[senordevnyc]

My naive understanding is that climate change poses no real risk of human extinction, or even anything approaching it, at least not for centuries or longer. Which isn’t to say that the high cost of climate change is something we should shrug and just pay, especially because it will fall on the poorest.

But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.

[tialaramex]

Extinction isn't a mechanical consequence but a cultural one. Each generation of future humans learn that their ancestors squandered better conditions, and their offspring will definitely experience even worse conditions and they despair and have net fewer kids. We're not altering the climate for a few years, or a few decades, or even a few centuries, but more like millennia.

[senordevnyc]

I don’t think there’s any evidence that the human population will decline to anything approaching extinction levels due to people’s attitudes about the environment. To the contrary, we have the population that we have today because humans reproduce in spite of horrible conditions.

[peterashford]

We've had deaths due to climate related storms in NZ now, and we haven't been hit anywhere near as hard as, say, Pakistan who had 1/3 of their country flooded in one go. And it's getting worse. That may not be human extinction but its definitely plausible that mass casualty events are possible

[triceratops]

There are fates nowhere near extinction that would still mean massive human suffering.