What else is a doomsday cult to do but prognosticate more doom?
A Carbon Calculation: How Many Deaths Do Emissions Cause?
What is the cost of our carbon footprint — not just in dollars, but in lives?
According to a paper published on Thursday, it is soberingly high, and perhaps high enough to help shift attitudes about how much we should spend on fighting climate change.
The new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, draws on multiple areas of research to find out how many future lives will be lost as a result of rising temperatures if humanity keeps producing greenhouse gas emissions at high rates — and how many lives could be saved by cutting those emissions.
Most of the deaths will occur in regions that tend to be hotter and poorer than the United States. These areas are typically less responsible for global emissions but more heavily affected by the resulting climate disasters.
Why not tell us how many are being killed right now due to a slight 1.5F increase in the global temperature over the last 170 years? Why not tell us how all those scientists involved in the paper have made their own lives carbon neutral?
R. Daniel Bressler, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, calculated that adding about a quarter of the output of a coal-fired power plant, or roughly a million metric tons of carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere on top of 2020 levels for just one year will cause 226 deaths globally.
Will this be like how they attributed lots of deaths to COVID that really weren’t? What happens if this doesn’t happen? How can they prove any of this?
The new paper builds on the work of William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate who first determined what is known as the “social cost of carbon†— an economic tool for measuring the climate-related damage to the planet caused by each extra ton of carbon emissions. The concept has been a crucial part of policy debates over the expense of fighting climate change, because it is used to calculate the cost-benefit analysis required when agencies propose environmental rules. The higher the social cost of carbon, the easier it is to justify the costs of action.
And therein is the point, to create scenarios of Doom which can used to push through legislation, rules, and regulations which empower Government over the citizens, often with the citizens simply giving up their money, freedom, and choice voluntarily.
Read: Say, How Many People Are Being Killed Because You Took A Fossil Fueled Trip? »