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.
The people responsible don’t care. They will be perfectly fine letting the rest of us die. They’ll only start giving a shit once cheap labor starts getting hard to come by.
Automation replaces manual works, AI replaces intellectual ones. No need for cheap labor in the short term.
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.
My wild ass guess is humanity will eventually die back to, at best, bronze age population levels.
Will I finally get to meet the sea people?
Yeah. We'll definitely be set ourselves back for a while. Shame because we are on the verge of lots of great technologies.
This global economist wrote a whole book arguing exactly that; The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/667b3daf-4c99-47de-82f6-f74eb7cd2ff7
So what you're saying is... we are going to enter a dark age... and we could use a Foundation to lessen it's impact on humanity?
Or two?
Pretty sure I'm gonna be fine.
Or it could end up being less bad than we expect.
It's OK, they're just billion poorest people.
/S
You joke, but that is how a lot of people feel about it.
Yeah. That's the sad part. I think most people sort of accidentally think that, without really critically thinking about it.
The people who will suffer most area already invisible to most others.
In NZ we're trying to reduce carbon emissions in farming to the cries of farmers "but you're killing our jobs" neglecting that they're indirectly killing actual people.
In Europe over 60,000 people died in 2022 due to heatwaves.
People are blind to these deaths because they're not being taken out by a single devastating event, but rather a series of small events the people brush off as "they were going to die anyway".
It's one of the reasons I've not, and will not have children. This is getting exponentially worse and I couldn't image the horror that our future will face.
... meanwhile we're compensating people who built $10m houses on cliff tops, who then cut down the trees securing the cliff edge, and are now finding out that cliffs erode, and their houses are failing into the sea.
... we're exempting farmers from paying the actual costs of their carbon emissions while they pollute or water ways with reckless abandon. It's only the poor fuckers down stream who'll get sick and die.
... While we still argue if old and sick people should die of COVID so that fashion shops can still hock their tat manufactured halfway around the world and shipped here on ships that burn the shittiest fuel available.
I have had kids, and lament the world I'm giving to them.
That’s the irony. They are probably a lot of the people who contribute the least to climate change. So any misanthropes in here saying “good, this will help” are not only evil but wrong.
I wish I could be an optimist, too.
There are some real disgusting people here. Anyone who thinks that the solution to climate change is to kill a lot of humans should consider going first.
Give me a quick, painless & easy way out and I take it.
Lol the top comment after this is "me first"
ecofascism baybeee
Yeah. The problem is how we use our resources.
Anyone who thinks we're overpopulated immediately gets written off as an idiot in my mind. They just don't know the world they were born into.
7% of me has. You next.
It only took 250 years since the industrial revolution to utterly doom our world.
Oh, our world will be fine, it's not the Earth's first mass extinction event. We - and a lot of flora and fauna we depend on - are really fucked though.
I hate seeing this take repeated. Just because there have been other mass extinction events doesn't mean the earth will be fine this time. If we fuck things up bad enough it will cause a runaway greenhouse effect. At which point the earth will not be fine, because it will be Venus 2.0. Additionally if we kill ourselves off but somehow fall short of that point, who cares if the earth will be fine in our absence? As far as we're aware we are the only sapient life in the universe. This dismissive, humanity hating attitude that its fine if we die off because the planet won't literally cease to exist, is so dumb. How about if we just be better instead of going extinct?
Man we still fucked it all up though
Nature knows how to solve this problem.
This issue is that nature is going to start with the people who contribute the least to the issue.
If only the people contributing the most could actually feel the pressure.
And those who contribute the least to this issue are also likely the ones who want it fixed the most.
I can easily see white nations gunning-down brown migrants by the millions to keep them out.
By resetting earth. I wonder what species will wander the lands and waters in millions of years...
Jellyfish.
I'm thinking the Octopuses finally take over if they survive the warming oceans.
I hope bird people rise up. It'd be neat.
Probably cockroaches, I've seen the film
Sentient dolphins and squidkids probably
Nature is already working on it and ramping things up.
Is the earth is getting a fever to kill the viruses that are infecting it?
It is is
Vaccine man from OPM was right. We need to put Saitama on trial
Calling people viruses is probably not the best way to go about it. It's the way we're doing economy at a global scale, not inherent to us as a species.
The most accurate thing is often not the most palatable.
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.
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
Yup. The same people who deny science start paying attention once their own money becomes involved.
In Florida, the issue is rising sea levels. If you look at one of those interactive maps showing the effects of a rising sea level, you’ll notice that all of southern Florida is at risk of major flooding.
In California, wildfires are the problem. As the atmosphere gets warmer and rainfall becomes unreliable, forests get drier. Fires will become bigger, spread faster, and be even more frequent.
Neither state will be a profitable place for home insurance companies.
In Florida the issue has little to do with rising sea levels at the moment. There's a Bad Faith law that makes the insurance companies responsible for the policyholders legal bills if the decision increases the amount of the settlement. There are a lot of lawyers that take cases and only bill if they win, and if they do win they bill a lot. There is also a lot of insurance fraud in Florida, both of which drove up the legal costs to insurers. Catastrophic events are more impactful to insurers in Florida since Florida has passed a law preventing international reinsurers from being used. So when a hurricane hits rather than having the costs borne by a larger number of insurers across the globe, only US insurers will be spending money on the catastrophe. This has pushed many insurers to insolvency.
In California rate increases could allow insurers to keep up with rising costs. Note that the percent of homes affected by wildfires is only somewhat up over the past roughly 20 years, the real problem is the increase in severity due to rising property values and insurers being unable to raise rates due to Prop 103. Prop 103 allows for public interest groups to have hearings with the DOI and the insurance company to determine if a rate increase of 7% or higher is justified, and the insurance company must pay the legal costs of the public interest group(s). The lawyers who lobbied for this law have set up a public interest group and start hearing whenever an insurer tries to increase rates at 7% or more. Said group tries to drag out the hearings as long as possible, since it's free money.
It's largely legislative changes that have made insurance unprofitable in those states. Florida's bad faith law and banning of international reinsurers have both hurt the industry a lot. California has had wildfires for a long time and their frequency hasn't increased much over time.
I left a more detailed comment elsewhere in this thread if you're interested.
How does lack of homeowners insurance translate to excess climate change deaths? Serious question
Because when ice melts it turns to water. When lots of ice (the arctic) melts, it turns to water (the ocean). The problem is not only does this raise the sea level (effectively causing the coast to recede inward) but it causes more common and powerful natural disasters which, in turn, wreak havoc on specific parts of the country.
Which states typically face the worst natural disasters? Florida (hurricanes) and California (wildfires). When somebody's house gets blown or burned away, insurance is supposed to cover the cost. But what happens when the insurance company spends more on paying out claims than it brings in in revenue? It goes out of business.
To avoid going out of business, these insurance companies are looking at market projections that use data attempting to predict future risks, or future likelyhood that they will have to pay out to their clients. Since climate change is only going to make natural disasters more severe, but ALSO more common, the companies are (intelligently) no longer pursuing business sin these states because it they are going to pay out more than they take in. If they stay, they would lose money.
Edit: "Wreak" havoc, not "Reek".
Insurance companies don’t want to offer homeowners insurance in places where mass destruction is likely. It’s just not profitable.
Like other companies, an insurance company generally wants as many customers as possible. If an area is considered so potentially dangerous (and therefore unprofitable) that home insurers are willing to turn business away, it may be too potentially dangerous to live in at all.
Get in line.
"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.
If you pull the lever, ultimately nothing changes because the tipping point was wooshed past in the 1990s and this first billion will be the lucky ones who dont survive to witness the extinction of the human race
Titan sub vs 300+ refugees in the med.
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.
Eco-fascism is not a solution to anything people, come on.
It is.
It's not actually junk prediction, though you might call it doom-bait journalism. WHO put climate change related deaths at like 150,000 people annually in the year 2000. Those numbers will obviously go up, which is why they're backed in a lot of studies, but the real rub on reporting here is that they're talking about "over the course of a century". So it's a completely reasonable estimate, it just ignores a lot of nuance like "some countries are having higher population growth so we're not going to just lose 1 billion (though these deaths are theoretically preventable)" but also "the vast majority of these deaths will be concentrated in Southeast Asia and poorer countries."
Yeah, anyone remember "10 in 2010"? You know, where everyone was panicking because there were going to be 10 billion people on Earth in 2010. The best thing anyone can do for their case is to stick to facts.
Fantastic! I want to die!
odds are greater you'll just have to live and suffer through the heatwaves, droughts, freezes and cyclones instead, not to mention the super fun collapse of society
they seem 1 in 8, not bad
And now a bunch of random strangers feel awkward about it. Thanks for that
It is so funny how stuiped people are as they can't see they are the reason. In China they need to wear masks due to the pollution makes the air unbreathable. They also burn coal to get electricity to run AC, especial now with the heat weaves.
"people" You and me are not the reason. We are stuck in a system created by the rich to exploit us. And like most parasites they are going to keep taking and polluting until there is nothing left.
But but but if you stop using grocerie bags and plastic straws you'll sleep better pretending you saved the turtles! The insane amount of waste and pollution by the industry is nothing in comparison. Just ask the politicians!
But but but if you stop using grocerie bags and plastic straws you'll sleep better pretending you saved the turtles! The insane amount of garbage and pollution by the industry is nothing in comparison. Just ask the politicians!
Didn't china just build or is building like 7 more coal plants?
...so far.
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?)
It doesn't need to kill them to completely disrupt social order. There's an estimate out there that there will be up to 1 billion climate refugees by 2050. The Global North already does not handle refugees as well, even though they consistently cause a large amount of the refugee problems.
A century isn't that long and 1 billion people is a huge portion of the global populace.
A billion over a century is only 10 million per year. Does that exceed the birth rate?
Not even two Holocausts per year. Basically nothing!
That's 1 billion less people contributing to climate changes! Seems like a self-correcting problem over a long enough time scale.
The richest 10% of the world's population contributes 50% of annual global warming emissions.
And you better believe those 10% aren't going to be the ones dying from climate change...
Some of us may die, but that's a chance they're willing to take (for more profit!)
