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Hello and welcome to More or Less. We are guides to the numbers all around us in the news

and in life, calm, evidence-based and always loyal, just like your favourite politician.

This week we take a step back from Sajid Javid's one-year spending review to ponder the last

20 years of taxes and deficits. We ask author Rob Eastaway to help me win £125,000 on who wants to

be a millionaire armed only with a back of an envelope and we ask where the pets are eating all the

steak. But first, are you worried about climate change? Not as worried as this man.

I'm talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century.

That's what the science predicts. That's the projectory we're on.

That was Roger Hallam, he's co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, which is the campaigning group

taking direct action on climate change. For example, blockading bridges in London, or just this

gluing themselves to a bank in Manchester. Roger Hallam was talking on BBC's hard talk

programme a couple of weeks ago, but his suggestion that six billion people, that's nearly the entire

current population of the planet, could be killed by climate change over the next 80 years,

sounds alarming. If true. So we tried to figure out which scientific papers had made such a forecast.

We couldn't find any, so we emailed the Extinction Rebellion press office to ask them whether

they could point us in the right direction. They replied, it looks like this figure may be Roger's

own estimation of the situation, which is I think a polite way of saying he made it up off the top

of his head. But that said, Extinction Rebellion added, some scientists are saying that these

absolutely horrifying scenarios could become a reality, many of us are terrified.

Which prompted us to ask, well, which scientists? Extinction Rebellion provided links to articles

and speeches by three scientists, none of them mentioned six billion deaths. One of them,

...