[✔️] Feb 24 2024 Global Warming News | Deb Rodney poet, How many dead?slowing ocean, 2002 Republicans try again

[Richard Pauli]

/*February*//*24, 2024*/

/[ Playwright and poet Deb Rodney delivers rhetorical questions in 2 min 
video ]/
*What did you do when you knew?*
https://youtu.be/9KOzOr8FHlo?si=pipHq7zUEzML0JHO

- -

/[  the real count has to include everyone under the sun, in heat, or 
starving, thirsty, etc ]/
*Just How Many People Will Die From Climate Change?*
Feb. 22, 2024
By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer

How deadly could climate change be? Last fall, in an idiosyncratic 
corner of the internet where I happen to spend a lot of time, an 
argument broke out about how to quantify and characterize the mortality 
impact of global warming. An activist named Roger Hallam — a founder of 
Extinction Rebellion who now helps lead the harder-line group Just Stop 
Oil — had told the BBC that, if global temperatures reach two degrees 
Celsius above the preindustrial average, “mainly richer humans will be 
responsible for killing roughly one billion mainly poorer humans.”

Hallam was quoting from a somewhat obscure paper, published by an 
engineer and a musicologist and focused less on climate impacts than on 
climate justice. The claim was quickly picked apart by experts: “An 
oft-quoted adage within the climate-modeler community is that garbage in 
equals garbage out,” the climate advocate Mark Lynas wrote. “Getting the 
science right will strengthen rather than weaken the case for climate 
activism, both in the public mind and in court.”

These are inarguable principles, and I don’t think it’s right to suggest 
that reaching two degrees of warming (which now looks very likely) will 
mean a billion people dead. Certainly that isn’t scientific consensus. 
But it did make me wonder: How big would the number have to be to strike 
you as really big? And how small to seem acceptable?

I ask because many more rigorous estimates, while lower, are still quite 
shocking. Some calculations run easily into the tens of millions. If you 
include premature deaths from the air pollution produced by the burning 
of fossil fuels, you may well get estimates stretching into the hundreds 
of millions. These are all speculations, of course. Estimating climate 
mortality involves a huge range of calculations and projections, all of 
which are shrouded by large clouds of uncertainty — it’s literally a 
climate-scale puzzle, with billions of human variables and many more 
political and environmental ones, and settling on a number also requires 
separating the additional impact of warming from the ongoing mortality 
produced by social and environmental systems running continuously in the 
background today.

In a recent commentary for Nature Medicine, the Georgetown University 
biologist Colin Carlson used a decades-old formula to calculate that 
warming had already killed four million people globally since 2000 just 
from malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, malaria and cardiovascular disease. 
As Carlson notes, this means that, since the turn of the millennium, 
deaths from climate change have already exceeded those from all World 
Health Organization global-health emergencies other than Covid-19 
combined. “Vanishingly few of these deaths will have been recognized by 
the victims’ families, or acknowledged by national governments, as the 
consequence of climate change,” he says.

Going forward, most estimates suggest the impact should grow along with 
global temperature. According to one 2014 projection by the W.H.O., 
climate change is most likely to cause 250,000 deaths annually from 2030 
to 2050. According to research by the Climate Impact Lab, a moderate 
emissions trajectory, most likely leading to about two degrees of 
warming by the end of the century, would produce by that time about 40 
million additional deaths.

Other work is even more striking. In a recent paper published in The 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Drew 
Shindell of Duke University calculated that heat exposure alone is 
already killing more than 100,000 Indians and about 150,000 Chinese each 
year. Not all of these deaths are attributable to warming — people died 
from heat exposure in the preindustrial past, of course — but the trends 
for all the examined countries were clear and concerning. By the end of 
the century, the team calculated, even in a low-emissions, low-warming 
scenario, annual mortality from heat exposure could reach 500,000 in 
India and 400,000 in China. This is just from heat, remember, and as 
Shindell points out, there are plenty of known climate impacts that are 
so hard to model that they are often simply not modeled. “There’s all 
kinds of stuff missing, and we still get big numbers,” Shindell says. 
“That should actually be scary.”

One thing that is almost always left out is air pollution. This is the 
research area for which Shindell is best known, and his most notorious 
finding on the subject is that simply burning the additional fossil fuel 
necessary to bring the planet from 1.5 degrees of warming up to two 
degrees would produce air pollution that would prematurely kill an 
estimated 153 million people.

If that number shocks you, consider that, according to the new paper, 
the present-day figures are more than two and a half million Chinese 
deaths each year, more than two million in India and about 200,000 
annually in Pakistan, Bangladesh and the United States each. Even given 
rapid decarbonization, Shindell and his co-authors find that, by the end 
of the century, particulate pollution might be responsible for the 
annual premature deaths of four million Indians, two million Chinese, 
800,000 Pakistanis, 500,000 Bangladeshis and 100,000 Americans.

Not all of the particulate pollution is a result of the burning of 
fossil fuels. (And even fossil-fuel pollution isn’t, technically, a 
climate impact, though it is produced by the same activities that 
produce the lion’s share of warming.) But over the course of the 
century, even in a low-emissions scenario, the total mortality impact of 
air pollution in just those five countries could reach half a billion.

Now, air pollution is probably not what you have in mind when you 
picture significant climate change; probably diarrhea and malnutrition 
aren’t either, or the elevated risk of stroke or respiratory disease 
that comes, empirically, with higher temperatures. Instead, you’re 
likely to imagine mass heat death or a world-historical storm. But that 
is a major lesson of the research on mortality and warming: that our 
climate fantasies can lead us astray, pulling us toward apocalyptic 
visions of environmental disaster rather than the simple but tragic 
accumulation of what today look like ordinary, if unfortunate, events — 
heat waves like those we’ve already lived through, infectious-disease 
outbreaks like those we’ve already read about, air-pollution problems 
like those we’ve mostly left behind in places like the United States. 
Climate scientists worry a lot about what they often call 
“discontinuities” or “nonlinearities.” But the world is a very large 
place, and you don’t need a major phase-shift in our experience of 
climate to produce a harrowing death toll. You just need things that 
kill people now to be made worse by warming.

Perversely, it’s also the case that some of the increased death toll can 
be seen as a sign of more general social progress. Everyone dies of 
something, mortality researchers like to point out, and you get to die 
of environmental causes only if you don’t die earlier from something 
else: childbirth, say, or measles, or smoking. Over the course of the 
century, Shindell says, he expects the share of overall death 
attributable to environmental factors to grow — not just because those 
conditions will worsen but also because other measures of human health 
and well-being will improve globally. There may well be catastrophic 
surprises in store, as well — extreme disasters, underestimated impacts 
and rapidly passed tipping points. But the science of climate mortality 
today suggests a different experience, of even large-scale climate 
mortality softening into a grim sort of background noise, never quite 
deafening, no matter how loud it gets.

When, a few years ago, in the midst of a period of intense climate 
alarm, a few more hardheaded climate minds invoked instead the analogy 
of planetary “diabetes,” they got a whiplash of criticism from activists 
in response. But while we can’t really see the deep future with much 
clarity, disease may prove a more precise analogy than apocalypse. This 
is not to say that the size of the impact will be small. It’s to say 
that imagining a climate future dominated by sudden ruptures and 
overwhelming catastrophes is perhaps to risk preparing for the wrong 
future — and remaining oblivious, in the meantime, to the death and 
suffering of the present.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/opinion/environment/climate-change-death-toll.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Xk0.6gGU.IYtno3AQ1w_3&smid=url-share



/[ Ocean circulations overturning - expected before the year 2100 - high 
optimism bias ]/
*Is Climate Change Slowing Down the Ocean? | Susan Lozier | TED*
TED
Feb 22, 2024  #TEDCountdown #TED #TEDTalks
Ocean waters are constantly on the move, traveling far distances in 
complex currents that regulate Earth's climate and weather patterns. How 
might climate change impact this critical system? Oceanographer Susan 
Lozier dives into the data, which suggests that ocean overturning is 
slowing down as waters gradually warm — and takes us on board the 
international effort to track these changes and set us on the right 
course while we still have time.

Countdown is TED's global initiative to accelerate solutions to the 
climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse 
gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world. Get 
involved at https://countdown.ted.com/sign-up
Watch more: https://go.ted.com/susanlozier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6ql90yGWt0



/[The news archive -  ]/
/*February 24, 2002 */
February 24, 2002:
In the Denver Post, Bruce Smart of Republicans for Environmental 
Protection rips President George W. Bush's February 14, 2002 speech on 
climate change:

    "...President Bush reaffirmed the nation's commitment to the U.N.
    Framework Convention's 1992 goal 'to stabilize greenhouse gas
    concentrations at a level that will prevent dangerous human
    interference with the climate,' and he outlined an environmental
    path for the nation to follow. A number of the specifics he
    proposed, if forcefully pursued, can be helpful.

    "But the medicine prescribed for the world's greatest environmental
    threat—the malignant growth of atmospheric concentrations of
    greenhouse gases—is only a well-packaged placebo. It is no cure for
    global warming and the hazardous changes in climate that a great
    majority of scientists believe it is likely to cause."

http://web.archive.org/web/20030122161530/http://www.rep.org/opinions/op-eds/19.htm




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