Reply to Burgess et al: Catastrophic climate risks are neglected, plausible, and safe to study

We thank Burgess et al. (1) for their contribution, “Catastrophic climate risks should be neither understated or overstated,” in response to “Climate Endgame” (2). We agree that studying catastrophic climate scenarios and extreme risk mitigation is imperative We disagree that catastrophic scenarios are already adequately or excessively studied. Counting the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 Working Group II report is not a good proxy for catastrophic climate risk assessment. The scenarios only account for anthropogenic emissions (each with a range of temperature outcomes), not extreme risk assessment. Even just for high-end warming scenarios, more granular text-mining reports (3, 4) show these are under-studied relative to their likelihood and lower-warming scenarios. This is supported by literature sampling (3) and reflections by popular writers who have synthesized the climate risk literature (5, 6). The normally used cutoff date of 2100 in modeling also contributes to an underappreciation of long-term higher warming and catastrophic scenarios.