--It’s a tail-end scenario in the far future.

Scientists who reviewed IFLScience’s story found that it failed to provide sufficient context for this report—differentiating, for example, between speculative claims and descriptions of peer-reviewed research. In particular, the story’s headline (“New Report Warns ‘High Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End’ Within 30 Years”) misrepresents the report as a likely projection rather than an exploration of an intrinsically unlikely worst case scenario.

See all the scientists’ annotations in context.

REVIEWERS’ OVERALL FEEDBACK

These comments are the overall assessment of scientists on the article, they are substantiated by their knowledge in the field and by the content of the analysis in the annotations on the article.

Amber Kerr, Researcher, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, University of California, Davis:

The content of the IFLScience article is mostly an accurate representation of the contents of the Breakthrough report, but the article tends to gloss over important caveats and probabilities that are given in the report. The least accurate part of the IFLScience article is the headline, which is an outright misrepresentation of the report. The article title states that there is, overall, a “high probability” of human civilization coming to an end in 30 years. This is extremely misleading. What the Breakthrough report actually says is that, in the most unlikely, “long-tail” biophysical scenario where climate feedbacks are much more severe than we expect, THEN there is a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end. But the report authors explicitly state that this “high-end scenario” is beyond their capacity to model or to quantitatively estimate.

Daniel Swain, Researcher, UCLA, and Research Fellow, National Center for Atmospheric Research:

The article uncritically reproduces claims from a recent report released by an Australian thinktank regarding the purported “end of human civilization” due to climate change over the next 30 years. While there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change will pose increasingly existential threats to the most vulnerable individuals in society and to key global ecosystems, even these dire outcomes aren’t equivalent to the “annihilation of intelligent life,” as is claimed in the report.

Andrew King, Research fellow, University of Melbourne:

The report this article is based on describes a scenario which is unlikely, but several aspects of what is included in the report are likely to worsen in coming decades, such as the occurrence of deadly heatwaves. The conclusion of a high likelihood that human civilisation will end is false, although there is a great deal of evidence that there will be many damaging consequences to continued global warming over the coming decades.

Peter Kalmus, Data Scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

I don’t think it’s so easy to discount the essential warning of this report. However, it would have been stronger if the authors were more careful not to mention the unsupported concept of near-term human extinction, and the unsupported probabilistic claim that there is a “high likelihood” of their 2050 scenario which includes the collapse of civilization. I do not understand why non-scientist writers (neither report author is a scientist) feel a need to exaggerate sound scientific findings, when those findings are already quite alarming enough. I feel that humanity should undertake urgent climate action just as the report authors do, but I feel that misrepresenting the science is unhelpful and unnecessary.

Richard Betts, Professor, Met Office Hadley Centre & University of Exeter:

This is a classic case of a media article over-stating the conclusions and significance of a non-peer reviewed report that itself had already overstated (and indeed misrepresented) peer-reviewed science – some of which was already somewhat controversial. It appears that there was not a thorough independent check of the credibility of the message.

Notes:

[1] See the rating guidelines used for article evaluations.

[2] Each evaluation is independent. Scientists’ comments are all published at the same time.

ANNOTATIONS

The statements quoted below are from the article; comments are from the reviewers (and are lightly edited for clarity).

New Report Warns “High Likelihood Of Human Civilization Coming To An End” Within 30 Years

Richard Betts, Professor, Met Office Hadley Centre & University of Exeter:

The headline overstates the conclusions of the report (which is already overdoing things). The reports says it presents a scenario, and under that scenario and all the assumptions within it, the report claims that there is a “high likelihood of human civilization coming to and end” – but even then, the report itself does not give the end of civilisation within 30 years. The process supposedly leading ultimately to collapse begins around 2050 but takes a long time to take effect. Also the processes themselves are not well-grounded in science, as they over-interpret published work.