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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>February</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 24, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ Playwright and poet Deb Rodney delivers rhetorical questions in
2 min video ]</i><br>
<b>What did you do when you knew?</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/9KOzOr8FHlo?si=pipHq7zUEzML0JHO">https://youtu.be/9KOzOr8FHlo?si=pipHq7zUEzML0JHO</a> <br>
<p>- -<br>
</p>
<i>[ the real count has to include everyone under the sun, in heat,
or starving, thirsty, etc ]</i><br>
<b>Just How Many People Will Die From Climate Change?</b><br>
Feb. 22, 2024<br>
By David Wallace-Wells<br>
Opinion Writer<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="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</a><br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="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">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</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ Ocean circulations overturning - expected before the year 2100
- high optimism bias ]</i><br>
<b>Is Climate Change Slowing Down the Ocean? | Susan Lozier | TED</b><br>
TED<br>
Feb 22, 2024 #TEDCountdown #TED #TEDTalks<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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 <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://countdown.ted.com/sign-up">https://countdown.ted.com/sign-up</a><br>
Watch more: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://go.ted.com/susanlozier">https://go.ted.com/susanlozier</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6ql90yGWt0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6ql90yGWt0</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"> <i>[The news archive - ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>February 24, 2002 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> February 24, 2002: <br>
In the Denver Post, Bruce Smart of Republicans for Environmental
Protection rips President George W. Bush's February 14, 2002 speech
on climate change:<br>
<blockquote>"...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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030122161530/http://www.rep.org/opinions/op-eds/19.htm">http://web.archive.org/web/20030122161530/http://www.rep.org/opinions/op-eds/19.htm</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><font face="Calibri"> <br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><br>
=== Other climate news sources
===========================================<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>*Inside Climate News</b><br>
Newsletters<br>
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every
day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s
top headlines deliver the full story, for free.<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/">https://insideclimatenews.org/</a><br>
--------------------------------------- <br>
*<b>Climate Nexus</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*">https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*</a>
<br>
Delivered straight to your inbox every morning, Hot News
summarizes the most important climate and energy news of the
day, delivering an unmatched aggregation of timely, relevant
reporting. It also provides original reporting and commentary on
climate denial and pro-polluter activity that would otherwise
remain largely unexposed. 5 weekday <br>
================================= <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b class="moz-txt-star"><span
class="moz-txt-tag">*</span>Carbon Brief Daily </b><span
class="moz-txt-star"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up">https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up</a></span><b
class="moz-txt-star"><span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span></b> <br>
Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon
Brief sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to
thousands of subscribers around the world. The email is a digest
of the past 24 hours of media coverage related to climate change
and energy, as well as our pick of the key studies published in
the peer-reviewed journals. <br>
more at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief">https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief</a>
<br>
================================== <br>
*T<b>he Daily Climate </b>Subscribe <a
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