Directly killing someone versus indirectly killing someone

[Jamie in Chile]

well some people estimated that maybe 1 billion animals died in 1 Australian fire season alone, and climate change makes these fires worse and more likely or at the very least will do so in the future.

I got an electric meter from my house and my phone used between 2W and 5W when charging and using it. My laptop was between 25W and 40W. That´s not a lot, even after you allow for additional energy used at data centres etc when browsing.

By way of comparison, our electric heater uses 1000-2000W, our kettle uses 1900W, our fridge/freezer uses 40W and is on 24 hours, our electric oven uses 1400W, charging the car uses 1000-1500W (or 40,000W at a fast charger). Powering our sprinkler system to water our garden uses 1300W.

2W or 5W for charging a phone is nothing. Don´t worry about it and use the phone and computer as long as you like guilt free. It is perhaps worth considering only changing these devices for a new one after 5-10 years rather than 2-3 - the largest share of their footprint is in the production. Keep them until they don´t work, perhaps even replace parts.

[Jamie in Chile]

So I saw an article in the Guardian about a new study published today reported as "the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions" (they obviously didn´t read page 1 of this thread where I did my own such analysis).

The estimate, by a PHD student at Colombia University, which was published in Nature, is that "one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature" for every 4,434 metric tons of CO2.

That is lower than my estimate of 10,000 tons per death. However, I read through large parts of the study and found that he is assuming that we will keep on emitting at a similar level as now or even increase emissions and reach 4.1C by the end of the century, which is not what I think, which explains some of the difference. (Doubling emissions will cause >2x deaths because 4C world is more than 2x worse than 2C world so deaths per unit CO2 increase as overall emissions increase).

They also have an estimate for number of deaths if we reduce emissions considerably and get to 2.4C by 2100 (which is closer to what I believe), and that was much closer to my estimate. Here he says 1.07 × 10−4 deaths per ton on the low emissions scenario (2.4C in 2100) compared to 2.26 × 10−4 on the high emissions scenario (4.1C in 2100). That would work out to 9365 metric tones of CO2 per death, almost identical to my estimate of 10,000.

BUT, for this new study "The figures for expected deaths from the release of emissions aren’t definitive and may well be “a vast underestimate” as they only account for heat-related mortality rather than deaths from flooding, storms, crop failures and other impacts that flow from the climate crisis, according to Daniel Bressler of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, who wrote the paper." That is different to my analysis, which estimated deaths from all causes. Given this, he is saying <9365 tonnes of CO2 per death even for the case of 2.4C in 2100.

Also they use marginal analysis which I didn´t, which could make a significant difference. I suspect that if I had used a marginal case analysis, mine would also have come out with <10,000. But don´t fully understand this for certain.

If nothing else it verifies my estimates on page 1 were somewhere in the right ball park, probably of the right order of magnitude.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ocial-cost
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w

[FredVegrox]

Certainly all factors cannot be taken into account. It would not be a measured rate of increase in death per unit of temperature increase, or exponential of it or logarithmic of it, at all. Storms will come and do their own damage independently. Deaths from heat exhaustion in places more vulnerable to that will happen separately. Temperature drops in certain places is related, with change in polar conditions and course of the jet stream. And loss of environments and even civilization collapsing will have a separate death toll independently. And other factors that are independent are still not considered.