I have had second thoughts after posting this essay. For those who know, I don't want to become a Chicken Little like Chris Hedges . I'll bring the post up again once I have taken the time to take another close look at the issue.  Whipping up Climate Change panic is as bad as Climate Change denial. Both distract us from our best vision of what we face and how we can deal with it. A few specific notes on this issue: It does seem like habitat destruction in Madagascar qualifies as a local extinction event. This example can be multiplied. The question is: do all these instances add up to a global extinction event? Are we forced to the conclusion that the disaster will rise to Permian levels? The IPCC report doesn't quite back up the judgment that an extinction event is upon us, or even that it would be a worst-case consequence of doing nothing. The job of the IPCC is to help us understand. If the IPCC models fail to tell us what will happen past 6 degrees, this is not