could you provide any citation to this claim that people are dying now from global warming?
Don’t have time to hunt for sources right now, but I read several years ago that WHO estimates some 150,000 die each year just from disease vectors spreading into new areas due to the warming, and that half of the 40,000+ heat deaths in Europe in the summer of 2003 could be attributed to AGW. Also, that heat deaths are increasing in recent times. It is not as much the heat during the day (diurnal maximum) but the heat at night (GW is increasing the diurnal minimum faster than the diurnal max, which is a signature of GW) that doesn’t allow the body to recouperate that mainly led to the heat deaths in Europe, tho day time heat stroke is also a danger.
The warming also increases the severity of droughts, floods, wildfires, storms & hurricanes (warmer air sucks up the moisture from plants and land desiccating these; warmer sea temps contribute to hurricanes intensity) – so at least a portion of those dying from these would be due to the difference if those events had happened without the extra harm from global warming factored in.
But we need to look at it this way: It is often the last few inches of flooding that breaks the levee or destroys a home, or the extra intensity of a storm or hurricane, or dryness of a drought (often that extra which has been added on by AGW) that does the most damage.
The other thing we need to consider is that our greenhouse gases will be up in the atmosphere contributing to warming for a long time – a portion of our CO2 emissions could last up to 100,000 years (see:
realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/03/how-long-will-global-warming-last/). Also, that the initial warming that we are causing is leading to dangerous positive feedbacks – by melting ice/snow cover, leaving darker surfaces, that leads to more warming, more melting, more warming; and by melting frozen methane in permafrost and in hydrates in the ocean, that methane (23 times a stronger GH gas than CO2), that released methane causes more warming, causing more melting, more warming, etc. These processes have already begun. It is sort of like we are pulling on a trigger of a very powerful shotgun, or poking a sleeping dragon.
So the GHGs we emit not only do harm for a very long time, but also cause a spiraling effect to great warming, such as e the end-Permian extinction 251 mill yrs ago when 90% of life on earth died. Except that warming process took a very long time, and we are causing the warming extremely rapidly (in geological time). And we could even tip the earth systems into a “venus syndrome” or permanent runaway warming, ending all life on earth, according to the top climate scientist at NASA, Jim Hansen (see esp page 24 of
columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to figure out the harm our personal GHG emissions in our time cause over the long haul – which is the way Christians in good moral standing should be looking at it, not just the deaths this year – but it could be very substantial, even subtracting off the lives saved by the warming. (For instance, some people die of heart attacks from snow shoveling; and while snow (and all precipitation) is increasing with AGW, there will be regions where snow will be replaced with rain due to the warming, and the warming could save some lives, but the net result will be tremendous death & destruction.)
I’ll be looking for sources on how AGW causes increased deaths. I just did at paper on “Food Rights [which the Holy Father champions] and Climate Change,” including a lot of peer-reviewed sources indicating out how climate change will dramatically decrease food production – even CO2, which has a slighly positive effect on some crops – but not as much as previously thought – up to a point of CO2 concentration and up to a point of the warming (up to around 2050 for northern latitudes like Europe and the U.S.), has negative effects on a lot of crops and sea-life. The overall net effect is that AGW is harming food production in many parts of the world even now, and in the future will have a net strongly negative impact.
When I came to understand back in 1990 that I was partly responsible for these harms, I made it my life work to study the issue and do whatever I could to reduce my contributions. I was willing to sacrifice, but what I found out (since my husband did not want to sacrifice) was that we have been able to reduce our GHG emissions by over 40% cost-effectively, without lowering our living standards, even raising them a bit, and saving $1000s to boot, thru energy/resource efficiency/conservation and going on alt energy when we moved to Texas and got on Green Mountain 100% wind-generated electricity.
I sincerely hope that along with all the good work we Catholics do in combatting abortion, etc, that we can also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, as the Vatican has done (they are now “carbon neutral”).
Peace and good will.
