Researchers from Australia and Canada have put out a study that says climate change will kill one billion people over the next hundred years.
Mentioning a “scientific consensus,” the writers looked at 180 climate change studies and came up with a “1000-ton rule,” which says that for every 1,000 tons of fossil fuels burned, one person dies.
The article, which was published in the journal Energies, says that “a future person dies every time humanity uses 1000 tons of fossil carbon.” This is based on a calculation that “burning a trillion tons of fossil fuels will cause 2°C of global warming (AGW), which will cause about a billion premature deaths over a period of roughly one century.”
Estimates based on global population growth show that there are going to be approximately 10 billion people on the planet by the year 2100. If the study’s authors are actually believed, this means that 10% of people will die because of climate change.
The study also makes the shocking claim that if people burned all five trillion tons of fossil carbon within the Earth’s crust, “global mean surface temperatures would rise by up to 10°C compared to the pre-industrial era and might lead to human extinction.”
One of the authors, Joshua Pearce of Western University, said, “If you take the scientific consensus on the 1,000-ton rule seriously and do the math, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) equals a billion premature deaths over the next century. It’s clear we need to do something. And we need to move quickly.”
The study also says that it has been “clear for more than a decade that the total number of deaths due to AGW is going to be much higher than 100 million, or one million a year for a century. This is an extreme best case if the present mortality rate from AGW somehow stayed constant at roughly one million per year, which may have already been reached.”
Since climate change has never been proven to be the cause of a death, it is hard to understand how the study’s writers can be so sure that nearly 3,000 individuals die every day because of it.
Also, the number of weather-related deaths has been going down every year and is now only a small fraction of what it was 100 years ago. To predict a sudden change in this trend would appear to call for a more scientific explanation rather than the “1000-ton rule,” which sounds clever but isn’t true.
Lastly, the study’s writers don’t talk about the scary fact that almost ten times as many individuals die each year from frigid temperatures compared to heat. This would seem to show that slightly warmer temperatures would lead to fewer weather-related deaths as well and not more.
But the approach of not allowing facts to get in the way of a good story has been tried and tested, and it has worked especially well for people who are worried about climate change.
