"In his memo, Gates posited that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise." That's true, Hayhoe said, but it's also an unhelpful "straw man" argument, because scientists sounding the alarm on climate change have never argued it will lead to humanity's extinction. Humanity's fate amid the climate crisis is not a binary, she explains, but a question of scale: How much will humanity suffer due to climate change? And how much suffering can we prevent?"
"These are the questions that will fundamentally underlie proceedings at COP30, the UN climate summit that kicks off this coming Monday in Belém, Brazil. Just last week, UN Secretary General António Guterres told The Guardian and the Amazon-based outlet Sumaúma that humanity has failed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal that world leaders agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Agreement."
Katharine Hayhoe warned that suffering increases with each tenth of a degree of warming. Bill Gates wrote that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise," a point Hayhoe called a straw man because scientists do not claim human extinction. The central question is the scale of suffering and how much can be averted. COP30 in Belém will center on those questions. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the 1.5°C limit has not been met and that overshooting it has become virtually inevitable due to insufficient national emissions reductions, with devastating consequences for vulnerable communities.
Read at The Nation
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