How deadly could climate change be? Last fall, in an idiosyncratic corner of the internet where I happen to spend a lot of time, an argument broke out about how to quantify and characterize the mortality impact of global warming. The claim was quickly picked apart by experts: “An oft-quoted adage within the climate-modeler community is that garbage in equals garbage out,” the climate advocate Mark Lynas wrote. But it did make me wonder: How big would the number have to be to strike you as really big? If you include premature deaths from the air pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels, you may well get estimates stretching into the hundreds of millions.

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Persons: Roger Hallam —, ” Hallam, Mark Lynas, “ Organizations: BBC