NPR: Is it Possible to Know How Many People Have Died Because of Climate Change?

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.