It's not that we're hopelessly cynical

We prefer to think of it as being appropriately worldly wise:

“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history.

If people are employed to study existential risk then existential risk to study will be found.

“Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster.

The international team of experts argue the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy,” they said.

Analysis. Yes, and we’re sure that those who study existential risk have some extant group who should be funded to study this existential risk. Further research, as they say, is required.

We would just like to point out one little thing. All those climate change models, all of them - even the RCP 8.5 disaster that we know isn’t going to happen already - already include feedbacks. The predictions are of the end state after the interactions, not before those tipping points that lead to runaway (cont pg 94).

But then as we say we’re appropriately worldly wise, not cynical at all.