In a development that promises to make climate denial slightly more inconvenient, researchers have unveiled a tool that directly links carbon emissions to the environmental and economic damage they cause. The Carbon Impacts Tracer, as it's called, can estimate climate impact across eight different factors, including lost food production. Because apparently "parts per million" wasn't scaring anyone at dinner parties.

The timing is impeccable. The biggest coal project currently before authorities in New South Wales, the HVO mine, will emit the equivalent of about 809m tonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide if it wins approval. For most people, that number carries about as much meaning as a quantum physics lecture delivered in Latin. Likewise the calculation that adding that amount of greenhouse gas to the atmosphere will cause an extra 0.00036C of global heating - a figure so small it practically begs to be ignored.

But what if the public was instead told that that amount of carbon dioxide would expose almost half a million people to unprecedented heat? Or kill nearly 15 million coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef every time it bleaches? Suddenly, the abstract becomes uncomfortably concrete.

All those statistics come from the new tool, which translates the emissions from burning fossil fuels into estimated real-world climate effects taken from peer-reviewed climate studies. It's like a translator for people who speak fluent "actually" but struggle with "0.00036C."

"Small numbers in global warming can mean catastrophic impacts," says Prof Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the Australian National University who is part of a team launching the Carbon Impacts Tracer. Which is a polite way of saying: the numbers may be small, but the consequences are not. And now there's a tool to prove it, one inconvenient statistic at a time.