If you walk in the middle of a highway then you "could" be hit by a truck. "Might" be left at the side of the road as a hit-and-run. Don't take it seriously though; go walk on that highway like it's yours.

Would it be more scientific to say it is sure it will happen?

I suspect the opposite is happening, too many times an environmental catastrophe has been predicted in too certain terms and has not happened, which is why many people lost trust.

And if you think that we shouldn't try to predict but only inform about what has already happened that seems even stranger to me.

And once it has indisputably happened, and the destructive consequences are impossible to ignore, the same people and institutions who spent decades complaining about "could" and "might" will immediately pivot to "there was nothing we could have done".

Yeah better to let an irreversible catastrophe happen than do anything about it before hand because we might be working to prevent something that wasn't going to happen.

All science-based conclusions come with uncertainty. Only ideologues (and siths) write in absolute terms.

And yet millions of people still play the lottery.

I don’t think it’s as simple as uncertainty. Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to avert climate change. People prefer carrots to sticks.

Every look into the future is could and might.

So you prefer just to ignore it and deal with the disaster afterwards?

I take it seriously, as do many others. Careful of the bandwagon fallacy or, even worse, the mind projection fallacy.

No it's the frog boil effect. It's a staggering amount of change, it's just over a whole human lifetime so most people don't really clock it. Elites are supposed to do something about it, but mostly because of corruption and ideology they aren't.

Thank you. HN should not allow any headlines containing "could", "might", or a question mark at the end. Conjecture is not news.