> As far as I know there is no indication that climate change will be an extinction-level threat?
We are currently living in an era of mass extinction. It's not something that's coming, we are in it, it is measurable. 75% of wild animals, insects and trees have disappeared. That is a fact, and it is not related to climate change at all: "just" to how we humans organize the world (mostly habitat loss).
Climate change will bring famines, natural disasters, and global instability (that means wars). This is yet to come.
It is fairly likely that at this rate, we will reach 4 degrees of global warming. At 4 degrees, a large part of the Earth (around the Equator) becomes unlivable for humans (it's too humid and hot, we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, we die). Which means that billions of people will need to relocate. This is not just normal wars: think entire countries that decide to leave their territory and go somewhere else, together with their army.
I don't know what the definition of "extinction-level" means (maybe you only care about some individuals of the human species surviving), but in my book that's as bad as it gets.
I agree with much of that, but I don't think that will really bring us to the "brink of extinction". That said, I'm not keen to find out as we don't really get to reload a save game if you mess up. Sadly, not many seem to agree :-( Or maybe they found a cheat to load save games, idk.
> I agree with much of that, but I don't think that will really bring us to the "brink of extinction".
I think that it was a figure of speech. Whether it brings the human species to the brink of extinction or makes life unbearable for 90% of humans and destroys civilization as we know it is a bit of a technicality, if you ask me.
In any case it is one of the biggest problems of our time.
Maybe. But in the face of a malicious misinformation campaign, I think it's important to be accurate and careful with our words. Hyperbolic statements are not really helpful as it adds just the right ring of truth to the "it's all a load of bollocks by climate alarmists" claims, so it ends up just helping the misinformation campaign.
Right. I understand your point, but I think it's important to understand that if the risk here is not "extinction" in the sense that the human species will disappear, it is actually the end of the world as we know it. And I mean it in the catastrophic way.
If you imagine a big stripe around the equator where people can't survive (it's basically mars) and have no other choice than to "invade" the rest of the world that may already not have the capacity to feed its population anymore, with oceans rising and pushing another couple billions inside the lands (so you can't just build walls as a country, you have civil war).
That's pretty much where we are headed now, and the data seems to show every year that we are actually getting there closer than we thought we were (because when our models "forget" something, usually it's something that made it worse). Not only that, but we are accelerating in that direction.
I personally think we're way passed the point where we can call anything "alarmism". The most conservative scenario I can find without us making drastic changes are all "equally bad" (as in: I don't really care whether or not the human species survives if all my relative and I die in very bad conditions).
That's what I mean with "it's as bad as it gets": between extinction of the human species and the most conservative scenario if we don't change, none of them is acceptable to me.
> In the book of world history things have been way worse[0].
Has it been way worse, really? I think that the climate change that ended the dinosaurs happened slower than what we are expecting with ours (but I didn't check it and I am not completely sure).
I am sure of this, though: the mass extinction we are living now is the fastest we know. Let me rephrase it: we human have made 75% of wild animals, insects and trees disappear faster than it ever happened in the history of Earth.
> In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].
"Way way worse"? Do you realise what "20 degrees around the equator becomes uninhabitable" means? It's like half of the inhabited world becomes mars, and the people living there have no choice but to move where the other half is.
We are currently living in an era of mass extinction. It's not something that's coming, we are in it, it is measurable. 75% of wild animals, insects and trees have disappeared. That is a fact, and it is not related to climate change at all: "just" to how we humans organize the world (mostly habitat loss).
Climate change will bring famines, natural disasters, and global instability (that means wars). This is yet to come.
It is fairly likely that at this rate, we will reach 4 degrees of global warming. At 4 degrees, a large part of the Earth (around the Equator) becomes unlivable for humans (it's too humid and hot, we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, we die). Which means that billions of people will need to relocate. This is not just normal wars: think entire countries that decide to leave their territory and go somewhere else, together with their army.
I don't know what the definition of "extinction-level" means (maybe you only care about some individuals of the human species surviving), but in my book that's as bad as it gets.