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.
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
deleted by creator
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?
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…
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.
less bad than the conservative estimates of their models… you can’t read properly can you…
…so far.
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.
As long as we don’t kill off the bunch beetles, we’ll be okay.
Man we still fucked it all up though
Removed by mod
“Overpopulation”? It’s infinite growth and inefficient distribution.
Where do you think does the “overpopulation” come from?So… in your mind it’s for sure we are actually alien in origin?
Removed by mod
No, because hundreds of thousands of years of migrations led my ancestors elsewhere. That’s not what invasive means.
Removed by mod
Lol yes if I’m not full on agent-from-the-matrix “humans are a virus” that means I’m a buffoon incapable of introspection. What’s definitely not the case? You are certainly not a jaded weirdo who isn’t particularly good with words and is looking to shit on humans as a species. Yep definitely not that.
Removed by mod
I think they meant we’re from Central Africa and technically an invasive species anywhere else in the world.
I thought invasive implied a species was moved by another. I don’t think a species can be invasive just for moving north or something. Humans moved themselves gradually over time.
They adapted the definition to include causing economic or environmental harm because NERDS kept pointing out that all species are either constantly invading new territory or in the process of going extinct.
Are you really logged into the fediverse right now using the word NERD in an accusatory manner?
I’m one of the nerds that does it.
Step off, DORK.
A quick search defines invasive species as a type of introduced species, which is outlined as
An introduced species, alien species, exotic species, adventive species, immigrant species, foreign species, non-indigenous species, or non-native species is a species living outside its native distributional range, but which has arrived there by human activity, directly or indirectly, and either deliberately or accidentally.
So I’d say that technically they are, but even more to the point it seems like the invasive species definition is very human centric (an alien cannot create an invasive species?)
Obviously this is a super semantically oriented discussion but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say human in this context really refers more to the role. Humans can control other species in that way, like an extra terrestrial also likely could have.
I’m not saying I agree with the idea, I’m just looking for a way humans could be “invasive”
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.
Automation replaces manual works, AI replaces intellectual ones. No need for cheap labor in the short term.
Robots cost money. Sweatshop slaves work for food.
Robots don’t sleep. They don’t get sick. They don’t have federally mandates days off. They don’t commit self delete via rooftop if you overwork them. If you can be replaced by something that can do your job at 10% the speed for 1% the total cost, you will be. Such is the way of capitalist automation.
The kind of sophisticated AI and robotics that can replace a human is much further away than some people seem to realize. That kind of technology doesn’t even exist in a lab. It will be decades before anything approaching that level even exists, and decades more before it’s an affordable, practical, mass-produced option. Even huge corporations that have the budget to invest won’t have the opportunity for quite a while.
Robots do get sick, it’s called needing maintenance.
I have never seen automation fully replace the need for human workers. You still need people to maintain the equipment. All automation does is increase the amount of output. And when you start running machines at capacity you find out real quick just how much maintenance they really need.
Half of what you say is true. But robots are expensive, in many cases way more expensive than child labours around the world. And while it’s possible to have robots do grunt work, true AI is still far away, like several decades.
Robots also do exactly what you tell them to.
Mmmm.
You know what’s in short supply right now? People who know how to automate stuff.
Wait I can get paid for that? Haha suckers my hourly rate is fucking steep.
We will automate that.
I am at risk of losing my own job since it can be quite easily replaced by AI. The original post was about people having to die, so I hope to be counted in that number.
AI learns from existing human work. Without innovation it will learn nothing of value.
Oh no, the sun is hot! It is normal to have variations in temperature from year to year.
Me first.
This is a risk capitalists are willing to take.
deleted by creator
Yeah, anyone remember “10 in 2010”? You know, where everyone was panicking because there were going to be 10 billion people on Earth in 2010. The best thing anyone can do for their case is to stick to facts.
It’s not actually junk prediction, though you might call it doom-bait journalism. WHO put climate change related deaths at like 150,000 people annually in the year 2000. Those numbers will obviously go up, which is why they’re backed in a lot of studies, but the real rub on reporting here is that they’re talking about “over the course of a century”. So it’s a completely reasonable estimate, it just ignores a lot of nuance like “some countries are having higher population growth so we’re not going to just lose 1 billion (though these deaths are theoretically preventable)” but also “the vast majority of these deaths will be concentrated in Southeast Asia and poorer countries.”
deleted by creator
“… over the next century,” continues the article after the catchy headline.
Not that people dying is a good thing, but I was kind of hoping they’d be people alive right now. If 1/8th of the world treated climate change like it was personally going to kill them, we might still have a chance of turning things around. (As a bonus, can oil giants really keep their execs safe from 1 in 8 highly motivated people?)
It doesn’t need to kill them to completely disrupt social order. There’s an estimate out there that there will be up to 1 billion climate refugees by 2050. The Global North already does not handle refugees as well, even though they consistently cause a large amount of the refugee problems.
It kills the poor. Noone care about that, not even the poor as they won’t be informed enough to know what’s going on.
Unfortunate. We’re the boiling frog fable all over again.
Definitely, because poor people don’t watch the news and can’t read.
Half the people in industrial countries barely grasp the seriousness of the situation so what do you expect from a farmer in Africa who thinks witchcraft is real?
This seems really racist dude. Very colonialist to assume this. A lot of people in non-industrialised and industrialist countries believe in a sky daddy and that heaven and hell are real. They may as well believe in witchcraft.
That doesn’t make the african farmer believe in climate change.
A century isn’t that long and 1 billion people is a huge portion of the global populace.
It is so funny how stuiped people are as they can’t see they are the reason. In China they need to wear masks due to the pollution makes the air unbreathable. They also burn coal to get electricity to run AC, especial now with the heat weaves.
Didn’t china just build or is building like 7 more coal plants?
“people” You and me are not the reason. We are stuck in a system created by the rich to exploit us. And like most parasites they are going to keep taking and polluting until there is nothing left.
Eco-fascism is not a solution to anything people, come on.
It is.
“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.
Titan sub vs 300+ refugees in the med.
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
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.
I can easily see white nations gunning-down brown migrants by the millions to keep them out.
And those who contribute the least to this issue are also likely the ones who want it fixed the most.
Nature is already working on it and ramping things up.
By resetting earth. I wonder what species will wander the lands and waters in millions of years…
Jellyfish.
I hope bird people rise up. It’d be neat.
I’m thinking the Octopuses finally take over if they survive the warming oceans.
Probably cockroaches, I’ve seen the film
That’s a bummer. Well, what’re you gonna do… We should build more solar and wind farms, that will surely help. Maybe ban plastic straws in Africa, too?
It’s OK, they’re just billion poorest people.
/S
You joke, but that is how a lot of people feel about it.
That is how conservatives feel about it. Normal people are unhappy.
Sadly conservative people have the money
And therefore the power.
Yeah. That’s the sad part. I think most people sort of accidentally think that, without really critically thinking about it.
The people who will suffer most area already invisible to most others.
In NZ we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions in farming to the cries of farmers “but you’re killing our jobs” neglecting that they’re indirectly killing actual people.
That’s the irony. They are probably a lot of the people who contribute the least to climate change. So any misanthropes in here saying “good, this will help” are not only evil but wrong.
In Europe over 60,000 people died in 2022 due to heatwaves.
People are blind to these deaths because they’re not being taken out by a single devastating event, but rather a series of small events the people brush off as “they were going to die anyway”.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve not, and will not have children. This is getting exponentially worse and I couldn’t image the horror that our future will face.
… meanwhile we’re compensating people who built $10m houses on cliff tops, who then cut down the trees securing the cliff edge, and are now finding out that cliffs erode, and their houses are failing into the sea.
… we’re exempting farmers from paying the actual costs of their carbon emissions while they pollute or water ways with reckless abandon. It’s only the poor fuckers down stream who’ll get sick and die.
… While we still argue if old and sick people should die of COVID so that fashion shops can still hock their tat manufactured halfway around the world and shipped here on ships that burn the shittiest fuel available.
I have had kids, and lament the world I’m giving to them.
At least with the house on the cliff example it’s the insurance companies paying for it though right? Hopefully their premiums were priced appropriately and the insurer doesn’t raise everyone else’s rates to cover their folly. I’ve no doubt they would if that’s the case, but I presume their actuaries did a decent job computing that risk so who knows.
I’m fairly sure, but have no evidence, that the argument is “the council approved these plans therefore it’s the council’s fault my house is falling off the cliff”. Floating over the fact that the council approved a plan where there was 50m of vegetation securing the cliff edge… All of which has mysteriously disappeared over the last 15 years.
Also apparently caveat emptor is only for poor people.
What council? Wouldn’t their insurance be on the hook then? Eventually somewhere an insurer has written a policy for that $10m cliff side house. Per my previous point, hopefully their actuaries accurately priced the risk.
Sorry. I lapsed into some specifics of my locale. Didn’t realise I was in world news.
We have city councils. They are responsible for approving building plan/permits. They tend to be either unless pedantic or grossly negligent.
There’s been a trend here to blame that council for when a property becomes uninhabitable. E.g. by a cliff face eroding over time, accelerated by actions of the property owner.
This is literally how rich people will take this.
Until they realise that almost no production chains can continue without the hard work of the poorest at the beginning of the chain.
Perhaps then, they’ll finally get those robots we keep hearing about ;-)
Nah, they will just convert middle class to poor. Robots are for writing, painting…
“Too many people at my beach anyways.”
Too many, of the wrong people, at my beach.
