While I appreciate things like this that have a lot of references, and I have been aware of this piece since it was published two years back, it is one of those essays that tends to swing far too pessimistic on its claims. Not saying that there isn't an issue but things like 6-7 billion dead in the next 25 years, that is a bold claim.
It reads similar to the works of Guy McPherson & James Kunstler in that they are continually pushing back the doomsday date as they miss again and again. But I think they do love the attention of publishing these dramatic predictions because it can make people feel like their lives are like that of fiction based drama. Alas normal life it much more humble and slow, at least for the most part.
I do think we will hit a long term equilibrium of about 2 billion people like claimed but over more like 150-300 years as we balance out from overshoot and ecological blow back. But that is a very different real world experienced scenario to what they propose.
The fact is that we just do not know. But what we can actually observe is... Quite grim. And we are not even taking the smallest, tiniest steps we can possibly take to fixing it.
We are basically doing only what is STRICTLY dictated by economy. And we know that it is simply not enough. Whether in 2 decades or 10, billions of human beings are going to die from the direct or indirect effects of climate change. And that is... Incomprehensible.
> Whether in 2 decades or 10, billions of human beings are going to die from the direct or indirect effects of climate change. And that is... Incomprehensible.
Just for some perspective... at the current global death rate, 2.4 billion die in two decades, and 12 billion die in 10. So it's not that incomprehensible.
We have short lifespans, it seems more likely the human population will shrink to match loss of habitable land mass and ecological damage through simply expiring, rather than suddenly through some kind of dooms day event (granted I'm certain climate change will hurry it along).
I'm going to use this bleak comment to suggest anyone reading make sure they go outside and smell the fresh air, life is short man, really short.
Billions of people will not die from climate change, if anything they would simply not be born.
That is already happening in almost every western democracy as fertility rates have dropped precipitously. That is not because we have any food shortages: it’s because people are choosing not to have kids because life is so expensive.
Europe now has hundreds of excess deaths from heat and hundreds of excess deaths from flooding due to events exacerbated or caused entirely by climate change most years. Africa likely already experiences tens of thousands of climate change related deaths each year, although attribution is tricky. Assuming that climate change and its effects are an exponentially escalating phenomenon, why would it be unthinkable that over the next 10/20/50/100 years the cumulative death toll of climate change will reach into the billions?
It's quite a leap of faith to extrapolate from hundreds up to billions, no?
It all depends ob your assumptions, i.e. the actual effects of climate change on extreme weather events, the capacity of various polities to adapt to these effects and how you would define "climate change related deaths" and the timeframe you are looking at.
Direct fatalities from weather related natural disasters (droughts, floods, storms, etc) between 2005 and 2024 worldwide are estimated somewhere around 200.000 people, so about 10.000 deaths per year [0].
If you assume (just for the sake of the argument) that climate change will increase this death toll by 10% every year for 100 years, direct deaths from natural disasters caused by climate change alone will amount to close to 140.000.000 deaths over that time period.
Add to this indirect deaths, i.e. premature deaths due to insufficient nutrition during childhood caused by drought, disease spread by floods, etc. etc.
And because the effects of climate change are mostly political in nature, you'll have to make some assumptions about that, too. Sea level rise will affect (as in inundate their current homes at least once a year) more than 600 million people by the year 2100 [1]. Many of these peoples will be displaced and depending on the political and economic capacity of their societies to cope with this displacement, this alone could result in millions of deaths.
Climate change is also a contributor to general political instability and the risk of both civil and nation state war. How do you account for those deaths?
In summary, the death toll of climate change can inherently not be known. But if you look at the next hundred years, I doubt you can assume a number of less than in the hundreds of millions, if we assume climate change effects based on current estimates of "status quo" emissions. Which makes emission reductions essential, because there is a literal connection between an additional ton of CO2 in the atmosphere and an increase in the number of deaths.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-nat... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
Simply assuming 10% compound growth year-on-year without any basis is, frankly, ridiculous.
https://ourworldindata.org/part-one-how-many-people-die-from...
"Cold deaths vastly outnumber heat-related ones, but mostly due to “moderate” rather than extremely cold conditions."
Maybe read the second part of this analysis? https://ourworldindata.org/part-two-how-many-people-die-from...
Cold deaths will decrease in high-latitude countries (which tend to be sparsely inhabited) but heat deaths will increase in low latitude countries (i.e. places like India). The exact effects of this will depend on political factors (adaption), but it is unlikely that the decrease in cold deaths will compensate the increase in heat deaths. Also, the people dying from heat will still be dead.
That's a useful baseline for future comparisons.
Currently (mostly) cities don't see Death Valley or Marble Bar range tempretures or beyond .. this will change.
~ https://www.climatechangenews.com/2025/07/14/to-help-people-...Extreme heat could lead to 30,000 deaths a year in England and Wales by 2070s, say scientists
~ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/10/extreme-...
That would be roughly on par with Germany's deaths related to infections contracted in a hospital. That doesn't make it into headlines.
That's just the UK (high latitude), at tempretures lower than current tempretures in Death Valley / Marble Bar.
Give it time for higher tempretures to reach dense urban centres, look to India and equatorial countries that'll experience both high temp and high humidity and you'll see heat exhaustion deaths rise to well past those anglocentric numbers.
The more serious numbers will come from climate related conflict and migration in any case (assuming no change in increasing emmissions, even assuming a flattening to a steady human annual addition).
>people are choosing not to have kids because life is so expensive.
Finally a positive outcome of capitalism!
Having children is subsidized where I come from. To a point where getting pregnant is a strategy to secure a form of UBI for certain low-income people. I think the reasons for lowered birth rates are much more hedonistic and less related to costs.
Not wanting to bring children into an overpopulated polluted overheating stormy flooding jobless fascist warring world of burning bombed out cities and ICE concentration camps run by heath care and science denying oligarchs and religious zealots is hardly hedonism.
There's a large amount of people and capital employed on deploying low emissions energy technology. We are sort of in a halfway pathway.
North America has large stable energy amount per capita that is cleaning up.
Asia has large population, small energy amount per capita and is increasing that rapidly by all methods, including fossils but also low emissions ones.
So overall Asia has very large emissions but smaller per capita than North America. And almost everybody is deploying low emissions energy sources.
This is finally happening at scale.
Even Poland generated more energy from solar power than coal in June.
I'd be a lot happier if we were even doing what is "strictly dictated by economy".
The tech and economics are there and have been for a while, it's politics and disinformation that's holding us back.
The key lesson I'm taking is that even if we avoid the worst of this environmental disaster we've created a political realm that looks to profit individually from making disasters worse rather than profit collectively by fixing them and that cannot be good for the human race as we face upcoming disasters, some of which will be spin-offs of this one, like climate wars and climate refugees.
> The fact is that we just do not know.
This always seems to apply to inaction, but never to action or what is really to say, tax plans.
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