The baseline is going up, and people are already dying due to weather extremes. A cyclic pattern that increases extremes is a legitimate cause for concern in each year it occurs.
While I am not saying to ignore climate change, I do believe that the recent public narrative of a looming „climate catastrophe“ is certainly just to scare people into accepting all kinds of policy changes (and some of them with questionable usefulness).
As the figure tries to convey laws of nature do not matter if human action is able to offset their effects. In the last 100 years climate related deaths plummeted by 10x despite the warming trend we now know about.
And it’s not that surprising, if you take a step back shortly: It’s quintessentially human to withstand natural forces. That behavior have brought humans ever more far away from doom. Human beings have witnessed sea levels 130 meters lower 21000 years ago and have crossed the Bering street to populate North America. So climatic changes have basically been a catalyst to human development and they will remain so for the foreseeable future. Human made climate change is not great but it will certainly not bring doom over our civilization and certainly not over our planet (that has seen much worse if you look back farther into the past).
All this doom and gloom talk will only incite the worst in us.
