A Multifaceted Issue
When looking at the impacts that carbon emissions have on human population or human health in general it must be addressed from two different areas. The first is the impact that the emissions have on human health through breathing in these emissions. This tends to be a prolonged effect. It can take many years for the results of breathing in the emissions to come into fruition. It can result in an early death and a higher probability to catch certain illnesses and diseases. The other impact is through climate change. Increased carbon emissions lead to climate change which then can result in human deaths. This can happen through flooding, or droughts, or any severe weather occurrences. These deaths tend to me more sudden and apparent. Both of these areas cause more human deaths and impact population growth negatively.
Health Risks
Many different studies have shown that increased levels of pollution are directly correlated with higher levels of illness and diseases and premature death. A study at MIT has claimed that around 200,000 people die each year in the U.S. prematurely because of air pollution. Now these numbers are showing air pollution as a whole and not just specifically carbon emissions but carbon emissions do make up a large portion of air pollutants. Most of these premature deaths were caused by lung and heart ailments which can be specifically linked to carbon emissions. In the U.S., most of these emissions have been linked to transportation and heating and cooling techniques that produce these carbon emissions. Other countries, specifically poorer countries, seem to have it even worse than the U.S.. In China there is about 300,000 premature deaths each year directly linked to coal fired power plants alone. Coal fired power plants produce mass amounts of carbon emissions and people who live around those plants can certainly feel the health impacts from it.
Climate Change
Carbon emissions have been proven to have a direct link to anthropogenic climate change. As this occurs and our earth changes, there will be direct impacts to human life. As previously noted on the climate change page on this website, drier climates will get drier and wetter climates will get wetter. This will cause more droughts to occur which will then cause food shortages. This will put pressure on the ability to produce enough food for the world population. The wetter climates will be dealing with floods which will also cause food shortages. Floods will wipe out many fields with crops growing. Floods can also kill large quantities of people. In 2017 South Asia experienced extreme flooding. This included places like Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. Around 2.4 million hectares of farmland was destroyed from the flooding. Over 1,400 people died directly from the flood and around 13,000 people suffered from diarrhea and other similar symptoms. On a side note about diarrhea, roughly 2.2 million people die from diarrhea a year. So the impacts from having it in a more impoverished nation like Bangladesh, Nepal, or India can be very serious. The flood also caused food shortages in the area. This type of flooding is only expected to get worse.
Extreme weather occurrences have increased due to climate change. In 1900-1909 there was an average of 2.5 extreme weather occurrences each year. In 1940-1949 there was an average of 8.5 each year and then in 2000-2008 there was an average of 354 per year. As we can see from the data, extreme weather events have become more and more frequent. Climate scientists believe that there is a direct correlation between this and climate change. Below is a chart showing the extreme weather occurrences from the 1900’s to 2008.
An interesting thing about this though is that deaths caused by extreme weather events have actually decreased. So extreme weather events increased yet deaths caused by them decreased. This is partly because technology has increased so we are better equipped to save lives. There has also been a large increase in response teams to help with these extreme weather events. Below is a graph showing the deaths by weather occurrences from 1900 to 2008.
The data presented above does have some accuracy issues but the trends do seem to be reliable. The issue is that as the extreme weather events continue to increase in frequency, our ability to respond to these events will be lessened. It could potentially reach a point to where we can not respond to these event appropriately. This would then cause the number of deaths caused by extreme weather events to increase. Also, as we see the ability to grow food become harder because of climate change I believe we will start to see starvation rates increase. This could lead to wars over food and even water. This could result in lots of human deaths.
Human Population Growth
As time goes on we can expect to see carbon emissions have a negative impact on population growth. We have seen how carbon emissions have caused premature deaths for lots of people throughout the world and as the level of emissions go up we can only expect more premature deaths. Also, as climate change worsens we can expect to see more deaths caused by climate change. These two factors will have a negative impact on population growth. The extent of the impact really depends on how we as a society move forward. If we continue to emit these emissions at such high levels than we can expect population growth to be severely impacted. Some would say that it could even cause a mass extinction of the human race. If we as a society decide to reduce and limit the emissions we emit then the impact it will have on population growth might be small. The outcome solely depends on if we change what we are currently doing.
Carbon Dioxide Production and Policies 