Daniel Swain in Grist: Climate change is a catastrophe. But is it an ‘existential threat’?

Some climate scientists think that calling climate change an existential threat is misleading. “I don’t think it’s an existential threat to humanity or ‘life on Earth,’” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Grist. “There’s this popular notion that there’s some level of warming after which the warming becomes self-sustaining, which is actually not our understanding as physical scientists of how the climate system works.”