Scientist warn 1 billion on track to die from climate change.
Scientist warn 1 billion on track to die from climate change.
The fossil fuels that humanity burns today will be a death sentence for many lives tomorrow.
This rule is actually "an order of magnitude best estimate", which means it's more of a range, somewhere between 0.1 to 10 deaths per 1000 tons of carbon burned.
That leaves a lot of room for scenarios even more dire than the one outlined here.
"When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom," explains Pierce.
"We've done that here too and it still doesn't look good."
Translation: 10 billion people will die.
2nd translation: Almost everyone will die.
I wish I could be an optimist, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of those casualties in the USA will be in Florida and California.
Many of the major insurance companies stopped issuing new home owners policies in those states because it was no longer profitable or very risky. IIRC, increasing housing costs and frequency of these events was the main reason they pulled out
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"1 billion people on track to die"... I guess we're doing an empirical test of the trolley problem.
We have a choice between inconveniencing some people (especially some very rich people); vs saving billions of lives by switching tracks. And apparently the empirical choice is to equivocate and delay so that we stay on the path of death and ruin. ... It isn't the solution I would have chosen personally.
There is quite a lot of extra discussion regarding the 1000-ton rule in the artual report itself (link can ne found in the article). Here are some excerpts:
it is likely more than 300 million (“likely best case”) and less than 3 billion (“likely worst case”) will die as a result of AGW of 2 °C.
A more recent attempt at quantifying future deaths in connection with specific amounts of carbon was published by Bressler [69]. Coining an economically oriented term “mortality cost of carbon”, he claimed that “for every 4434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature”. His predictions were confined to deaths from extreme heat when wet-bulb temperature exceeds skin temperature (35 °C).
Some interesting stuff in there.
I would've added more but holy shit the mdpi.com mobile website is atrocious to copy stuff from. It keeps throwing me at the end of the entire article, highlighting everything.
And with your help we can make sure that that number includes those that need to die.
...so far.
Where does the line start?
Oh no, the sun is hot! It is normal to have variations in temperature from year to year.
That's a bummer. Well, what're you gonna do... We should build more solar and wind farms, that will surely help. Maybe ban plastic straws in Africa, too?
"... over the next century," continues the article after the catchy headline.
Not that people dying is a good thing, but I was kind of hoping they'd be people alive right now. If 1/8th of the world treated climate change like it was personally going to kill them, we might still have a chance of turning things around. (As a bonus, can oil giants really keep their execs safe from 1 in 8 highly motivated people?)