I was thinking e.g. of Nordhaus’s result that a modest amount of mitigation is optimal. He’s often criticized for his assumptions about discount rate and extreme scenarios, but neither of those is causing the difference in estimates here.
According to your link, recent famines have killed about 1M per decade, so for climate change to kill 1-5M per year through famine, it would have to increase the problem by a factor of 10-50 despite advancing technology and increasing wealth. That seems clearly wrong as a central estimate. The spreadsheet based on the WHO report says 85k-95k additional deaths due to undernutrition, though as you mention, there are limitations to this estimate. (And I guess famine deaths are just a small subset of undernutrition deaths?) Halstead also discusses this issue under “crops”.
I was thinking e.g. of Nordhaus’s result that a modest amount of mitigation is optimal. He’s often criticized for his assumptions about discount rate and extreme scenarios, but neither of those is causing the difference in estimates here.
According to your link, recent famines have killed about 1M per decade, so for climate change to kill 1-5M per year through famine, it would have to increase the problem by a factor of 10-50 despite advancing technology and increasing wealth. That seems clearly wrong as a central estimate. The spreadsheet based on the WHO report says 85k-95k additional deaths due to undernutrition, though as you mention, there are limitations to this estimate. (And I guess famine deaths are just a small subset of undernutrition deaths?) Halstead also discusses this issue under “crops”.