A new study shows a specific ratio of excess carbon dioxide emissions to the number of people who die because of it.
A new study by the Columbia University Institute introduces a new measure: the amount of carbon per death. That is, how many people will die depending on exceeding the permissible level of carbon emissions.
The authors of the paper, Daniel Bressler, Ph.D. from Columbia University, concluded that the current estimates of excess emissions, which show as a cost to the economy, do not sufficiently reflect the current state of affairs.
While recent studies show how climate change will lead to millions of premature deaths, these estimates are based on outdated data.
The new method, the authors write, specifically shows how individual enterprises, depending on their own decisions, will kill or not kill a certain number of people.
During the work, the authors assessed the impact of climate change on mortality based on several key health studies. It also took into account only deaths directly from the effects of climate change, such as high temperatures, and did not take into account possible deaths from storms, floods, crop failures, infectious diseases or wars.
Assuming that emissions continue to rise, the authors arrive at a figure of 0.000226 excess deaths this century per metric tonne of carbon dioxide emitted in excess of current emissions.
