The end of the world is an odd thing to think about. It doesn't seem real, even in looking at the physics and the geology and the ground truth of what is happening and what might.
And, smart people can and do make mistakes. Sometimes something cannot - must not - be allowed to be true, so it is explained away. Sometimes the fallacy underpins some belief system, and even seriously listening to "the other side" is tantamount to blasphemy. Conservatives do this. Other times people make predictions that end up being lines in the sand from which they cannot bear to withdraw.
But regardless of human psychological malfunctions, there are hard, cold, facts that are not easy to accept as true. One is the idea that Earth could warm enough that human life is essentially impossible on most or all of the planet.
One feared possible path to that end involves methane. It is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, 100 times stronger in the short term. There is an awful lot of frozen methane in the Arctic. If it thaws and is released as methane, we are in big trouble fast. If it gets digested to CO2 by microbes on the way out, we're still in big trouble, but slower.
An end of the world scenario is being discussed, with no immediate technical rejection of it.
It is essentially a cascade of runaway events. First the reflective (and cooling) features of the Arctic are lost. They are now. Then massive amounts of super-greenhouse gasses are released. This too has started. Then water is evaporated in very large quantities to further boost the greenhouse effect. Earth's warming runs away and a Venus-type state results. Mostly this depends on methane being released fast enough to do that.
I don't know if it is possible or not. But I do know that what is happening now was thought next to impossible less than 10 years ago.
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