Beyond that, I agree with you, and it's one of my major concerns as well.
We are currently living in an era of mass extinction. It's not something that's coming, we are in it, it is measurable. 75% of wild animals, insects and trees have disappeared. That is a fact, and it is not related to climate change at all: "just" to how we humans organize the world (mostly habitat loss).
Climate change will bring famines, natural disasters, and global instability (that means wars). This is yet to come.
It is fairly likely that at this rate, we will reach 4 degrees of global warming. At 4 degrees, a large part of the Earth (around the Equator) becomes unlivable for humans (it's too humid and hot, we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, we die). Which means that billions of people will need to relocate. This is not just normal wars: think entire countries that decide to leave their territory and go somewhere else, together with their army.
I don't know what the definition of "extinction-level" means (maybe you only care about some individuals of the human species surviving), but in my book that's as bad as it gets.
In the book of world history things have been way worse[0].
In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
Has it been way worse, really? I think that the climate change that ended the dinosaurs happened slower than what we are expecting with ours (but I didn't check it and I am not completely sure).
I am sure of this, though: the mass extinction we are living now is the fastest we know. Let me rephrase it: we human have made 75% of wild animals, insects and trees disappear faster than it ever happened in the history of Earth.
> In the book of world futures things could get way way worse[1].
"Way way worse"? Do you realise what "20 degrees around the equator becomes uninhabitable" means? It's like half of the inhabited world becomes mars, and the people living there have no choice but to move where the other half is.
I think that it was a figure of speech. Whether it brings the human species to the brink of extinction or makes life unbearable for 90% of humans and destroys civilization as we know it is a bit of a technicality, if you ask me.
In any case it is one of the biggest problems of our time.
Maybe. But in the face of a malicious misinformation campaign, I think it's important to be accurate and careful with our words. Hyperbolic statements are not really helpful as it adds just the right ring of truth to the "it's all a load of bollocks by climate alarmists" claims, so it ends up just helping the misinformation campaign.
If you imagine a big stripe around the equator where people can't survive (it's basically mars) and have no other choice than to "invade" the rest of the world that may already not have the capacity to feed its population anymore, with oceans rising and pushing another couple billions inside the lands (so you can't just build walls as a country, you have civil war).
That's pretty much where we are headed now, and the data seems to show every year that we are actually getting there closer than we thought we were (because when our models "forget" something, usually it's something that made it worse). Not only that, but we are accelerating in that direction.
I personally think we're way passed the point where we can call anything "alarmism". The most conservative scenario I can find without us making drastic changes are all "equally bad" (as in: I don't really care whether or not the human species survives if all my relative and I die in very bad conditions).
That's what I mean with "it's as bad as it gets": between extinction of the human species and the most conservative scenario if we don't change, none of them is acceptable to me.
We’re at the beginning of the exponential ramp on this sort of stuff, where the changes are barely noticeable. For example, until last night (so, assuming best case greenhouse projections), there was roughly a 50% chance that some people reading this will live to see the northern half of Europe turn into a glacier.
Anyway, without modern civilization, we probably won’t survive 10,000’s of years of such stuff. The global population bottlenecked at a few thousand the last time this happened.
Like, if most of the tropics reach wet-bulb temperature and more than a billion people live there - that will be grim.