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Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. If a large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat, I'm tempted to agree. In fact, I think most widely held scientific stances on this are meant to be balanced and as agreeable as possible, so I personally believe it's likely to be worse than the mainstream opinion.

Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either.

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Of course I'm qualified to make the assessment, as the respectable scientific community has been warning people to not make such bombastic statements, and similar warnings were in the IPCC. You really aren't doing yourself any favors by pushing hysteria into scientific disciplines. This is exactly why the climate movement has lost so much credibility and suffered so many policy setbacks.

No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year.

> large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat

I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.

So extinctions, but not extinction?

> extinctions, but not extinction?

Yes. Extinctions are horrible, but they aren’t an existential threat to us. Climate change simply isn’t an existential threat. That doesn’t mean it isn’t urgent. Like, the Bronze Age collapse and black plague and WWII weren’t existential, doesn’t mean they’re fine. But raising the stakes beyond what the science says like this undermines the credibility of the real warnings.

I think it's really naïve to realize that climate change is an existential threat to many species, but not connect that we are part of the ecosystem which is being put in danger. You are experiencing survivorship bias.

Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life. Which is also a totally valid interpretation of the phrase.

> You are experiencing survivorship bias

Ex ante survivorship is literally the delineation between existential and not.

> Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life

You see why this comes across as bullshit, though. It’s needlessly redefining a word to seem more punchy. We have plenty of perils we massively mobilize against without imagining they’ll exterminate the human species.

> I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment.

The scientists aren’t, either, given how many times they have failed.

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