Friday, February 02, 2007

Climate Change about 1/115 as bad as auto traffic

The worst could mean more than 1 million dead and hundreds of billions of
dollars in costs by 2100, said Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Colorado


Do you feel a little like Number Two when Dr. Evil wants to hold the United Nations hostage for one million dollars? We lose Florida, invite routine tornadoes and hurricanes, create large scale famine and only lose one in every six thousand people?

Car crashes, which is a fine measure because it's a risk we're completely comfortable with, killed about 1.22 million people in 2001. Climate change will kill fewer than that over the next 94 years.

Well, maybe the industrial revolution wasn't such a bad idea after all.

2 comments:

Rionn Fears Malechem said...

confirmed.

Anonymous said...

I noticed this too. Where Dr. Trenberth - a climate scientist - gets off estimating death tolls in 2100 I don't know. One million is ridiculously trivial. Should we be so lucky.

But then he's from New Zealand originally, and lives in Boulder. Both are semi-autonomous Republics that might make 1 million feel like a lot.