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by 3gg 1719 days ago
If by "existential threat" you mean a threat to existence, there are already many species going extinct today, which is why it is said we are in a 6th mass extinction:

https://earth.org/data_visualization/the-6th-mass-extinction...

Droughts and floods are also affecting many parts of the world today. And "At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows:" (IPCC)

https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/

Beyond 2C and nearing 4C, the extreme events are expected to yield larger crop failures and migration events.

The US military has also called climate change "a serious threat", stating "while extreme weather events and rising sea levels threaten infrastructure and economic output, trigger large-scale population displacement, migration and exacerbate food and water insecurity."

https://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2021/05/14/

And the Defense secretary did call it existential:

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/25...

So it does seem fairly existential to me. How exactly is this being nuanced? I have also only linked respectable sources above.

All of that being said, I also share the opinion from others above that a single corporation unilaterally deciding what is or not acceptable speech should be unacceptable.

1 comments

Maybe this is just a semantic debate, but I (and likely most people) interpret the phrase “existential threat” in the context of climate change as referring to humans. As in, humanity/civilization will not survive the predicted climate changes. However, the worst case scenarios are not extinction of humans but rather death in the millions to hundreds of millions, assuming we don’t adapt in various ways.
Well, for all those hundreds of millions it will indeed be existential (and I have read that a 4C Earth could only be able to host ~1 billion people, so the deaths could be a lot more than "millions to hundreds of millions".) In any case, arguing about the technicalities of the word "existential" at this point denotes such a complete lack of empathy that it's not even worth it.
Even the deaths of hundreds of millions requires a number of worst case scenarios to happen, which isn’t all that likely.