The dire yet unfulfilled predictions of climate alarmists’ fever dreams must not be making much of a dent in the average person’s tendency to put climate change near the bottom of their list of things to worry about.

A new marketing campaign scientific study is eschewing the big budget special effects disaster movie scenario and is narrowing the focus to a more personal scare tactic: LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE DIE for lack of “tough climate policies.”

There is an overlooked benefit to greatly lowering carbon emissions worldwide, a new study says. In addition to preserving Arctic sea ice, reducing sea-level rise and alleviating other effects of global warming, it would probably save more than 150 million human lives.

Probably. We’re not absolutely sure… but 150 MILLION HUMAN LIVES!!!1!!

The really funny part of this mess published at The Washington Post is that the writer’s name is Darryl Fears. It’s his name and his lifestyle.

According to the study, premature deaths would fall on nearly every continent if the world’s governments agree to cut emissions of carbon and other harmful gases enough to limit global temperature rise to less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That is about a degree lower than the target set by the Paris climate agreement.

The benefit would be felt mostly in Asian countries with dirty air — 13 million lives would be saved in large cities in India alone, including the metropolitan areas of Kolkata, Delhi, Patna and Kanpur. Greater Dhaka in Bangladesh would have 3.6 million fewer deaths, and Jakarta in Indonesia would record 1.6 fewer lives lost. The African cities of Lagos and Cairo combined would register more than 2 million fewer deaths.

Asian cities are indeed horribly polluted and this has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the global temperature will eventually do what the eggheads’ and their computer models want it to.

How about just instituting some controls on pollution without having to tie it to dubious claims about the weather in 2018? Maybe we can address specific problems without having to entirely remake the world into an environmentalist caliphate where there is no god but climate change and Al Gore is its prophet (peace be upon him).

In the United States, the Clean Air Act has improved air quality over the years. Still, more than 330,000 lives in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Washington would be spared, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Translation: If you don’t act on these confirmation-bias laden studies, you are literally killing people.

“Americans don’t really grasp how pollution impacts their lives,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University and the study’s lead author. “You say, ‘My uncle went to the hospital and died of a heart attack.’ You don’t say the heart attack was caused by air pollution, so we don’t know.

Americans don’t say that because according to real science their uncle’s heart attack had more to do with genetics, his 3 pack a day smoking habit, or the extra 150 pounds he was carrying around his middle. Suggesting that heart disease is a result of dirty air and that working to fix the climate will prevent heart attacks is a religious assertion of faith, not science.

It’s still a big killer here. It’s much bigger than from people who die from plane crashes or war or terrorism, but we don’t see the link so clearly.”

Shindell used an automaker’s problem with faulty ignition switches in 2014 to further illustrate his point. When the switches failed, more than 3 million recalls were involved and auto executives were summoned to Washington to testify before Congress. “But the combined tailpipes of automobiles kill dozens and dozens more people than faulty ignition switches,” the researcher said. “We should be far more worried about pollution than the things we actually worry about.”

We can’t clearly see the link between pollution and death, so naturally Science! invented a computer simulation to tell the story they had already decided was true.

The researchers ran computer simulations of future carbon dioxide emissions as well as other pollutants — such as ozone and particulate matter — that make it harder for millions of people around the world to breathe, to arrive at different scenarios for its potentially grave effects.

Then they “calculated the human health impacts of pollution exposure under each scenario all over the world — but focusing on results in major cities — using well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths,” the statement said.

So we’re still being told to fear results of computer simulations created and run by people seeking to prove exactly the results the simulations delivered. Funny how that always works out for climate scientists. The track record for proving hypotheses among scientists whose disciplines require actual laboratory experiments is nowhere near as successful as among climate modelers.

The lead researcher in this study said that we can’t see a clear link between pollution and your uncle’s heart attack but also there are “well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths.” Are there decades worth of autopsy reports saying Aunt Gertrude’s blocked arteries were a direct result of SUV exhaust or cousin Buford’s emphasema was clearly caused by overly lax CAFE standards?

Or are we really just talking about scientists performing very subjective interpretations of sketchy data using a lot of conjecture in order to acheive the results their boss wanted them to get?

Scientists are human and influenced by their culture and biases like anyone else. They are possibly influenced to a greater degree because their culture convinces them that they are perfectly objective and motivated by nothing but a noble desire to seek the truth. This is their version of “God wills it.” Imagine if a scientist looked at decades of data and reported no discernible link between air pollution and death. Would his results be taken seriously? Or would he be accused of being in the pocket of Big Pollution?

It was during the Obama administration that we saw the beginnings of this shift toward using fear of human mortality as a justification for accepting the groupthink on climate change and implementing whatever disastrous anti-industry and anti-capitalist policies the left prescribed.