This is an abbreviated re-post of, Confonting the Climate Cranks, The Nation, adapted from Mark Hertsgaard's HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.  Links + bold added by ecoSanity.

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...I had been covering the climate story for fifteen years by then, and when Chiara was almost six months old, I went to London to interview Sir David King, then the British government's chief science adviser. The interview changed my life. King, who had done as much as anyone except Al Gore to awaken the world to the dangers of climate change, helped me understand that the climate problem had undergone a profound, largely unexpected paradigm shift that carried the gravest of implications for little Chiara and all the world's children. No longer was climate change a preventable future threat; it was now a punishing current reality, one that was guaranteed to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it got better.

Below is a slightly abbreviated re-post of an essential article, Meet Generation Hot, by Mark Hertsgaard, in reference to his forthcoming book, Hot: Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth.

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My daughter Chiara, age five, is a member. So is my goddaughter Emily, age twenty-two. So are the thousands of Pakistani children now suffering after record monsoon rains left 20% of their country -- an area the size of Great Britain -- under water.

In fact, every child on earth born after June 23, 1988 belongs to what I call Generation Hot. This generation includes some two billion young people, all of whom have grown up under global warming and are fated to spend the rest of their lives confronting its mounting impacts.

For Generation Hot, the brutal summer of 2010 is not an anomaly; it's the new normal.