Man-Made Global Climate Change: So...what's up with that?

[Weltall]

I'm not stating that I would like any such thing, nor should we strive towards or allow it to happen. I'm merely commenting on how such disaster speak is almost certainly not grounded in reality, especially any talk indicating that climate change will bring about mass extinctions a la those which typically demarcate the shift from one geological period to the next (mesozoic to tertiary, for example, which saw dinosaurs take a hike). To a tee, such extinctions are believed to have been caused by abrupt disasters. The Yucatan impact is one widely-accepted cause for the Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinos, and if the story is correct, it was a meteorite some eleven miles wide, throwing millions of tons of debris into the air, poisoning the atmosphere and creating a state not unlike what we call nuclear winter.

The point is, climate change, even if you believe the worst, will not occur so quickly that life in general will find a way to adapt and survive it with a (relative) lack of fuss. My point also is that I don't see what is gained by spreading such mistruth. If you make people believe that apocalypse is imminent, you're going to make a lot of them believe that there's nothing we can do to stop it. The most beneficial way to overcome what may happen is to be realistic about the consequences, to neither be panicky nor ignorant. The likely consequences of climate change are enough to worry about without adding end-of-the-world scenarios from the B-movie archives to the mix.