Paul Beckwith:
A crucial new peer reviewed scientific paper shows that our society today, with accelerating fossil fuel emissions driving abrupt climate change is conservatively on track to kill one billion people.
Worst case, is to kill 10 billion people, or in other words essentially everybody expected on the planet in 2100 (population projection assuming no climate change). Basically: 1) Multiple approaches converge to the “1000-ton rule”, which is that 1000 tons of C emitted today will kill one future person (this is an order of magnitude estimate; namely the range is to kill from 0.1 people to 10 people, with 1 person being the central estimate).
Note that 1000 tons of C would be 3700 tons of CO2. Also, 1 ton of C emitted could be said to kill 1/1000 of a person or 1 millilife. 2) One degree C of temperature rise beyond today is expected to kill 1 billion people. Thus, 0.1 C of temperature rise kills 100 million people, and thus 0.001 C of temperature rise kills 1 million people. 3) One trillion tons of C emitted kills 1 billion people. Thus, the “1000-ton rule”. 4) These calculations do not account for tipping points and thus are extremely conservative calculations.
We can expect reality to be much worse. Putting global temperature rise, and C emissions in terms of future people killed needs to be widely done by scientists, the media, and politicians so that the general public understands what is actually happening on our planet with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).