University of California professor: Death toll for global warming "perhaps billions"

University of California Berkeley professor of law Andrew Guzman is seriously competing with the likes of Bill McKibben and George Monbiot for the global warming number one scaremonger title. A fellow warmist has published this enthusiastic review of Guzman's book The Human Cost of Climate Change:

"Over time, I found myself putting together a story about how a seemingly modest increase in temperature of a couple of degrees is enough to make the seas rise, food production collapse, nations go to war, and disease spread virtually unchecked. It was becoming clear, in a way that I felt was not widely appreciated, that the consequences of these changes will be measured in the hundreds of millions of lives, if we are lucky. If we are unlucky, perhaps billions."

Yes, billions. Guzman anchors his doom-laden case in statistics. The 10 warmest years since 1880 have all happened since 1998, he says, and cites an estimate that the annual global death toll already sparked by climate change is 300,000.

The stealthy fatal force pans out most dramatically as glacier meltdown that pumps up the seas and swamps island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives. Global warming, too, is the cause of the flooding of Bangladesh, which has resulted in devastating water-borne diseases such as dysentery and diarrhoea.

Meanwhile, shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes will desiccate rivers, robbing millions of people of fresh water, threatening key cities and undermining strained food production. The result of the bedlam may be that millions will be forced to migrate into cities or "climate-refugee camps", Guzman forecasts. Another possible knock-on effect is war. Already, drawn-out droughts in Africa's Sahel region have fuelled mass violence in Darfur, Guzman writes.

If the planet's predicament sounds horrendous, he says, it is. But he has a solution: cut carbon emissions by raising fossil fuel's cost.--

Still, with luck, this book will put him in the big league of global warming critics, among the likes of Bill McKibben and George Monbiot - if he sticks with the subject, which has more grunt than the topic of his previous books: international law.

His ecological broadside underlines that it is high time the media stops pretending there are two sides to the threat he addresses.

Another glowing "review" explains why the law professor chose to write the book:

Countless books exist on the scientific aspects of climate change, but not one on why people should care, said Guzman. So he decided to write for a popular audience, to engage them, to capture their imaginations in a way that would communicate the depth of the problem.

In the same article Guzman talks about the future for his children:

"I'm terrified for my children -- for everybody's children," he said. "The world they are going to inhabit when they're my age in 2050 is not a pretty place. If I have grandchildren, it'll be even worse.

For the sake of his own - and other - children, one must hope that professor Guzman will utterly fail in "capturing their imaginations".