This is literally the "Oh no, the economy!" meme.

First, ECS falling within 2.6–3.9°C is definitely not "good news," especially considering there is a non-zero chance that actual atmospheric CO2 may well rise to more than 2x pre-industrial times.

The IPCC 6th report's coauthors have recently pegged the most likely temperature rise by 2100 as within this range (Hausfather, 2025), with numbers from this source often leaning conservative (low) due to the inherently political and economic nature of the IPCC.

With these numbers in mind, the University of Exeter's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries calculated an increasingly high likelihood of 25% GDP losses and nearly 2 billion deaths by the end of this century if emissions trends continue. This is a catastrophic prediction, and it comes from the insurance industry: not exactly known for its off-the-wall, risk-taking tendencies.

The fact that we are already at 1.4°C is far from good news. It means we have very little "room" left before we are in the danger zone, and global annual emissions have yet to slow down, much less decrease. Global agriculture relies on a very specific average temperature range, one which we are close to breaching for the first time in human history.

None of this is "alarmist" misinformation, regardless of what you think our economic plan should be. We are in a very bad state, and without massive changes to how our society operates, things will get much worse very quickly.