Reuters: 100 mln will die by 2030 if world fails to act on climate - report

[caraher]

18. You can certainly judge particular claims that way

I don't think physics is on McPherson's side on some of what he predicts. Biologists I know are also pretty skeptical of his arguments predicting extinction.

But more generally, when you have a lot of critical indicators looking bad at the same time, it's hard to tell which one is most likely to go catastrophically wrong first. To focus entirely on things like surface temperature and sea level rise is to miss most of the picture. There's a whole witch's brew of population growth, industrial growth, degradation of water resources, ocean acidification, etc. and only a small subset of those could suffice to bring down civilization. It would be easier to pooh-pooh doomsaying if we had more of a track record of acting decisively against these threats as they are recognized, but we don't. So while one way of being wrong is to say civilization collapses in 2035 and have that not happen, a far worse way of being wrong is to conclude in 2036 that there was never anything to worry about in the first place and have everything fall apart a few decades later out of complacency.