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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Where in the IPCC reports do you find an existential risk to humanity? I’ve read most of AR5 and I haven’t come across it.

I’m worried about climate change, but activists like extinction rebellion are far from telling the truth, and the doomsaying is preventing action.

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I don't claim an existential risk to humanity, I claim there's an existential risk to our current global civilization which manages to feed, cloth and shelter almost 8 billion people in largely tolerable conditions and which will need to find room for another 1.5 billion before global population peaks. If parts of the world where large numbers of people live become heat stressed to the extent that living in them is impossible without air conditioning and agriculture starts to become a lot less productive in currently fertile areas then the secondary effects of billions of people trying to find somewhere else to live in a short space of time are likely to be not good. I don't think we face extinction. I do think we face having to transition to a low carbon lifestyle. We can either do that in a peaceful way and maintain and even increase the standard of living for the majority of the human race or we can do nothing and face decades of major disruption that kills huge numbers of people.

Just thinking something doesn't make it true. Why can't they just use air conditioners like everyone else in hot climates does? They'll all be rich soon afterall, with poverty due to be effectively extinct by the end of the century.

Who are these billions of people? I haven't seen predictions of anywhere near a billion people needing to migrate.

You need to stick to the science here because there's so much misinformation spread by activists.

You're surely right that it's a risk to civilization but lots of things are and we still have to try. Falling birth rates are a risk, spread of Islam is a risk, meteor strike is a risk, nuclear war is a risk, pandemic is a risk, and importantly, suddenly stopping using fossil fuels is a risk! But these are just unquantified imaginary risks so we don't need to drop everything and solve them or we'd never get anywhere.

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