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The costs of climate change are often estimated in monetary terms, but this raises ethical issues. Here we express them in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’-defined as the historically highly conserved distribution of relative human population density with respect to mean annual temperature. We show that climate change has already put ~9% of people outside this niche. By end-of-century (2080-2100), current policies leading to around 2.7 °C global warming could leave one-third (22-39%) outside the niche.
