In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
We need something like the doomsday clock but with the degrees C change forecast based on current emissions and efforts.
We have this:
https://climateclock.world/
But I think it would be useful to have the current trajectory (in degrees C) along with a table showing the consequences of each 0.5 to 1C
The thing is the Doomsday Clock is for something that may happen any time, and in only minutes
The climate crisis is longer term than people seem to grasp. There is no instant fix, nor instant apocalypse: it’s slow moving and long term. I just looked this up to fact check myself: CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 300-1,000 years. That’s right, we already locked in at least 300 years of climate change, and we continue to make it worse.
Even with the anomalous weather we’ve been having around the globe this year, I think people don’t grasp how long term an issue this is, and how that’s the core of the problem. How do we get people who expect next years weather to be different to understand enough of the problem to help?