I would say that it is unlikely that humans will go extinct because of global warming. But impossible? I would think that humans would migrate to inhabitable areas, but no one will really know until it happens. And rising sea levels and expanding deserts could always lead to a nuclear war.

The answer is probabilistic - and I don't know how to get a mathematical solution because I don't know how to estimate the parameters for an unprecedented event. However, for the set of extinction-causing events, I think the likelihood is inversely related to how quickly the conditions occur. So, I would weight a catastrophic impact event as being a greater threat than a slower atmospheric/climate change.

Given that the species population consists of roughly 7 billion individuals that are (1) more able than other species to adapt to changing conditions; (2) that, species-wide, are already adapted to disparate environmental conditions; (3) including conditions that are marginal and where individual life is fragile; and (4) if nothing else, who have a well-documented history of breeding at every opportunity regardless of who it is with, the situation, existing conditions, or future uncertainties - unless it is wiped out swiftly, I'd give the species a better than fair chance of avoiding extinction.

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>>Umm, a major part of the purpose of science is to be able to make physical predictions.<<

Umm, a major part of science is knowing what you can and cannot do with what you do and do not have.

>>you seem to be saying that things that are "unprecedented" cannot be estimated<<

Things cannot be estimated mathematically if you cannot estimate parameters because you have no empirical data.

>>What if, for example, we dropped every single nuclear weapon we had on Canada to avenge the War of 1812? Nothing like that has been done before--Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much smaller scale.<<

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were much smaller scale, indeed; however, we do have usable information from those events. Plus, we have numeric data on the amount and destruction power of our arsenal and we would control where and how much we would drop.

More realistic would be trying to estimate the global impact from unloading our entire arsenal - and I don't believe it is possible to forecast that with any accuracy at all.

The issues of global warming and fossil fuel usage are certainly closely connected. The use of oil and natural resources will decline in a decade. But this would not reduce the carbon dioxide emissions automatically; the replacements with coal, heavy oil and tar sand contain even more carbon, if to make them produce the same amount of energy they will produce twice more carbon. But the fact is that all transport, roads and airports for this transport are useless without oil. To create a new transport system is a task for the whole society, not for an individual, besides it would need money, time, natural resources and a lot of brain power. So the previous arguments concerning a lot of money spent on the stopping or at least slowing the global warming can be put aside against these ones.

The projections made for the future state that Earth will be an ice planet without greenhouse effect, the Earth will get warmer, by the 2100 the temperature will be 1.5 C - 4.5 C warmer, the increase will be less in the southern hemisphere and greater in the northern hemisphere. The global temperature is connected with carbon dioxide level and methane level, which at the moment exceed greatly the past levels.

"I've noticed a paradoxical behavior on the part of Moderates--they are often fanatical."

Interesting thing about fanatical behavior; it mostly is not recognized within by the individual exhibiting it.

It would clarify this question if you could define what you mean by "Moderates."

I've noticed a paradoxical behavior on the part of Moderates--they are often fanatical.

I suspect that it is because their Moderatism is due to emotions--as we have seen here they reject mathematics, and just defend what they have been told. In this way many of these people who probably personally dislike the Limbaugh ditto-heads actually behave much like those very people.

One of the Moderates wrote "But I'm not sure to what this conversation is in regards. Is Paul still prognosticating The End of All Things?

In reality I have not been prognosticating anything. I merely have been asking the Moderates to give actual scientific reasons for them excluding the *possibility* that global warming could make humans go extinct. I hjave not taken a position.

Cannot the Moderates understand the concept of needing a scientific argument to back up a claim that is actually a claim about science?