People just aren’t equipped to think about it on the right scale.

Experts have not been suggesting that a catastrophe will wipe humans from the planet within the next handful of years. They have been suggesting that our trends are deeply unsustainable for the planet. And the effects of screwing with our planet will easily be catastrophic in many years if trends continue.

So yes, urgent action would be necessary to get the trends to be more manageable. But because monkey brain doesn’t see an immediate threat, monkey brain calls climate scientists liars for some reason. We have these “temperature targets” not because the world instantly ends once we hit however many degrees of warming, but because we know the impact of that much change will be more drastic over the following decades. Monkeybrain just doesn’t know how to prioritize that threat without making people afraid of it.