David Wallace Wells in the New York Times:
In a recent commentary for Nature Medicine, the Georgetown University biologist Colin Carlson used a decades-old formula to calculate that warming had already killed four million people globally since 2000 just from malnutrition, floods, diarrhea, malaria and cardiovascular disease. As Carlson notes, this means that, since the turn of the millennium, deaths from climate change have already exceeded those from all World Health Organization global-health emergencies other than Covid-19 combined. “Vanishingly few of these deaths will have been recognized by the victims’ families, or acknowledged by national governments, as the consequence of climate change,” he says.
Going forward, most estimates suggest the impact should grow along with global temperature. According to one 2014 projection by the W.H.O., climate change is most likely to cause 250,000 deaths annually from 2030 to 2050. According to research by the Climate Impact Lab, a moderate emissions trajectory, most likely leading to about two degrees of warming by the end of the century, would produce by that time about 40 million additional deaths.
Other work is even more striking. In a recent paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Drew Shindell of Duke University calculated that heat exposure alone is already killing more than 100,000 Indians and about 150,000 Chinese each year. Not all of these deaths are attributable to warming — people died from heat exposure in the preindustrial past, of course — but the trends for all the examined countries were clear and concerning. By the end of the century, the team calculated, even in a low-emissions, low-warming scenario, annual mortality from heat exposure could reach 500,000 in India and 400,000 in China. This is just from heat, remember, and as Shindell points out, there are plenty of known climate impacts that are so hard to model that they are often simply not modeled. “There’s all kinds of stuff missing, and we still get big numbers,” Shindell says. “That should actually be scary.”
One thing that is almost always left out is air pollution. This is the research area for which Shindell is best known, and his most notorious finding on the subject is that simply burning the additional fossil fuel necessary to bring the planet from 1.5 degrees of warming up to two degrees would produce air pollution that would prematurely kill an estimated 153 million people.
If that number shocks you, consider that, according to the new paper, the present-day figures are more than two and a half million Chinese deaths each year, more than two million in India and about 200,000 annually in Pakistan, Bangladesh and the United States each. Even given rapid decarbonization, Shindell and his co-authors find that, by the end of the century, particulate pollution might be responsible for the annual premature deaths of four million Indians, two million Chinese, 800,000 Pakistanis, 500,000 Bangladeshis and 100,000 Americans.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new methodology for estimating the value of climate and air quality benefits from wind and solar generation. A report describing the results of an analysis of data from 2019 to 2022 using the methodology concludes that wind and solar generation provided $249 billion of climate and air quality health benefits over that period.
Renewable energy advocates argue that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) does not tell the whole story when comparing the economics of wind and solar generation with fossil-fuel sources. Emissions from natural gas- and coal-fired plants in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen oxides (NOx) affect the climate and air quality in ways that should be accounted for in the evaluation of renewable energy’s benefits.
The researchers draw on publicly available electricity generation data and break the continental United States into 10 regions in which wind or solar supplied at least 3% of electricity demand. An 11th region centered on Tennessee was excluded because the thresholds weren’t met. The methodology measures daily generation from appropriate sources (solar, wind, gas and coal) by region and a yearly average of emissions by region. The reason for averaging emissions is that there is generally a significant delay in the availability of daily emissions data.
According to the report, in 2022 the generation-weighted average across all regions in shows that 1.0 MWh of wind generation offsets 0.89 MWh of fossil generation (0.29 MWh of coal generation and 0.60 MWh of gas generation); and that 1.0 MWh of solar generation offsets 0.76 MWh of fossil generation (0.14 MWh of coal generation and 0.62 MWh of gas generation).
An oldie but goodie:
https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/styles/max_650x650/public/2023-07/HOAXrgb.jpg
*sigh*
I miss being able to insert images.
Add in the number of deaths associated with warring over oil reserves, too.
I’m curious about how they arrived at the 1:89 figure.
In fact, since it’s so much more efficient, each MWh of wind or solar should replace at least 1.65 MWh of fossil fuel primary energy at the well or mine face.