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.
Or it could end up being less bad than we expect.
Said every apologist ever. Look around you man. It’s already pretty bad out there. How much worse does it need to be before you stop downplaying the situation?
“Don’t Look Up” and all that…
less bad than the conservative estimates of their models… you can’t read properly can you…
When does that ever happen?
I told my friend about all my problems, and he said, “Cheer up! Things could be worse!”
So, I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.
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.
Nature is already working on it and ramping things up.
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.
Probably cockroaches, I’ve seen the film
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.
Robots cost money. Sweatshop slaves work for food.
Robots don’t sleep. They don’t get sick. They don’t have federally mandates days off. They don’t commit self delete via rooftop if you overwork them. If you can be replaced by something that can do your job at 10% the speed for 1% the total cost, you will be. Such is the way of capitalist automation.
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.
I wish I could be an optimist, too.
Me first.
And with your help we can make sure that that number includes those that need to die.
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.
“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.
Titan sub vs 300+ refugees in the med.
“… 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 kills the poor. Noone care about that, not even the poor as they won’t be informed enough to know what’s going on.
Definitely, because poor people don’t watch the news and can’t read.
Half the people in industrial countries barely grasp the seriousness of the situation so what do you expect from a farmer in Africa who thinks witchcraft is real?
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?
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…
