This rule is actually “an order of magnitude best estimate”, which means it’s more of a range, somewhere between 0.1 to 10 deaths per 1000 tons of carbon burned.

That leaves a lot of room for scenarios even more dire than the one outlined here.

“When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom,” explains Pierce.

“We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.”

Translation: 10 billion people will die.

2nd translation: Almost everyone will die.

The people responsible don’t care. They will be perfectly fine letting the rest of us die. They’ll only start giving a shit once cheap labor starts getting hard to come by.

“1 billion people on track to die”… I guess we’re doing an empirical test of the trolley problem.

We have a choice between inconveniencing some people (especially some very rich people); vs saving billions of lives by switching tracks. And apparently the empirical choice is to equivocate and delay so that we stay on the path of death and ruin. … It isn’t the solution I would have chosen personally.