> It is not that Michael Shellenberger is wrong, he is mostly right and I also like to point out to people that we are not facing extinction. I think he is wro

> It is not that Michael Shellenberger is wrong, he is mostly right and I also like to point out to people that we are not facing extinction. I think he is wrong on this in that if we don't address climate change, we are on the road to extinction. It won't happen in our lifetimes but on a timescale of hundreds of years or a few thousand it may indeed happen. The CO2 released in the atmosphere can stay there for thousands of years, and once we cross certain temperature thresholds there are feedback loops that will make things hotter still. We're talking about 2 degrees C by the year 2100, but what about 2200, 2300, 2500? If we don't get things under control, at some point modern civilization is going to start breaking down, and at that point carbon sequestration or geoengineering measures that could fix things, simply won't be possible. After that point, humanity would just be a passenger on a ride to a planet inhospitable for human life. > And civilization collapse is absolutely possible. The way he reasons about numbers is wrong. It is the equivalent of arguing that the 1929 crash was irrelevant because hey were were richer afterwards than in 1900 and we managed just find back then. > He thinks just in terms of absolute numbers, when relative change is usually MORE important. If you suddenly get a 50% cut in your income from one year to another that will have huge impact on your family. It makes no sense to argue that 10 years ago you made 50% less and managed just fine. Absolutely. I think he fails to account for the fact that climate change makes it much more likely that parts of the world will experience devastating collapses that will be difficult, if not impossible to recover from. There are parts of the world now that are unstable and poor, what's going to happen to them when wide scale weather disasters and resource shortages hit entire regions?