On April 17, 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington DC. A day later the headline that forms the title of this post appeared in Google News. I’ve been unable to find out exactly how many views Google News gets, but it’s probably in the billions/year range, and this headline is sufficiently eye-catching that even viewers who just skim through the articles can hardly miss it. Three billion global warming deaths is, however, a lot, and the question is where Gov. Brown got this number from. It turns out to be a recent World Health Organization report that cites 3 billion as the number of people potentially affected by “household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices“. How Gov. Brown translated this into 3 billion global warming deaths isn’t clear, but if you sincerely believe that climate change will destroy civilization the important thing is to get the message across. The facts are secondary.
In the interests of fairness we must first consider what Gov. Brown actually said in his speech. According to CNS News and other sources it was this: “The prospect is 3 billion people on this planet will be subject to fatal lethal heat events.” A heat event that is both fatal and lethal can be guaranteed to kill the people who are subjected to it, but this is not quite as catchy a headline as 3 billion will die. So Gov. Brown got some help from the media in delivering his message.
Second, the World Health Organization has consistently projected that climate change deaths will be far lower than Gov. Brown claims. WHO estimates (probably overestimates, but that’s a separates issue) only the health impacts of climate change, but these include the impacts of drought (malnutrition etc), and the impacts of floods are generally included in a separate category.
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