“A scientific metric increasingly widely used to estimate the human damage is the “thousand tonne rule”, which basically argues that for every thousand tonnes of fossil fuels mined, one person dies. Using this [actually a “1,000 ton rule”], Pearce and Parncut [Parncutt] argue “If warming reaches or exceeds 2 °C this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming, which is comparable with involuntary or negligent manslaughter””.
[Editor Comment: Assuming a “1000 tonne rule” for metric simplicity, and annual greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution as 63.8 billion tonnes [63.8 Gt] CO2-equivalent (properly taking land use and CH4 into account) [1] then future avoidable deaths from this annual GHG pollution = 63,800 million t CO2 x (1 Gt C/ 3.7 Gt CO2) x (1 death / 1,000 t C) = 17.2 million future deaths.
On the same basis, and taking Australia’s annual Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution as 3.4 Gt CO2-equivalent [2, 3], then future avoidable deaths 3,400,000,000 t CO2 x (1 Gt C/ 3.7 Gt CO2) x 1 death/1000 t C) = 920,000 future deaths.
An alternative calculation based simply on future air pollution deaths alone (i.e. ignoring future climate change-related deaths) of 75,000 future deaths due to annual Australian exports of coal [4]. The climate criminal Australian Labor Government proposes over 100 new coal and projects.
2023-08-19. Joshua M. Pearce and Richard Parncutt, “Quantifying Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Human Deaths to Guide Energy Policy ”, MDPI, 19 August 2023:https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/16/6074
“When attempting to quantify future harms caused by carbon emissions and to set appropriate energy policies, it has been argued that the most important metric is the number of human deaths caused by climate change. Several studies have attempted to overcome the uncertainties associated with such forecasting. In this article, approaches to estimating future human death tolls from climate change relevant at any scale or location are compared and synthesized, and implications for energy policy are considered. Several studies are consistent with the “1000-ton rule,” according to which a future person is killed every time 1000 tons of fossil carbon are burned (order-of-magnitude estimate). If warming reaches or exceeds 2 °C this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming, which is comparable with involuntary or negligent manslaughter. On this basis, relatively aggressive energy policies are summarized that would enable immediate and substantive decreases in carbon emissions… The 1000-ton rule says that a future person is killed every time humanity burns 1000 tons of fossil carbon. It is derived from a simple calculation: burning a trillion tons of fossil carbon will cause 2 °C of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) [57,58], which in turn will cause roughly a billion future premature deaths spread over a period of very roughly one century [59]. On the assumption that 2 °C of warming is either already inevitable (given the enormous political and economic difficulties of achieving a lower limit) or intended (given that the business plans of big fossil fuel industries make it inevitable), it can be concluded that burning 1000 tons of fossil carbon causes one future premature death. The numbers “one billion” (for the total death toll at 2 °C) and “one thousand” (for the amount of carbon that needs to be burned to cause one death) are both very approximate (both are hardly more than order-of-magnitude estimates), but also consistent with diverse evidence and arguments:”