Climate Change isn’t going to cause extinction.

First, the good news: climate scientists, as a whole, are not warning us to prepare for the apocalypse. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a group of hundreds of scientists working with the United Nations to analyze climate change research from around the world—names many serious risks brought on by the warming of our planet, but human extinction is not among them.1

“If I had to rate odds, I would say the chances of climate change driving us to the point of human extinction are very low, if not zero,” says Adam Schlosser, the Deputy Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a climate scientist who studies future climate change and its impact on human societies.

In some ways, the most recent climate science even shows some encouraging trends. IPCC reports have always spelled out different scenarios for the amount of climate-altering greenhouse gases humans will put into the atmosphere, to show a range of possible climate risks the world may face. The IPCC calls these scenarios “representative concentration pathways” (RCPs), and they range from the relatively mild RCP2.6 scenario all the way up to RCP8.5, whose risks would be calamitous.

But as the world has made progress in recent years on switching to clean energy and controlling our greenhouse gas emissions, it has become clearer that we are not, in fact, headed toward the worst-case scenarios. “RCP8.5 is being viewed more and more as an extreme outcome,” says Schlosser. Even with no further progress on climate action, he says, the less-dire RCP6.0 scenario now looks closest to reality.