This rule is actually “an order of magnitude best estimate”, which means it’s more of a range, somewhere between 0.1 to 10 deaths per 1000 tons of carbon burned.
That leaves a lot of room for scenarios even more dire than the one outlined here.
“When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom,” explains Pierce.
“We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.”
Translation: 10 billion people will die.
2nd translation: Almost everyone will die.
My wild ass guess is humanity will eventually die back to, at best, bronze age population levels.
This global economist wrote a whole book arguing exactly that; The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/667b3daf-4c99-47de-82f6-f74eb7cd2ff7
Yeah. We’ll definitely be set ourselves back for a while. Shame because we are on the verge of lots of great technologies.
Or it could end up being less bad than we expect.
less bad than the conservative estimates of their models… you can’t read properly can you…
When does that ever happen?
I told my friend about all my problems, and he said, “Cheer up! Things could be worse!”
So, I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.
So what you’re saying is… we are going to enter a dark age… and we could use a Foundation to lessen it’s impact on humanity?
Pretty sure I’m gonna be fine.