Reading David Abel’s “Report finds city facing peril from ocean’’ (Page A1, June 23), I had a realization. Looking at the dates by which the latest report says some of the now-unimaginable could become real — sea levels rising 6 to 10 feet by 2100, submerging 30 percent of Boston; 90-degree temperatures for 90 days per year by 2070 — it struck me that people born in 2016 will be 54 in 2070, 84 in 2100. Climate change is not the concern of some distant generation; it is within current lifetimes. I’ll be gone when the worst is set to hit, but young children in my family are going to have to live through the consequences of our current inaction.

Report coauthor Rob DeConto says that, with the predicted amount of sea-level rise, one of those consequences will be “a managed retreat from the coastline.’’ Mass migrations of humans are not pretty. We celebrate when children are born, but should we be apologizing now for the catastrophe we are leaving them to deal with? Or should we be fighting with everything we’ve got to make sure they have a better future than science predicts?

Alexis Rizzuto

Cambridge