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Thursday, August 31st, 2023

Climate-changing human activity could lead to 1 billion deaths over the next century, according to new study

Author:     Jeff Renaud
Source:     Phys.org
Publication Date:     AUGUST 28, 2023
 Link: Climate-changing human activity could lead to 1 billion deaths over the next century, according to new study
Stephan:  

A billion deaths, do you think that will wake up people, particularly Republicans, about what is coming? I doubt it. Nor do I think many authoritarian governments are going to prepare properly, which is going to radically change international relations and geopolitics. What I think will happen in the United States is that the Blue states are going to begin to seek ways to stop having to pay for the failure of the Red states. Federal funds paid out to Red states after a climate crisis are essentially Blue state tax money being used to pay for the failures of Red states. Few Americans seem to realize that for every dollar a Red state pays into the Federal treasury, it already takes out more than a dollar in some form of aid. In contrast for every dollar a Blue state pays in it takes out less than a dollar in federal support.

Credit: CCO Public Domain

If global warming reaches or exceeds two degrees Celsius by 2100, University of Western Ontario’s Joshua Pearce says it is likely that mainly richer humans will be responsible for the death of roughly one billion mainly poorer humans over the next century.

The oil and gas industry, which includes many of the most profitable and powerful businesses in the world, is directly and indirectly responsible for more than 40% of carbon emissions—impacting the lives of billions of people, many living in the world’s most remote and low-resourced communities.

A new study proposes aggressive energy policies that would enable immediate and substantive decreases to carbon emissions and recommends a heightened level of government, corporate and citizen action to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy, aiming to minimize the number of projected human deaths.

“Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It’s pretty scary really, especially for our children,” said Pearce, Western’s John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and lead author of the study. “When climate scientists run their models and then report on […]

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