What is the cost of our carbon footprint — not just in dollars, but in lives? According to a paper published on Thursday, it is soberingly high, and perhaps high enough to help shift attitudes about how much we should spend on fighting climate change. The new paper, published in the journal Nature Communications , draws on multiple areas of research to find out how many future lives will be lost as a result of rising temperatures if humanity keeps producing greenhouse gas emissions at high rates — and how many lives could be saved by cutting those emissions. Most of the deaths will occur in regions that tend to be hotter and poorer than the United States. These areas are typically less responsible for global emissions but more heavily affected by the resulting climate disasters. R. Daniel Bressler, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, calculated that adding about […]