NPR’s special series, “The Undercount: The invisible death toll from climate change,” aims to answer this question. When climate and health reporter Alejandra Borunda asked doctors what important topics she should focus on, she heard the same thing over and over: Climate change is hurting a lot of people, but we aren’t doing a good job of keeping track of how many. “We’re undercounting the damage by an enormous amount,” Borunda says.
The answer to the basic question here is no; it’s impossible to provide even a good guess as to this figure, if only because there is no way to ascribe a certain catastrophic event, say a hurricane or a wildfire, to climate change. It’s really not a matter of doing a good or a bad job at keeping track.
Consider what appears to be a far more black-and-white situation, deaths from COVID-19. As discussed in this paper, it’s not a straightforward task to say that a certain victim died “with” COVID or “of” COVID.
As unsatisfying as it may be, I’m afraid that the community of climate scientists will eventually give up on the task of counting the deaths due to global warming.
NPR: Is it Possible to Know How Many People Have Died Because of Climate Change?
Minnesota is home to intelligent, well-educated people whose approval of Trump is lower than that of toenail fungus.
If Lindell wants to lead a state, he needs to choose one at least 800 miles away. Oklahoma?
He may also want to consider that Trump is easily the most detested person in this nation.
I wouldn’t say that the burden of proof lies on religion. No one knows how the universe got here.
The Big Bang was an event in which there was no chaos, no “entropy,” as we say in thermodynamics. How did all this orderliness get there 13.87 billion years ago? No one knows. This is an issue in cosmology which is quite likely to outlast human civilization on this planet.
I’m an atheist for a few reasons, one of which is that saying that God created the universe doesn’t get us any closer to an understanding of the cosmos, if only because it raises the question: Who made God?
More to the point, there are hundreds of moral reasons to disbelieve in God. Each year, 9 million children will die unbaptized on this planet before their fifth birthdays. In the bible, we learn that God punishes them all with an eternity of torture in hell. To what sort of weirdo does this make sense?
At left we have another good reminder that our cognitive biases can render us incapable of thinking critically.
Some of us believe anything we want to.
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