You are being downvoted for what I see as a fairly logical comment. The problem that climate change researchers keep running into is that these things are extremely hard to predict, and predictions are sometimes embarrassingly incorrect[1].
So, here is another doomsday prediction. As someone who whole-heartedly believes climate change is happening and is a very real threat, I am forced to take this article with a big grain of salt, unfortunately, unless there is an immense amount of evidence to the contrary. Also, I don't want people to assume that I am arguing 'these scientists have been wrong in the past, so they will be wrong in the future'. That is definitely not what I am saying. But at this point it is a frustrating boy-cried-wolf situation with these predictions.
When I was a kid I kept hearing in the media that in 20 years oceans levels will rise by 7meters which would mean the big cities near me would be under water.
20 years have passed and water level is the same.
The problem is there is two issues:
1. Is climate change real - this can be easily verified with observation, and there is solid science proving this.
2. What will happen in the future - here we have tons of research that would not fly in other domains as it is not verifiable experimentally until it actually happens. This are just hypothesis about extremely complex system we do not fully understand. And it should be viewed us such.
Who was predicting a mere 20 years for 7m? Around 2001 I was only hearing about 1-2m by the end of the century.
I do see a lot of wildly misleading claims in newspapers, including where the research institutes the newspapers claim to be citing release statements specifically denying what the newspapers claim they’ve said, and I’ve been confounded by comments sections under those stories where other readers read only the false interpretations and not the actual words of the researchers.
