Abstract
Climate change will cause large numbers of casualties, perhaps extending over thousands of years. Casualties have a clear moral significance that economic and other technical measures of harm tend to mask. They are, moreover, universally understood, whereas other measures of harm are not. Therefore, the harms of climate change should regularly be expressed in terms of casualties by such agencies such as IPCC’s Working Group III, in addition to whatever other measures are used. Casualty estimates should, furthermore, be used to derive estimates of casualties per emission source up to a given date. Such estimates would have wide margins of error, but they would add substantially to humanity’s grasp of the moral costs of particular greenhouse gas emissions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Archer D et al (2009) Atmospheric lifetime of fossil fuel carbon dioxide. Annu Rev Earth Planet Sci 37:117–134. doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100206
Arnesen T, Kapiriri L (2004) Can the value choices in DALYs influence global priority-setting? Health Policy 70:137–149. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2003.08.004
Barnosky A et al (2011) Has the earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471:51–57. doi:10.1038/nature09678
Broome J (2012) Climate matters: ethics in a warming world. W. W. Norton, New York
Development Assistance Research Associates (DARA) (2012) Climate vulnerability monitor 2nd ed. http://daraint.org/climate-vulnerability-monitor/climate-vulnerability-monitor-2012/report/. Accessed 6 November 2103
Frederick S, Loewenstein G, O’Donoghue T (2002) Time discounting and time preference: a critical review. J Econ Lit XL:351–401
Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) (2009) Climate change: the anatomy of a silent crisis. http://www.ghf-ge.org/human-impact-report.pdf. Accessed 6 November 2103
Hope, C (2011) The social cost of CO2 from the PAGE09 model, Economics Discussion Papers 2011–39, http://econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/49936/1/668556455.pdf. Accessed 6 November 2103
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate Change (2007) Synthesis Report. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Matthews H, Solomon S (2013) Irreversible does not mean unavoidable. Science 340:438–439. doi:10.1126/science.1236372
Mooney, C (2013) How much should you worry about an arctic methane bomb? Mother Jones, 8 August, 2013, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/arctic-methane-hydrate-catastrophe?page=1. Accessed 6 November 2103
Myers T, Nisbet M, Maibach E, Leiserowitz A (2012) A public health frame arouses hopeful emotions about climate change. Clim Chang 113:1105–1112. doi:10.1007/s10584-012-0513-6
Nolt J (2011a) Nonanthropocentric climate ethics. WIRES Climate Change 2:701–711. doi:10.1002/wcc.131
Nolt J (2011b) How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions? Ethics, Policy Environ 14, 1: 3–10. doi:10.1080/21550085.2011.561584
Nolt J (2013) Replies to critics of ‘How harmful are the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions?’ Ethics, Policy Environ 16(1):111–119. doi:10.1080/21550085.2013.768399
Parfit D (2004) Reasons and Persons. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Sagoff M (1988) The economy of the earth: philosophy, law and the environment. Cambridge University Press
Silva R et al (2013) Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environ Res Lett 8:3. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034005
Stern N (2008) The economics of climate change. American Econ Rev 98(2):1–37. doi:10.1257/aer.98.2.1
Stocker T (2013) The closing door of climate targets. Science 339:280–282. doi:10.1126/science.1232468
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2013) 2013 Human Development Report. Human development index. http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/hdi/. Accessed 6 November 2103
Vanderheiden, S (2008) Atmospheric justice: a political theory of climate change. Oxford University Press
Whiteman G, Hope S, Wadhams P (2013) Vast costs of arctic change. Nature 499:401–403. doi:10.1038/499401a
World Health Organization (WHO) (2009) Global health risks: mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks. http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/GlobalHealthRisks_report_full.pdf . Accessed 6 November 2103
World Health Organization (WHO) (2013) Disability weights, discounting and age weighting of DALYs. http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/daly_disability_weight/en/index.html. Accessed 6 November 2103
Zeebe R (2013) Time-dependent climate sensitivity and the legacy of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci 110. doi:10.1073/pnas.1222843110
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Jenna Nolt and Robert Nowell for help with the research for this paper and Klaus Keller for helpful criticisms. Three anonymous reviewers for this journal provided astute suggestions that have substantially improved this paper
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This article is part of a special issue on “Multidisciplinary perspectives on climate ethics” with guest editors Marco Grasso and Ezra M. Markowitz.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Nolt, J. Casualties as a moral measure of climate change. Climatic Change 130, 347–358 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1131-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1131-2