The Human Cost of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Semi-Quantitative Prediction and the 1,000-Tonne Rule

Abstract

Greenhouse-gas emissions are indirectly causing future deaths by multiple mechanisms. For example, reduced food and water supplies will exacerbate hunger, disease, violence, and migration. How will anthropogenic global warming (AGW) affect global mortality due to poverty around and beyond 2100? Roughly, how much burned fossil carbon corresponds to one future death? What are the psychological, medical, political, and economic implications? Predicted death tolls are crucial for policy formulation, but uncertainty increases with temporal distance from the present and estimates may be biased. Order-of-magnitude estimates should refer to literature from diverse relevant disciplines. The carbon budget for 2°C AGW (roughly 1012 tonnes carbon) will indirectly cause roughly 109 future premature deaths (10% of projected maximum global population), spread over one to two centuries. This zeroth-order prediction is relative and in addition to existing preventable death rates. It lies between likely best- and worst-case scenarios of roughly 3 × 108 and 3 × 109, corresponding to plus/minus one standard deviation on a logarithmic scale in a Gaussian probability distribution. It implies that one future premature death is caused every time roughly 1,000 (300–3,000) tonnes of carbon are burned. Therefore, any fossil-fuel project that burns millions of tons of carbon is probably indirectly killing thousands of future people. The prediction may be considered valid, accounting for multiple indirect links between AGW and death rates in a top-down approach, but unreliable due to the uncertainty of climate change feedback and interactions between physical, biological, social, and political climate impacts (e.g., ecological cascade effects and co-extinction). Given universal agreement on the value of human lives, a death toll of this unprecedented magnitude must be avoided at all costs. As a clear political message, the “1,000-tonne rule” can be used to defend human rights, especially in developing countries, and to clarify that climate change is primarily a human rights issue.

Science-Driven Societal Transformation, Part I: Worldview

“…Risks are increasing and conditions deteriorating. To give some idea of risk, one rough estimate is that climate change could cause between 300 million to 3 billion additional premature deaths over the next one to two centuries (1.5 million to 30 million deaths annually, on average), even if the rise in global temperature is limited to 2 • C [5]. The higher estimate amounts to roughly 30 percent of an otherwise expected future world population.…”

Science-Driven Societal Transformation, Part I: Worldview

“…This formula (informal version on top, symbolic below) describes how an agent updates its beliefs after seeing some data. In the data science setting, an analyst is typically interested in learning the distribution of an unknown parameter, call it θ (theta), after seeing some data, D. 5 As an example, θ might be the mean body temperature of healthy humans (which should be about 97.8 • F). The data are typically samples from a population.…”

“…That posterior will represent a kind of compromise between likelihood and prior. The denominator 5 The symbol | in the bottom formula is read as "given," and p() is read as "probability of," so for example, p(D | θ) is read as "probability of D given theta." acts as a normalization factor.…”

“…To give some idea of risk, one rough estimate is that climate change could cause between 300 million to 3 billion additional premature deaths over the next one to two centuries (1.5 million to 30 million deaths annually, on average), even if the rise in global temperature is limited to 2 • C [5]. The higher estimate amounts to roughly 30 percent of an otherwise expected future world population.…”

Live streaming at international academic conferences: Ethical considerations

“…From a human rights perspective, the main consequence of AGW will be the premature deaths of untold millions of people as it exacerbates famine, disease, war, and forced migration (Parncutt, 2019). Based on a series of plausible assumptions, Nolt (2011) calculated that "The average American is responsible, through his/her greenhouse gas emissions, for the suffering and/or deaths of one or two future people" (p. 3).…”