Addendum B to Part 1 and Part 2
Net zero is not enough. What would it take to save the ice, and the lives that depend on it?
Four short briefings, prepared with Claude, follow one climate model from today to 2100.
Part 1, The Road to Net Zero: a realistic transition reaches net zero around 2074. Warming peaks near 2.1 °C and stays there. Net zero stops the warming from rising, but it does not bring temperatures down.
Part 2, Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal: pulling CO₂ back out of the air on an enormous scale could cool the planet to about 0.8 °C by 2100. It would mean removing roughly twice today’s total emissions every year.
Addendum A, Climate-Related Deaths: heat from human-caused warming already kills about 350,000 people a year. About 15 million more will die before 2050 whatever we do now. By 2100 the toll reaches about 66 million on the realistic path, or 37 million with large-scale carbon removal.
Addendum B, Cooling to Save the Ice, and Lives
- What the ice needs: the Arctic and Greenland need a climate near that of the 1980s, about 0.6 °C above pre-industrial. That is roughly 0.8 °C cooler than today.
- Lives saved: deliberately cooling the planet could save about 40 to 46 million lives this century.
- The catch: it must never stop suddenly. A sudden halt in 2070 would bring back 0.9 °C of warming in six years and cost some 19 million lives. With carbon removal underneath, the same halt is far less dangerous.
All of these figures are conservative. They count only deaths from heat and leave out tipping points.
So the question is no longer what it would cost. It is what risks the people alive today are willing to take, and what commitment they will make, to spare future generations a loss they could never undo.
