4BD Launch Event – 4 Billion Dead
H simmens
Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
Dr. Soumitra Das
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rob de laet
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robert...@gmail.com
I've registered but I have a prior commitment this evening. I'm hoping it'll be recorded and streamed so I can watch it later.
Robert
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Robert Chris
Does anyone have the pass code for the Zoom session?
Robert
H simmens
Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
On Mar 7, 2026, at 1:06 PM, Robert Chris <robert...@gmail.com> wrote:
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/326ff9ca-cf4a-41d9-9ea0-a00cc4ff5a7a%40gmail.com.
Michael MacCracken
I have same problem.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/326ff9ca-cf4a-41d9-9ea0-a00cc4ff5a7a%40gmail.com.
David Spratt
The Planetary Insolvency report in figure 12 includes estimates of deaths at 2C of >2 billion and at 3C of >4 billion people.
The caption said the table contained "outputs contained in previous sections” of the report. But this was NOT the case. There were no relevant ”outputs”.
Then it was said that it came from the Climate Endgame paper, but its author said this was not the case. A person associated with the Solvency report told me:
"They come from a definition of terms table in Luke Kemp's Climate Endgame paper - I mentioned this to Luke the other day, he confirmed that he does NOT make any forecasts about mortality in the paper."
As the caption to figure 12 says, it is a risk assessment matrix that illustrates general levels of risk, and the authors have now privately clarified that they "are absolutely NOT forecasts or predictions and we don't use them as such”.
So either it was too subtle in its distinctions, and/or it was a bit of a stuff up in that it was assumed that the 4 billion figure came from somewhere but it did not. So there is still a question of how the 4 billion figure was derived.
I suggested to some people associated with the paper that a correction or clarification be issued, at least repeating what they had said privately, that the figures "are absolutely NOT forecasts or predictions and we don't use them as such”. This has not been done.
I had conversations with people working with Roger on his four billion dead project outlining the story above, and suggesting that going out with numbers pretending they have some scientific credence when they have none and even the authors have said they are not forecast or predictions and should not be used as such, was not a great idea. It just feeds into claims of scientifically illiterate doomism. My advice didn’t get far.
David Spratt
Paul Beckwith
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David Spratt
A 4C global average rise means on average about 5.5–6C warmer over land, especially
away from the coast. Where people could actually live with land suitable for growing
food (with the much greater evaporation rates implicit at +6C), and above existing deltas
and flood plains as sea-levels rise, would be limited. On 30 November 2007, Reuters
reported:
Children born today in countries such as Spain and Italy will witness a 7 degrees Celsius
rise in summer temperatures by the end of their lives, the European Union’s environment
watchdog warned on Tuesday.
Much of the tropics would be too hot, much of the temperate regions desertified.
The “4 degrees and beyond” conference heard that 4C could render half of the world
uninhabitable. Populations would be driven towards the poles, and practically-speaking
that means the north pole. How many would survive? On 29 September 2009, at the
conclusion of the “4 degrees and beyond” conference, “The Scotsman” reported:
Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, believes only
around 10 per cent of the planet’s population – around half a billion people – will survive if
global temperatures rise by 4C...
Current Met Office projections reveal that the lack of action in the intervening 17 years – in
which emissions of climate changing gases such as carbon dioxide have soared – has set
the world on a path towards potential 4C rises as early as 2060, and 6C rises by the end of
the century.
Anderson, who advises the government on climate change, said the consequences were
“terrifying”. “For humanity it’s a matter of life or death,” he said. “We will not make all human
beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the
right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have
mass death at 4C. If you have got a population of nine billion by 2050 and you hit 4C, 5C or
6C, you might have half a billion people surviving.”
Earlier, in March 2009, at the Copenhagen science conference, Professor Hans Joachim
Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute, and one of Europe’s most eminent
climate scientists, told his audience that at 4C, population “... carrying capacity
estimates (are) below 1 billion people.”
Three years earlier, in 2006, James Lovelock — scientist extraordinaire, inventor of the
microwave oven and propounder of the Gaia thesis — told an audience that the Earth
has a fever that could boost temperatures by up to 8C (more on this later), making large
parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples’ lives. He said a
traumatised Earth might only be able to support less than a tenth of its six billion people:
“We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don’t see the species dying
out... A hot Earth couldn’t support much over 500 million.”
Sources
http://climatecongress.ku.dk/speakers/schellnhuber-plenaryspeaker-12march2009.pdf
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Warming-will-39wipe-out-billions39.5867379.jp
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L28841108.htm
http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-53238020101130
H simmens
Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
On Mar 7, 2026, at 4:12 PM, 'David Spratt' via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Re: 4 billion dead figure.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/703075D4-1E12-46A0-8C06-95CFAD3A0815%40bigpond.net.au.
Michael MacCracken
Hi David and Herb, particularly--
On severe weather forecasts here in the US, say of tornado outbreaks, they color in some large, sort of general region about where the severe weather will form and then add up the population in that zone, say 60 million, and say they are at risk of life-threatening tornadoes. In doing this they are not saying that many will die, but that many are at severe risk, and typically, as happened in the past few days, 4 or 6 die due to falling trees, blown apart homes, etc. And then the next day the storms have moved on at least somewhat and say 50 million (including some overlap) are at risk. Might we be interpreting what is being said incorrectly, so that what they are saying is that half or so of the global population will be at risk of climate-change induced events (heat waves, drenching rains and flooding, etc.) capable of killing them--not that that many may be killed by these events.
If that is what they are meaning, and I did not get to listen to their announcement, then the question to ask would be what number of people are at risk of being exposed to potential life-threatening events today. Given typhoons, other tropical cyclones. drenching rains, intense heat waves without the availability of air conditioned retreats, that number could easily be 2-3 billion of so--so the issue is how many more people that now are going to be exposed to very severe weather, etc.
And the other question would be if these deaths are going to be reducing deaths in other categories. So, with 8 billion people on the planet, something like 2.5-3 billion will die during this time of well-documented causes like cancer, old age, heart attacks, etc. I these people now die even one day earlier due to extreme weather, is that being counted in their totals and so causes by other factors would come down as the causes due to extreme weather events (or climate change caused disease) go up. To avoid this problem, what should really be counted is lost days (or years) of life due to extreme climate change--and it would be useful to also have the age distribution of those passing away.
Overall, in addition to apparently having no correct source for their number, how they are expressing it is pretty inadequate and uninformative--though admittedly catchy..
Mike MacCracken
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robert...@gmail.com
Hi folks
This is the question that got me into climate change 25 years ago. I think the 'mortality vs. temperature' metric is seriously misguided. If only it were that simple!
I am reminded of the two books that got me going. One was one of Lovelock's Gaia books in which he posited that by 2100 the global human population would be down to around a billion or so. The second was Straw Dogs by John Gray (Professor of lots of stuff at London School of Economics and until a few years ago a regular speaker on BBC radio on cultural and philosophical issues). He takes a deliberately provocative view of humanity as just another species and notes that population spikes are quite common in the living world. Typically, they come off as quickly as they arise and usually return to their prior stable level before the spike started building. In humanity's case that implied returning to a billion by 2200 or thereabouts.
In both cases the authors attributed the drop in population to a wise range of causes including, war, civil unrest, pandemics, pestilence, pollution, flood, drought, starvation, sea level rise, mass migration and so on. The central point is that the collapse is systemic. The causes feed on each other so it's not meaningful to attribute them to any single cause. Just because temperatures rise doesn’t mean that what follows is directly attributable to world being hotter. We have choices as to how we respond.
Finally, in this very brief note, the issue is not about four billion being dead. The fact is, and this is a fact, all 8 billion alive today are going to die. The question is not how many deaths there'll be, we know that for certain. The questions are to what extent will present and future life expectancy be reduced as a result of the various perils, and at what level will the population then stabilise. We need to remember that there is nothing sacrosanct about any particular level of population. It isn't planned. It's an emergent property of the state of civilisation. Gray might be right; our 8 billion is just a typical spike and before long we'll get back to somewhere close the the 1 billion people there were in 1800. Civilisation will adjust accordingly.
The transition to that new equilibrium will be messy and unpleasant for those living through it. But for those born after, who knows, it might be close to paradise!
These questions are interesting philosophically but they are completely irrelevant from a policy perspective. We don't need answers to these questions to know that we have to reverse global warming. That ought to be blindingly obvious to everyone by now, although sadly, it doesn't appear to be. Policymakers just need to focus on the practicalities of delivering cooling. How much cooling is also irrelevant for today's policymakers. Their task is to get the ball rolling. It'll be for future policymakers to decide how to control the size and speed of the ball. All the rest of this discourse is now little more than a distraction.
RobertC
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H simmens
 | |
Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
On Mar 7, 2026, at 4:49 PM, 'Michael MacCracken' via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/8fdbfec5-2dc6-47a0-be4d-052e6499ce08%40comcast.net.
Paul Beckwith
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Robert Chris
Typo: 'wide range' not 'wise range'!
RobertC
robert...@gmail.com
Paul, don't abuse the averages! On land, temperatures will rise much more than the global average because of the oceans that cover 70% of Earth's surface having much high thermal capacity. In addition, humans depend on a wide range of ecosystems for a range of services that sustain them. Warming of even 1.5oC, if sustained for lengthy periods, will dramatically impact those ecosystems services. That's what'll cause the loss of food and water, the mass migration that will provoke widespread unrest and even war, as the dominoes collide to render the systems that sustain 8 billion people no longer capable of doing so. The problem with global warming is not the relatively few people that'll die due to exposure to high wet bulb temperatures.
RobertC
H simmens
Herb Simmens
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
On Mar 7, 2026, at 5:18 PM, robert...@gmail.com wrote:
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robert...@gmail.com
Herb
You're absolutely right. We have choices about how we respond to the increasing threats from climate induced perils. What makes this conversation slightly silly is that there is no way we can predict which perils will arise, to what degree, when and where, nor how we will respond when they happen. I wasn't aware of the flood data you mention below. It illustrates that we can get some things right! (Are they Us data or global?) Hallelujah! The problem is that as warming gathers pace we must expect the perils to come more frequently and more severely. We also have the threat of the dreaded tipping points, in particular AMOC shutdown, that would have dramatic and widespread environmental impacts that would impact peoples lives at scale. Your implication that the 'extremely favorable trend' in reducing flood deaths might be indicative of our responses to all other potential perils globally, is stretching logic a little too far!
The point I made in an earlier post this evening is that mithering over the minutiae of all this is just a distraction. We know we're headed in the wrong direction. We know we're heading there at ever increasing pace. We know the risks are growing (and by risk I mean both the likelihood of perils arising and the extent of the harms they cause when they do). We know that there are only two interventions that will reverse this path to collapse a) increasing reflected sunlight to reduce absorbed solar radiation, and b) reducing the atmospheric concentration of GHGs to increase outgoing infrared radiation. There are lots of ways that each of these could be done. We need to find the mix that reduces overall risk to the greatest possible extent (and here, overall risk balances the risks of action and inaction and isn't limited to the climate impacts - forced rapid closure of the O&G sector would be great for the climate but would have some very undesirable socioeconomic consequences). The rest is irrelevant.
Again, you are absolutely right that 'No one knows how much adaptation and untapped resilience is still available to limit death and injury ...'. That is not a sound argument for engendering complacency by suggesting that things might not be as bad as we fear. It is precisely that mindset that has created the problem we now have. Had policymakers reacted more wisely back in the 1990s when climate change became 'a thing', we'd be in a very different place today.
RobertC
John Nissen
From: Paul Klinkman <paulkl...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 8, 2026 at 11:29 AM
Subject: [prag] Re: 4BD Launch Event – 4 Billion Dead
To: Planetary Restoration <planetary-...@googlegroups.com>
The 4 billion dead figure has little credence.
The Planetary Insolvency report in figure 12 includes estimates of deaths at 2C of >2 billion and at 3C of >4 billion people.
The caption said the table contained "outputs contained in previous sections” of the report. But this was NOT the case. There were no relevant ”outputs”.
Then it was said that it came from the Climate Endgame paper, but its author said this was not the case. A person associated with the Solvency report told me:
"They come from a definition of terms table in Luke Kemp's Climate Endgame paper - I mentioned this to Luke the other day, he confirmed that he does NOT make any forecasts about mortality in the paper."
As the caption to figure 12 says, it is a risk assessment matrix that illustrates general levels of risk, and the authors have now privately clarified that they "are absolutely NOT forecasts or predictions and we don't use them as such”.
So either it was too subtle in its distinctions, and/or it was a bit of a stuff up in that it was assumed that the 4 billion figure came from somewhere but it did not. So there is still a question of how the 4 billion figure was derived.
I suggested to some people associated with the paper that a correction or clarification be issued, at least repeating what they had said privately, that the figures "are absolutely NOT forecasts or predictions and we don't use them as such”. This has not been done.
I had conversations with people working with Roger on his four billion dead project outlining the story above, and suggesting that going out with numbers pretending they have some scientific credence when they have none and even the authors have said they are not forecast or predictions and should not be used as such, was not a great idea. It just feeds into claims of scientifically illiterate doomism. My advice didn’t get far.
David Spratt
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David Spratt
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Rebecca personal em
On 9 Mar 2026, at 7:59 am, 'David Spratt' via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
I don’t understand why this crazy, non-sensical message about a "phishing attempt” in response to a legitimate post of mine (and a subsequent discussion on this list) is being copied from a PRAG list and send to the HPAC list. This does not seem appropriate.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/23CA6A44-0E5A-42C0-A522-E8E577E11511%40bigpond.net.au.
John Nissen
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br...@chesdata.com
The link “https://4billiondead.org/4bd-launch-event/” is phishing attempt. Under no circumstances should you follow the instructions.
Followed by
David Spratt
o "They come from a definition of terms table in Luke Kemp's Climate Endgame paper - I mentioned this to Luke the other day, he confirmed that he does NOT make any forecasts about mortality in the paper."
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/BA7EA68B-FBBB-4CCF-A702-C8E711E39487%40gmail.com.
rob...@rtulip.net
Paul Klinkman’s message is not spam. He is not suggesting that David Spratt’s message is phishing, but as Bruce Parker has also noted, that the four billion event link shared by Herb Simmens goes to a page that looks like phishing. It is strange as Herb and others appear to have been able to go to the four billion event while others including me get the weird link Paul warned against.
From: healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Rebecca personal em
Sent: Monday, 9 March 2026 8:17 AM
To: David Spratt <dsp...@bigpond.net.au>
Cc: healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>
David Spratt
o "They come from a definition of terms table in Luke Kemp's Climate Endgame paper - I mentioned this to Luke the other day, he confirmed that he does NOT make any forecasts about mortality in the paper."
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/BA7EA68B-FBBB-4CCF-A702-C8E711E39487%40gmail.com.
Tom Harris
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Tom
Interesting paper but one I don't find in the least convincing. The abstract concludes:
As a clear political message, the “1,000-tonne rule” can be used to defend human rights, especially in developing countries, and to clarify that climate change is primarily a human rights issue.
Climate change is not primarily a human rights issue. As currently framed by most policymakers, it's primarily an economic issue. Whilst I'm all for interdisciplinary engagement in the climate discourse, it isn't clear how this author, who is a musicologist, is connected to it.
On the substantive point, I also don't think we should lend much credence to the premature death projections. We can have no idea how those in the future will adapt to climate change so any such estimates are going to fraught with impenetrable uncertainty. Moreover, they're irrelevant to current policy imperatives. All we need to grasp is that the harms from global warming accelerate as it gets warmer. What difference to current policy would it make if we knew with confidence that Policy A leads to 4 billion premature deaths by 2100 whereas Policy B leads to only 2 billion. Obviously we'll choose Policy A. But hold on! What if Policy A costs us four times as much as Policy B? Ah! Well, that's different! How much do I now care about those other 2 billion people that I don't know?
There is a different world where we'd be asking different questions. But this is the one we're currently in.
RobertC
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Tom Harris
H simmens
In 2021, Daniel Bressler, a PhD student at Columbia University in
New York, estimated that every additional 4,400 metric tons of carbon
dioxide emitted will cause one heat-related death later this century.
He called this number the mortality cost of carbon. While the resul-
tant value of the calculation may vary considerably depending upon
assumptions, the intent behind developing the mortality cost of carbon
is admirable and important.”
Author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future
“A wonderful achievement, a SciencePoem, an Inspiration, a Prophecy, also hilarious, Dive in and see"
Kim Stanley Robinson
@herbsimmens
On Mar 10, 2026, at 12:35 PM, Tom Harris <hp...@tomharris.uk> wrote:
Hi
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robert...@gmail.com
Hi Herb
This is where we need to distinguish between predictions and forecasts on the one hand, and speculations and conjectures on the other. I can say with scientific confidence that there are no credible forecasts or predictions about how many extra deaths would be caused by however many extra tonnes of CO2 emissions. This relationship is not amenable to a rational analysis because it lacks a key ingredient - data! To make a reliable forecast here you need a time machine to travel into the future to collect some data about how people will respond to future situations that we haven't yet conceived. Do that, and then let's revisit this question! Remember that your time machine also has to get you back here with the data. But then, is there a possibility that you might find the future such a paradise that you'll chose to stay there? If so, how then do we get that data? You'd have to get Elon to design the time machine as an autonomous vehicle , so all you have to do is pop the data inside, and remotely send the machine on its way back to the present.
Bressler might well assume that as wealth increases so does the means and success of adaptation. But what if it doesn't? What about singularities and other non-linear path dependencies.
RobertC
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robert...@gmail.com
Hi Mike
The point I’m making is that these key decisions are made to serve the short-term economic and power interests of the elite. The moral questions emerging from considerations of intergenerational justice are not, in today’s world, primary considerations. In Realpolitik, we just pay lip service to them, and often not even that.
As regards your question as to whether I’m for or against global de-population, I am neither. I don’t regard this to be a meaningful choice. Population size is an emergent property of human existence. It isn’t something we can plan for.
Where does the quality of life enter into this? Is lots of people living in deprivation better or worse than fewer people living well? How can we know what future generations will do with the opportunities and threats they confront? I think that Parfit (who I’ve mentioned here before) is probably right and we have no moral obligations to future people, however counterintuitive that might seem.
But we do have obligations to behave well. There’s 3,000 years of philosophy on this topic so I’m not going to explore here what ‘behaving well’ might mean other than to claim we have an obligation to nurture planetary resources rather than deplete them. Future generations can then make their own choices.
However, we need to remember that humans are part of nature and subject to the same basic dynamics that apply to all living species. Our population size is a function of the resources available to us. If we squander those resources, the planet will support fewer future humans, or the same number of humans in worse average conditions. Reducing average quality of life and wellbeing will most probably lead to a population decline.
Until we start behaving as responsible members of a highly complex adaptive system, we will continue to reduce the capacity of Earth to sustain the current human population other than by reducing its average quality of life and wellbeing. The choice is not about population size, it’s about respecting planetary resources.
RobertC
Hi Robert--Can I presume you really thought we'd obviously choose Policy B, or are you really for global de-population?
Best, Mike
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rob...@rtulip.net
Of course population size is something we can plan for. Deploying technology to stabilise the climate will enable a larger human population.
From: healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of robert...@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, 11 March 2026 10:05 PM
To: Michael MacCracken <mmac...@comcast.net>
Cc: healthy-planet-action-coalition <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com>
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robert...@gmail.com
Hi RobertT
I don't think we're going to agree on this. We have totally different and, at least in this regard, incompatible worldviews. Your reductionist approach is at odds with my systems one.
Deploying technology may well enable a larger number of humans but enabling it and it actually happening are not the same thing. Moreover, enabling it doesn't mean that they will have greater wellbeing in any terms that we'd understand. Each generation develops a sense of 'a life worth living' that fits their circumstances. It would be nonsense to claim that no one living before all the goodies that we now consider to be essential to a good life were available, had a life that wasn't worth living.
It would be nonsense to claim that the world is better place today simply by virtue of there being 8 billion people than it was when I was born and there were less than 3 billion.
Population size is, as I said earlier, an emergent property, and as such it is unpredictable and uncontrollable. It is therefore not a moral or ethical question. The moral and ethical questions concern the quality of the lives and the relationships between people. Some would claim that that stretches across the generations binding the dead, the living and the yet to be born.
The category that refers to those that believe that technology is the solution to all our ills is Prometheans.
RobertC
Michael MacCracken
I was commenting, perhaps not clearly enough, that you suggested that we would obviously choose Option A with its 4B deaths instead of Option B with 2B deaths. How is that obvious?
Mike
robert...@gmail.com
Hi Mike
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I mis-spoke! Or whatever the equivalent is in writing! Let me rewrite that:
Obviously we'll choose Policy B. But hold on! What if Policy B costs us four times as much as Policy A?
I hope that settles this. Apologies for the confusion.
Robert
Robert Chris
Hi all
Mike MacCracken has very kindly pointed to a serious error in my message below, one that needs correcting. The sentence beginning 'Obviously...' and the following sentence should read:
Obviously we'll choose Policy B. But hold on! What if Policy B costs us four times as much as Policy A?
Apologies for any confusion this might have caused.
Robert