Quantifying the human cost of global warming

By T. Lenton, Chi Xu, J. Abrams, Ash Ghadiali, S. Loriani, B. Sakschewski, C. Zimm, K. Ebi, R. Dunn, Jens‐Christian Svenning and 1 more. bioRxiv, 2022

275 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The costs of climate change are often estimated in monetary terms, but this raises ethical issues. Here we express them in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’—defined as the historically highly conserved distribution of relative human population density with respect to mean annual temperature. We show that climate change has already put ~9% of people (>600 million) outside this niche. By end-of-century (2080–2100), current policies leading to around 2.7 °C global warming could leave one-third (22–39%) of people outside the niche. Reducing global warming from 2.7 to 1.5 °C results in a ~5-fold decrease in the population exposed to unprecedented heat (mean annual temperature ≥29 °C). The lifetime emissions of ~3.5 global average citizens today (or ~1.2 average US citizens) expose one future person to unprecedented heat by end-of-century. That person comes from a place where emissions today are around half of the global average. These results highlight the need for more decisive policy action to limit the human costs and inequities of climate change. As an alternative to monetary estimates, this study expresses the costs of climate change in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’, which reflects the historically highly conserved distribution of human population density relative to mean annual temperature.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aefc402b6da8d490f1572c7fa3f0de1008b5e710

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