Comment by YetAnotherNick 15 hours ago
> very real risk of societal collapse or species extinction
No, there is no risk of species extinction in the near future due to climate change and repeating the line will just further the divide and make the people not care about other people's and even real climate scientist's words.
Don't say false things. Especially if it is political and there isn't any way to debate it.
Risk can never be zero, just like certainty can never be 100%.
There is a non-zero chance that the ineffable quantum foam will cause a mature hippopotamus to materialize above your bed tonight, and you’ll be crushed. It is incredibly, amazingly, limits-of-math unlikely. Still a non-zero risk.
Better to think of “no risk” as meaning “negligible risk”. But I’m with you that climate change is not a negligible risk; maybe way up in the 20% range IMO. And I wouldn’t be sleeping in my bed tonight if sudden hippos over beds were 20% risks.
It's hard to produce a quantifiable chance of human extinction in the absence of any model by which climate change would lead to it. No climate organization I'm aware of evaluates the end of humanity as even a worst-case risk; the idea simply doesn't exist outside the realm of viral Internet misinformation.
Don’t say the things people don’t want to hear and everything will be fine?
That sounds like the height of folly.