How many people has each ton of carbon emissions killed through heat waves?

Question

Please don't say anything about a false premise. I am looking for a real answer.

Answer 1

The correct answer is zero.

Answer 2

Impossible to answer, can only speculate.  There have been heatwaves that have killed many thousands of people but it's not possible to say how much of a role carbon emissions have played in these heatwaves.  It's safe to say that they have played a part but just how much is hard to say.

What we can do is look at the number of heat related deaths each year and devise an equation showing that for each X degrees rise in temperature over and above a baseline figure there are Y heat related deaths.

If we do that then a one degree C rise = very approx 100,000 additional deaths per year.

We can then look at the long term mean temperature change which for the last 100 years is about 0.3 degrees C above the mean for the previous 100 years, by extrapolation this gives us a figure of 3 million deaths over and above what would have been expected naturally.

You specifically asked how many deaths per ton of carbon emissions.  Taking the 2006 figure of 29 billion tons and the 1907 figure of approx 6 billion tons there's been an annual average of 16 billion tons for the last 100 years, 1.6 trillion tons altogether.

1.6 trillion divided by 3 million = 533,333 tons of emissions per death caused by heatwaves.  This is a very approximate answer; a more precise answer, if it were calculable, should lie in the range 100,000 to 2.5 million.

Answer 3

I find it hard to believe there is any statistically significant number that could be given.