Here are a couple projections of climate change impacts.

The World Health Organization projects “Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.” This sounds awful, and of course it is. But if you compare this to other preventable causes of death like traffic accidents, smoking and air pollution, you could probably save a lot more lives with a given amount of money focusing on the latter group than exclusively on climate change.

A more sobering projection, at least to me, comes from an organization called DARA.  Although the report includes some truly awful and incomprehensible infographics, there is a very clear graphic on p. 21. Under a “no action” scenario, climate change subtracts about 3% from world economic growth in 2050 and 7-8% in 2100. If you believe technology will lead to a massive acceleration of economic growth, we may be able to afford even this (although our children will be learning about Earth’s original native ecosystems in history class). If long-term growth stays in the sub-5% range where it has been recently, this will mean the decline and fall of civilization as we know it.