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One way out may be to reframe the debate. Global warming will affect billions of lives in the future. But, by one estimate, our love for fossil fuels may already be responsible for more deaths than those caused by wars, murders, and traffic accidents combined.

These figures come from the 2012 Climate Vulnerability Monitor. In 2010, some 4.5 million deaths could be attributed to air pollution, because of the production of carbon particles and nitrogen oxides. Another 500,000 deaths that year could be attributed to changes in climate, which lead to extreme weather events, flare ups in infectious diseases, and other disastrous phenomena.

Of course, things are only going to get worse. But few people will understand what “worse” will look like in the future.

Better to think about how our fossil fuel use is already affecting the planet and its inhabitants, and act now.

“The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as the US President,” Madasani Jaganmohan Reddy, Alok Madasani’s father, said last week. “I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their children to the US in the present circumstances.”

Looking back to the early 20th century, it was the Standard English used in England, spoken with the accent known as “Received Pronunciation,” that carried prestige. But today the largest concentration of native speakers is in the US, and the influence of US English can be heard throughout the world: can I get a cookie, I’m good, did you eat, the movies, “skedule” rather than “shedule.” In the future, to speak English will be to speak US English.

The turn of the 20th century was a period of regulation and fixity—the rules of Standard English were established and codified in grammar books and in the New (Oxford) English Dictionary on historical principles, published as a series of volumes from 1884-1928. Today we are witnessing a process of de-standardization, and the emergence of competing norms of usage.

Clipped forms, acronyms, blends, and abbreviations have long been productive methods of word formation in English (think of bus, smog and scuba) but the huge increase in such coinages means that they will be far more prominent in the English of 2115.

It also required that either the president or vice president be a woman, and that one-third of parliamentarians be women. Parliament’s first female speaker, Onsari Gharti Magar, was elected last week.

Bhandari became involved in politics as a teenager in Nepal the 1980s, but stepped away from the action after marrying communist leader Madan Bhandari and having two children with him. After becoming a widow in 1993, when her husband was killed in a mysterious car accident, she stepped back in and campaigned to take his place in parliament.

Nepal is still reeling from the violence and unrest sparked by the adoption of the new constitution. Minority groups complain that it marginalizes them, while others are dismayed at its secularism. India, Nepal’s neighbor, appears to have sided with the dissenters by instituting an unofficial blockade of fuel and other supplies across its border.

Demographers forecast a steep population decline for Japan this century. The Japanese Statistics Bureau (pdf) estimates that the Japanese population will fall to just over 100 million by 2050, from around 127 million today.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Japan’s government enacted a number of programs to make having kids more appealing for young adults. These were supposed to reduce the costs of childcare and force companies to adopt more parent-friendly policies.