Item — HN Reader

>The world is going to end in 12 years..." " is a recent famous quote by a prominent Democrat.

This isn't true, and you should probably cut whatever source told it to you out of your life. The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years, which is the gist of what the IPCC report says.

1 comments

My quote is literally what she said. (She later claimed it was "dry humor plus sarcasm")[1]. Perhaps she meant something more like what you said.

It doesn't matter.

"The world is going to end if we don't take action within 12 years" is also false, and not at all what the IPCC report says. When O'Rourke said something similar, the AP fact checked the claim:[2]

> THE FACTS: There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.

> “This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”

And no, I'm not going to cut the AP and PBS out of my life just because some alarmists are delusional.

1: https://apnews.com/1c663bcb294c1752573f45fc5bf5e0f9/

2: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-orourke-...

You don't appear to have read the things you linked. The argument Ebi is making is that we shouldn't give up if we don't hit that 12 year deadline, because it's continuous, and things keep getting even worse. She's trying to communicate that there are worse things than 1.5C that we could still prevent.

There are worse things than 1.5C that we could still prevent because 1.5C isn't the "end of the world".

If your quibble is with the precise definition of "the end of the world" and not with the rest of the statement then I think we're well outside of what concrete facts can resolve. The impacts of 1.5C are going to be horrific. The fact that the impacts of 2, 3, 5, 5C are more horrific doesn't change that.