3 percent of the world’s population: U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Estimates of World Population,” www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.
smallpox: “Experts Warn of Threat of Born-Again Smallpox from Old Siberian Graveyards,” The Siberian Times, August 12, 2016, https://siberiantimes.com/science/opinion/features/f0249-experts-warn-of-threat-of-born-again-smallpox-from-old-siberian-graveyards.
bubonic plague: Fox-Skelly, “There Are Diseases Hidden in Ice.”
among many other diseases: Robinson Meyer, “The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change,” The Atlantic, November 6, 2017.
But in 2016, a boy: Michaeleen Doucleff, “Anthrax Outbreak in Russia Thought to Be Result of Thawing Permafrost,” NPR, August 3, 2016, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/488400947/anthrax-outbreak-in-russia-thought-to-be-result-of-thawing-permafrost.
Haemagogus and Sabethes mosquitoes: World Health Organization, “Yellow Fever—Brazil,” March 9, 2018, www.who.int/csr/don/09-march-2018-yellow-fever-brazil.
more than thirty million people: Ibid.
kills between 3 and 8 percent: Shasta Darlington and Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Yellow Fever Circles Brazil’s Huge Cities,” The New York Times, March 8, 2018.
Malaria alone kills: World Health Organization, “Number of Malaria Deaths,” www.who.int/gho/malaria/epidemic/deaths. See also Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Epidemiology,” www.cdc.gov/dengue/epidemiology/index.html.
disease mutation: “Zika Microcephaly Linked to Single Mutation,” Nature, October 3, 2017, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-04093-x.
appear to cause birth defects: Ling Yuan et al., “A Single Mutation in the prM Protein of Zika Virus Contributes to Fetal Microcephaly,” Science 358, no. 6365 (November 2017): pp. 933–36, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam7120.
when another disease is present: Declan Butler, “Brazil Asks Whether Zika Acts Alone to Cause Birth Defects,” Nature, July 25, 2016, www.nature.com/news/brazil-asks-whether-zika-acts-alone-to-cause-birth-defects-1.20309.
World Bank estimates that by 2030: World Bank Group’s Climate Change and Development Series, “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty” (Washington, D.C., 2016), p. 119, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/22787/9781464806735.pdf.
Lyme case counts have spiked: Mary Beth Pfeiffer, Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2018), pp. 3–13.
300,000 new infections each year: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Lyme and Other Tickborne Diseases,” www.cdc.gov/media/dpk/diseases-and-conditions/lyme-disease/index.html.
fleas have tripled in the U.S.: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Illnesses from Mosquito, Tick, and Flea Bites Increasing in the U.S.,” May 1, 2018, www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0501-vs-vector-borne.html.
encountering ticks for the first time: Avichai Scher and Lauren Dunn, “ ‘Citizen Scientists’ Take On Growing Threat of Tick-Borne Diseases,” NBC News, July 12, 2018, www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/citizen-scientists-take-growing-threat-tick-borne-diseases-n890996.
winter ticks helped drop the moose population: Center for Biological Diversity, “Saving the Midwestern Moose,” www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/midwestern_moose/index.html.
90,000 engorged ticks: Katie Burton, “Climate-Change Triggered Ticks Causing Rise in ‘Ghost Moose,’ ” Geographical, November 27, 2018, http://geographical.co.uk/nature/wildlife/item/3008-ghost-moose.
a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses: Dennis Carroll et al., “The Global Virome Project,” Science 359, no. 6378 (February 2018): pp. 872–74, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap7463.
More than 99 percent: Nathan Collins, “Stanford Study Indicates That More than 99 Percent of the Microbes Inside Us Are Unknown to Science,” Stanford News, August 22, 2017, https://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/22/nearly-microbes-inside-us-unknown-science.
the case of the saiga: Ed Yong, “Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?” The Atlantic, January 17, 2018.
nearly two-thirds of the global population: Richard A. Kock et al., “Saigas on the Brink: Multidisciplinary Analysis of the Factors Influencing Mass Mortality Events,” Science Advances 4, no. 1 (January 2018), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao2314.
Economic Collapse
“Whoever says Industrial Revolution”: Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution (New York: The New Press, 1999), p. 34.
about one percentage point: Solomon Hsiang et al., “Estimating Economic Damage from Climate Change in the United States,” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 2017): 1362–69, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4369.
23 percent loss in per capita: Marshall Burke et al., “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (October 2015): pp. 235–39, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15725.
There is a 51 percent chance: Marshall Burke, “Economic Impact of Climate Change on the World,” http://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php.
a team led by Thomas Stoerk: Thomas Stoerk et al., “Recommendations for Improving the Treatment of Risk and Uncertainty in Economic Estimates of Climate Impacts in the Sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 12, no. 2 (August 2018): pp. 371–76, https://doi.org/10.1093/reep/rey005.
global boom of the early 1960s: World Bank, “GDP Growth (Annual %),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG.
There are places that benefit: Burke, “Economic Impact of Climate Change,” http://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/map.php.
India alone, one study proposed: Katharine Ricke et al., “Country-Level Social Cost of Carbon,” Nature Climate Change 8 (September 2018): pp. 895–900, http://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0282-y.
800 million: World Bank, “South Asia’s Hotspots: Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards” (Washington, D.C., 2018), p. xi.
dragged into extreme poverty: World Bank Group’s Climate Change and Development Series, “Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty” (Washington, D.C., 2016), p. xi, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/22787/9781464806735.pdf.
chronic flooding by 2100: Union of Concerned Scientists, “Underwater: Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for U.S. Coastal Real Estate” (Cambridge, MA, 2018), p. 5, www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/global-warming-impacts/sea-level-rise-chronic-floods-and-us-coastal-real-estate-implications.
$30 billion in New Jersey: Union of Concerned Scientists, “New Study Finds 251,000 New Jersey Homes Worth $107 Billion Will Be at Risk from Tidal Flooding,” June 18, 2018, www.ucsusa.org/press/2018/new-study-finds-251000-new-jersey-homes-worth-107-billion-will-be-risk-tidal-flooding#.W-o1FehKg2x.