The people responsible don’t care. They will be perfectly fine letting the rest of us die. They’ll only start giving a shit once cheap labor starts getting hard to come by.
This rule is actually “an order of magnitude best estimate”, which means it’s more of a range, somewhere between 0.1 to 10 deaths per 1000 tons of carbon burned.
That leaves a lot of room for scenarios even more dire than the one outlined here.
“When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom,” explains Pierce.
“We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.”
Translation: 10 billion people will die.
2nd translation: Almost everyone will die.
So what you’re saying is… we are going to enter a dark age… and we could use a Foundation to lessen it’s impact on humanity?
Pretty sure I’m gonna be fine.
Or two?
My wild ass guess is humanity will eventually die back to, at best, bronze age population levels.
Will I finally get to meet the sea people?
Yeah. We’ll definitely be set ourselves back for a while. Shame because we are on the verge of lots of great technologies.
This global economist wrote a whole book arguing exactly that; The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/667b3daf-4c99-47de-82f6-f74eb7cd2ff7
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Or it could end up being less bad than we expect.
Said every apologist ever. Look around you man. It’s already pretty bad out there. How much worse does it need to be before you stop downplaying the situation?
“Don’t Look Up” and all that…
less bad than the conservative estimates of their models… you can’t read properly can you…
When does that ever happen?
I told my friend about all my problems, and he said, “Cheer up! Things could be worse!”
So, I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.
I wish I could be an optimist, too.
Nature knows how to solve this problem.
This issue is that nature is going to start with the people who contribute the least to the issue.
If only the people contributing the most could actually feel the pressure.
And those who contribute the least to this issue are also likely the ones who want it fixed the most.
By resetting earth. I wonder what species will wander the lands and waters in millions of years…
I’m thinking the Octopuses finally take over if they survive the warming oceans.
Jellyfish.
I hope bird people rise up. It’d be neat.
Probably cockroaches, I’ve seen the film
Nature is already working on it and ramping things up.
It only took 250 years since the industrial revolution to utterly doom our world.
Oh, our world will be fine, it’s not the Earth’s first mass extinction event. We - and a lot of flora and fauna we depend on - are really fucked though.
It’s an interesting mass extinction event, too. Have we ever seen one species balloon to such predominance? Humans are like 80% of mammalian biomass on the planet. Definite loss of biodiversity. I wonder if it’s a loss of biomass too.
Hard to beat the dominance of archosaurs on Earth for about 180 mio years. Humans are a blink of an eye compared to that.
Man we still fucked it all up though
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There are some real disgusting people here. Anyone who thinks that the solution to climate change is to kill a lot of humans should consider going first.
Give me a quick, painless & easy way out and I take it.
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Lol the top comment after this is “me first”
ecofascism baybeee
7% of me has. You next.
This article is bogus. It doesn’t even mention the power or thoughts and prayers once!
Wishes and spells
Well that’s fine because I have a wizard what installs programs for me
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I cast level three eroticism
Is the earth is getting a fever to kill the viruses that are infecting it?
It is is
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I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of those casualties in the USA will be in Florida and California.
Many of the major insurance companies stopped issuing new home owners policies in those states because it was no longer profitable or very risky. IIRC, increasing housing costs and frequency of these events was the main reason they pulled out
Yup. The same people who deny science start paying attention once their own money becomes involved.
In Florida, the issue is rising sea levels. If you look at one of those interactive maps showing the effects of a rising sea level, you’ll notice that all of southern Florida is at risk of major flooding.
In California, wildfires are the problem. As the atmosphere gets warmer and rainfall becomes unreliable, forests get drier. Fires will become bigger, spread faster, and be even more frequent.
Neither state will be a profitable place for home insurance companies.
In Florida the issue has little to do with rising sea levels at the moment. There’s a Bad Faith law that makes the insurance companies responsible for the policyholders legal bills if the decision increases the amount of the settlement. There are a lot of lawyers that take cases and only bill if they win, and if they do win they bill a lot. There is also a lot of insurance fraud in Florida, both of which drove up the legal costs to insurers. Catastrophic events are more impactful to insurers in Florida since Florida has passed a law preventing international reinsurers from being used. So when a hurricane hits rather than having the costs borne by a larger number of insurers across the globe, only US insurers will be spending money on the catastrophe. This has pushed many insurers to insolvency.
In California rate increases could allow insurers to keep up with rising costs. Note that the percent of homes affected by wildfires is only somewhat up over the past roughly 20 years, the real problem is the increase in severity due to rising property values and insurers being unable to raise rates due to Prop 103. Prop 103 allows for public interest groups to have hearings with the DOI and the insurance company to determine if a rate increase of 7% or higher is justified, and the insurance company must pay the legal costs of the public interest group(s). The lawyers who lobbied for this law have set up a public interest group and start hearing whenever an insurer tries to increase rates at 7% or more. Said group tries to drag out the hearings as long as possible, since it’s free money.
How does lack of homeowners insurance translate to excess climate change deaths? Serious question
Because when ice melts it turns to water. When lots of ice (the arctic) melts, it turns to water (the ocean). The problem is not only does this raise the sea level (effectively causing the coast to recede inward) but it causes more common and powerful natural disasters which, in turn, wreak havoc on specific parts of the country.
Which states typically face the worst natural disasters? Florida (hurricanes) and California (wildfires). When somebody’s house gets blown or burned away, insurance is supposed to cover the cost. But what happens when the insurance company spends more on paying out claims than it brings in in revenue? It goes out of business.
To avoid going out of business, these insurance companies are looking at market projections that use data attempting to predict future risks, or future likelyhood that they will have to pay out to their clients. Since climate change is only going to make natural disasters more severe, but ALSO more common, the companies are (intelligently) no longer pursuing business sin these states because it they are going to pay out more than they take in. If they stay, they would lose money.
Edit: “Wreak” havoc, not “Reek”.
It stinks, but not like that!
Ahhhh should’ve checked! Good call
Where’s the part that kills people tho?
Original OP said the homeowners insurance debacle in FL is going to contribute to the climate change deaths mention in the article.
I’m trying to understand how lack of property insurance results in excess deaths
Fair enough. Just speculating at this point, but I would think that, since it’s rather difficult to just up and move to another state, people are going to find that they can’t insure their homes, or if they can, they would be for exorbitant rates.
Banks require home insurance for a mortgage, so if all the insurance companies start pulling out, you’re going to have large swathes of people who can’t find or can’t afford their insurance. I’m not sure what happens to your mortgage when you lose/can’t find somebody to insure you, though, I imagine it’s nothing good.
So if they have nobody willing to insure them (not there yet, but if all insurers start pulling out…) You’ll have swathes of people who can’t insure their homes and may go into foreclosure. Homelessness increases, and the homeless are some of the most vulnerable people in the country, so perhaps that’s what they were thinking?
It’s certainly going to cause significant financial hardships for those states at the very least, though how climate change’s impact on the insurance industry SPECIFICALLY increases deaths, I am not sure.
Insurance policies are short-term and climate change is going to take longer to really hit. Climate change isn’t why but rather legislative changes. I’ve left a more detailed comment elsewhere in this thread if you’re interested.
Put ice in a glass. Add water. Notice where the line is. Wait for it to melt. Check said line again. shocked Pikachu face
Do you really think all global ice is floating? Or are you being disingenuous?
Yeah dude, the entire arctic is just a sheet of ice, bro. /s
Antarctica and Greenland are landmasses with ice on them.
No way 😮
Insurance companies don’t want to offer homeowners insurance in places where mass destruction is likely. It’s just not profitable.
Like other companies, an insurance company generally wants as many customers as possible. If an area is considered so potentially dangerous (and therefore unprofitable) that home insurers are willing to turn business away, it may be too potentially dangerous to live in at all.
We’re not underinsured because of climate change per se in FL, it’s because every storm results in a ton of fraudulent claims.
Again, how does lack of property insurance kill people?
It’s largely legislative changes that have made insurance unprofitable in those states. Florida’s bad faith law and banning of international reinsurers have both hurt the industry a lot. California has had wildfires for a long time and their frequency hasn’t increased much over time.
I left a more detailed comment elsewhere in this thread if you’re interested.
Me first.
“1 billion people on track to die”… I guess we’re doing an empirical test of the trolley problem.
We have a choice between inconveniencing some people (especially some very rich people); vs saving billions of lives by switching tracks. And apparently the empirical choice is to equivocate and delay so that we stay on the path of death and ruin. … It isn’t the solution I would have chosen personally.
If you pull the lever, ultimately nothing changes because the tipping point was wooshed past in the 1990s and this first billion will be the lucky ones who dont survive to witness the extinction of the human race
Titan sub vs 300+ refugees in the med.
There is quite a lot of extra discussion regarding the 1000-ton rule in the artual report itself (link can ne found in the article). Here are some excerpts:
it is likely more than 300 million (“likely best case”) and less than 3 billion (“likely worst case”) will die as a result of AGW of 2 °C.
A more recent attempt at quantifying future deaths in connection with specific amounts of carbon was published by Bressler [69]. Coining an economically oriented term “mortality cost of carbon”, he claimed that “for every 4434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature”. His predictions were confined to deaths from extreme heat when wet-bulb temperature exceeds skin temperature (35 °C).
Some interesting stuff in there.
I would’ve added more but holy shit the mdpi.com mobile website is atrocious to copy stuff from. It keeps throwing me at the end of the entire article, highlighting everything.
And with your help we can make sure that that number includes those that need to die.
Fantastic! I want to die!
odds are greater you’ll just have to live and suffer through the heatwaves, droughts, freezes and cyclones instead, not to mention the super fun collapse of society
they seem 1 in 8, not bad
