or the livestock cannot handle the heat...Or the permafrost melts under the house. Or they don’t have money to rebuild."

From there, the network offered some seriously sobering facts about the impact that climate change is already having on populations around the world.

"A recent World Bank study looking only at Latin America and parts of Africa and Asia sees up to 142 million people migrating within their own countries because of climate change impacts in the coming decades," The Weather Channel wrote, referencing a report from March of 2018.

And it's not just the people, themselves, who will feel the impact of climate change, according to The Weather Channel. Those people also have homes, and the destruction of those homes will carry a significant financial loss, especially in the United States.

"And the Union of Concerned Scientists recently estimated that $117 billion of coastal real estate in the United States alone is at risk of inundation by 2045," read one tweet. "But displacement and migration due to the effects of climate are already happening."

But at the end of the day, climate change denial is a real hurdle when it comes to getting the general population on board with combatting it. The thread acknowledged this, directly."

"Look, if you’re reading this and you reject the fact that climate change is happening, these pieces probably aren’t going to convince you, because you haven’t been convinced by anything else," wrote The Weather Channel. "But climate disruptions cause human disruptions....These disruptions are happening, and the way they’re playing out in different places is a complicated knot of local factors, with weather, infrastructure, politics, violence and more playing a part," the channel wrote on Twitter."

The Weather Channel linked to its ongoing project about climate-caused migration, the directory indicates that the network has already begun highlighting several areas around the world. The reality is that climate change is a global issue, and it helps to stay educated about how it's already affecting various groups of people.