No, life in general would be fine. It will be (already is) a mass extinction but earth had a couple of those and life will bounce back.
The worst case scenario is turning Earth into a planet with a climate like Venus’s.
A planet that proves the existence of runaway greenhouse effects btw.
It is theoretically possible that life exists there, but multicellular life is considered unlikely, and we’ll probably never get to take surface samples, given it’s been measured at 464 Celsius.
We probably can’t fuck up the planet that badly, but toss in a nuclear exchange to greenhouse effects and an unfortunate volcanic eruption or two?
You say that as it’s not a big deal.
Do you really want to see a world without dolphins, pandas, tigers, anacondas…?
We’d be dead as well, so wouldn’t see them anyway.
Also, the world is pretty cool without dinonsaurs. It will still be pretty cool with what ever comes after what we currently have.
I don’t think he’s saying it’s not a big deal for us, but for the planet.
The question is on a scale of the extinction event at the end of the last ice age to the End Permian Extinction Event aka the Great Dying how bad do we want it
Or, if instead of reducing emissions, we try to geo-engineer our way out of global warming, screw it up, and create a real snowball Earth.
I even think humanity will survive fine as many icy places will become habitable and we’re good at adapting to extreme climates. Overall it’s rather our current civilisations with the bad but also the good in them that are the most endangered.
If we manage to keep the warming to levels seen in previous warming periods, humanity might come out better on average in the long run, but the planet is heating faster than it did in those other periods and we haven’t demonstrated any ability to control ourselves. We’d have to stop generating CO2 pretty soon to avoid surpassing the last great warming period.
