alt Hacker NewsIt was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.
People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
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> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
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