> unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change I have no interest in trying to convince anyone who is "on the fence" about climate change. It's

> unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change I have no interest in trying to convince anyone who is "on the fence" about climate change. It's real. Anyone who doesn't see that by now can't be convinced by facts, or overwhelming scientific consensus, they sure as hell aren't going to be convinced by me. > Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark. What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism Some scientists like Frank Fenner, Henry Gee, and Stephen Hawking have already predicted that humans will go extinct in large part due to climate change, but climate research hasn't given much consideration to the worst effects of climate change and it's hard to blame them. The IPCC has looked at tens of thousands of species of land animals and determined that as many as 14% "will likely face very high risk of extinction" and things are looking much worse for things living in our oceans (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/without-action-on-climate-another-mass-extinction-event-will-likely-happen-in-the-worlds-oceans-180979991 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/without-action...) but predicting the effects of climate change on animal populations is hard enough, predicting the effects of the collapse of human society is much much more difficult and also really depressing to think about. Still, scientists are saying that it's time to explore how bad climate change will be on humanity, what the collapse of civilization might look like (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm), and that human extinction is one of those outcomes we need to be thinking about. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119) You call it doom and gloom fetishism, but it's smart to take a hard look at the potential outcomes of climate change so we know what's at stake and can prepare as best as we can for what's coming. Even the DoD acknowledges that climate change is an "existential threat" (https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2582051/defense-secretary-calls-climate-change-an-existential-threat/ https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/25...). > The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past, And in the past those periods of warming, which are nothing like what we face now, still resulted in mass extinction events that killed off 80%-90% of all life on the planet. Adaptation takes time, and that's something we might not have enough of.