Study: Global warming may kill 83 million by 2101
A population equivalent to that of Germany — 83 million people — could be killed by 2100 because of rising temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a new study that might influence how markets price carbon pollution.
The research from Columbia University’s Earth Institute introduces a new metric to help companies and governments assess damages wrought by climate change this century. Accounting for the “mortality cost of carbon” could give polluters new reasons to clean up by dramatically raising the cost of emissions.
“Based on the decisions made by individuals, businesses or governments, this tells you how many lives will be lost or saved,” said Columbia’s Daniel Bressler, whose research was published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. “It quantifies the mortality impact of those decisions” by reducing questions down “to a more personal, understandable level.”
Adapting models developed by Yale climate economist and Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, Bressler calculated the number of direct heat deaths that will be caused by current global-warming trajectories. His calculations don’t include the number of people who might die from rising seas, superstorms, crop failures or changing disease patterns affected by atmospheric warming. That means that the projected deaths — which approximate the number of people killed in World War II — could still be a “vast underestimate,” Bressler said.
Every 4,434 tons of carbon spewed into the Earth’s atmosphere in 2020 will kill one person this century, according to the peer-reviewed calculations that see the planet warming 4.1 degrees Celsius by 2100. So far the planet has warmed about 1.1 degrees C, compared to pre-industrial times.
The volume of pollution emitted over the lifetime of three average U.S. residents is estimated to contribute to the death of another person. Bressler said the highest mortality rates can be expected in Earth’s hottest and poorest regions in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
The new metric could significantly affect how economies calculate the socalled social cost of carbon, which U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration set at $51 a ton in February.