The recent American National Climate Assessment concluded that humans have always assumed the seasons will arrive and depart when expected, that they could live near seas and oceans confident that the waters will remain in their place as they have for generations, and that they could plant harvests the same time each year, confident they will grow. But, federal scientists wrote, “now, the sea is lifting above its shore, the harvest is faltering, and the seasons arrive and depart in disorder.”

We imagine we can buy a home somewhere nice, grow old in it, and leave it to our children to enjoy. But that is no longer the case. I recently came close to buying a house right by the sea in England only to realize that current climate models show the street would be underwater within 20 to 30 years. If I had bought it, then I would have struggled to sell it again even within a decade.

This rammed home the extent to which Western climate refugees will become normal, and soon. People will need to move away from a place that is no longer inhabitable because of flooding, fires, or pollution, but what will they do if they’re unable to sell their home to buy a new one somewhere else? If they have no savings, which is more and more likely as our politicians squander economic stability for populism, expect to see people like us either trapped in horrendous cities or escaping with nothing.

Of course, climate refugees are already here — they’re just not yet us. We do not realize that many of the world’s refugees and migrants are running away from economies and societies collapsing due to climate change. We attribute it to political instability, conflict, or just a “search for a better life.” But when you look deeper, these problems are caused by a change in how land can be used, by failed harvests, and by fights over resources.

Those are the refugees we recognize from the news, but in the future, those of us in the West will become refugees too. People who own properties like the one I nearly bought by the sea, or on flood plains, or just property designed to stay warm in a cold climate, will get trapped as the value crashes.

Climate apartheid will divide our society into those who can afford increasingly expensive food, air-conditioned homes and cars, and can move to cooler cities in the north, and those who are left behind to sweat and wheeze. They will become poorer, and live shorter and less comfortable lives. In some cases, they will end up as an impoverished underclass, carrying their belongings as they migrate away from cities and societies ruined by climate change, searching for simple things like food, clean air, water, and shelter. In fact, it will be like the 19th Century, when the Industrial Revolution left poor people living in smoke-clogged city slums whilst the rich escaped to the countryside. We will have gone full circle.

A process that started years ago will worsen. We are seeing it now but don’t understand it for what it is because it is a truly global phenomenon and that is hard to see. Idiots like Trump and his coterie deny it is happening because it is not happening to them, because they are too intellectually limited to see that something happening beyond their personal experience is still happening (remember how young children think you aren’t there when they have their eyes shut?).

Climate change has already caused mass-migration toward Western countries, and that has triggered the age-old knee-jerk reaction of xenophobia, populism, and authoritarianism. As in the past, and throughout ages, a perceived crisis becomes an opportunity for populist leaders, who play on people’s fears to justify taking away their freedom in return for a false promise to protect them.

Looking ahead, it is clear that the future will not get progressively better as I had grown up to expect.

Look at Viktor Orban in Hungary, building an entire political culture around fear of a refugee crisis that never existed in his country. Look at Brexit, with its underlying ambition of ending immigration to the U.K., despite immigrants being net-contributors economically and being the historical bedrock of British culture. And look at the shameful situation on America’s border, where a made-up crisis has led to people in uniforms separating babies from their mothers, some of whom went on to die in camps. And this is just the beginning.

What we have now that we did not have before is the technology to make this all much worse, and which is spreading around the globe like a manufactured biological weapon. We always assumed it would be the robots that kill us all, but it turns out it may be algorithms. Facebook is A.I. gone awry; an algorithm that is spreading disinformation, causing people to question the basics of science, leading to people not vaccinating their children against preventable fatal diseases, and dismissing the science that proves human-made climate change. They are also isolating sections of society into echo chambers that reinforce populist conspiracies and insulate people from truth and facts. This in turn is taken advantage of by populist political leaders who want power for power’s sake, or to protect the narrow influences of the gangsters or billionaires who support them.

Looking ahead, it is clear that the future will not get progressively better as I had grown up to expect. Life expectancy is falling in the United States, the most real sign that progress is faltering, and the machinery of society is failing. The U.K. is about to become the first country in modern Western history to take concerted steps to shrink its economy and slow its progress, by leaving the EU. Russia is successfully driving wedges into the cracks of unions like NATO and the European Union which have been the most successful opponents of its dictatorship, corruption, and foreign adventurism.

Whilst we focus on the daily impact of all of this, we are often unable to see the whole picture. The bigger picture, beyond the current political storms is that half of the world is on fire, while the other half is under water. The news in 2019 was just full of massive fires and record floods.

It’s only when you pull back and see all the stories as one global picture that it becomes so terrifying. 2019 was the second-warmest year on record. Massive fires burned out of control in California, Siberia, and Australia, whilst the ice melted in the Arctic, and cities around the world flooded. And scientists are telling us now that it’s too late to do more than try to survive climate change and try to prevent it from getting even worse. We are reaching a point of no return. Meanwhile in Brazil, the guardians of the Amazon — humanity’s lungs- are burning it down to the ground fueled by greed and corruption. And still we only go to war over oil, not over forests.

The real malaise runs deep, and is already entrenched. The recent Pisa Test by the OECD that measures the success of education systems around the world showed how the countries that used to lead the West are now far behind in education. The U.K. and United States came in behind China, Singapore, and Poland. The country that educates its children best is China, and the leader in the West is the tiny post-Communist state of Estonia, not any of the former Western powers. Invest in children and invest in our future, we used to say. Now it seems we don’t care. The populism we are seeing unfold in the West, which in turn undermines our attempts to stem climate change, surely in part is a result of decades of underfunding and poor strategy in education.

Bad education now is a harbinger of how bad the future will be. We are producing future generations of adults who lack the basic skills of reading and critical thinking to understand or rebuild the mess we’re creating now. This decline has been slow, and what we see today is already a consequence of this: an electorate, political class, and media that is the product of under investment in education and healthcare and a neglect of civil society going back years. We got complacent when we — the West — were winning, were on top. We got lazy, we forgot what it’s like when the forces of evil are strong, be that the horrific pollution of the industrial revolution, or the dictatorships of the 1930s. What we are seeing now is the first generation of politicians who did not fight in or live through the war, and a generation of voters who are still learning how to use algorithm-driven information sources.

Western idealists built social media and search algorithms to bring us closer together, to unite the world. It was used by Barack Obama to rally a liberal electorate to vote in the first black president — that was progress. But Russia figured out how to turn it against us, to game it and cheat, and this opened up a new battlefront between democracies and dictatorships. China turned something that was meant to open up the country into the greatest state surveillance and control mechanism in history.

We are in the era of information wars now, in the middle of a massive battle we can’t see. Now the opponents of liberalism are using our own tools to destroy the one thing that holds democracies together: truth. They are undermining the science of climate change to perpetuate the oil-based economy because without it their economies, and therefore their hold on power, collapses. They are attacking the benefits of democracy and peace because their people have no freedom, so successful democracy threatens their power by giving their citizens hope.

Things are going to get bad now. I cannot see any way out of this that does not involve a completion of this death spiral — things getting bad enough that even the uninformed mob realize they were wrong. I keep thinking of those photos of Berlin after the war, a once great city reduced to near rubble, or of the piles of corpses in the liberated concentration camps. Only then could humanity widely agree that one side had been wrong and the other right. With today’s climate change, populism, and dictatorships will we again have to burn things to the ground before those supporting this backward-slide realize they were wrong? And will that happen in time for our children to stop humans from completing the human-made great extinction by destroying themselves?

The only hope we can really have for our children is that they will mature into a powerful electorate, a future generation of political leaders, and of protestors and resistance fighters before it is all too late.

The problem with dictatorships and authoritarian regimes is that they censor truth and manipulate facts. That leads to things like the anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and persecution of minorities, it also leads to things like artificial intelligence being developed as a weapon and to suppress people rather than as a tool for the greater good of humanity. Over the last century, the oil lobby hid the truth about the harm carbon-based industry was doing. Our children may suffer the same fate in relation to A.I. and algorithm-based industry, which has the potential to grow into something horrifically destructive if it is not kept in check by transparency and a liberal rules-based system.

The schoolchildren following Greta Thurnberg, the students of Hong Kong, Navalny’s followers in Russia, all around the world young people are starting to fight for their future as they realize that the gerontocracies and kleptocracies of Trump, Xi, and Putin are literally burning down their inheritance.

The only hope we can really have for our children is that they will mature into a powerful electorate, a future generation of political leaders, and of protestors and resistance fighters before it is all too late. This is their time now, and the best we can do is empower them and step aside.

It looks like my son will come of age in a world of climate refugees, dictatorships, revolutions, and wars. This was not how it was meant to be. It was meant to be an Enlightenment-led future where science and industry made the world better and safer, and meritocracy put the most intelligent and benevolent people into positions of power and influence.

I am tired of a debate in which everyone’s view is treated equally, in which we are meant to respect those who disagree with us. No, some people are wrong. Some people cannot make sense of this new unfiltered firehose of information that pours straight onto their phone. They will kill us all, with climate change, nationalism, and preventable infectious diseases. So, no, I will not be respectful.

I am with Greta when she shouted down the adults. They deserve her wrath. I am with the students of Hong Kong fighting for a world in which they cannot be thrown into concentration camps for thinking the wrong thoughts, which is precisely what China is already doing to the Uighur. I am with the climate protestors bringing cities to a stand-still, annoying people going shopping or to work because they can see that as things stand, our children will only inherit rubble and ashes. We need to nurture those who dream, who hope, and who fight because right now they are the only thing that will mean our children aren’t living in a hell of burning forests, flooded cities, and choking air.

This is what keeps me awake at night. When I was young I thought I would grow up in an ever improving world, where democracy, science, sense, and meritocracy would thrive. Now, I fear for my son. It was never meant to be this way.