I am the person you're responding to here.

I am generally aware of the range of probable results of AGW. Some of them would be quite catastrophic. Some would even cause a mass extinction event.

But I am also aware of the adaptability of our species. I think at least some humans would survive just about any event that didn't flat-out sterilize the planet, and I don't think there's any reasonable results of AGW that would flat-out sterilize the planet. There is not enough carbon in our fossil fuels to cause that level of catastrophe, even if we trigger every vaguely probable positive feedback on the planet.

Therefore, I don't think AGW is likely to wipe out humanity.

Do you see any flaws in my reasoning?

What exactly do you find irrational? I don't think many people think that global warming is going to kill every living human. Its a slow process: ice melts, sea level rises, etc. When the water rises into a major city like New York, and forces thousands to move, it will be the top story in the news. But then, remember hurricane Sandy? That caused the sea to flood New York, and it was the top story in the news.

If massive flooding did occur, people would move to higher ground. No one believes that people currently living in the mountains are at risk from global warming.

The argument is not whether global warming is bad, but rather, are we causing it, or is the planet going through a cycle as it has many times before. Scientist can successfully argue both sides. This planet has been screwed up and fixed many times before we came along.

Of course, scientifically speaking, you cannot rule out the possibility. The scientific way would be to assign different scenarios a probabililty. I haven't done or seen an analysis but I would guess that completely wiping out humanity would be a very low probability.

I have noted that some people obsess over low probability events just because they "might" happen. As a matter of fact, I'd say that's a characteristic of overly enthusasitic environmentalists. This at times might border on fanaticism which of course is irrational in itself.

I vote for Caliserv as the best answer.

What good is your life, if you live in fear of something that is so far out that it is neigh impossible? It possibility could happen that the lizard people who live on the other side of the moon (Just kidding Prico. Just using an absurdity.) will come down to earth and stomp all of us human life creatures out.But I am not going to for an Army to wipe them out. And I am not going to live in fear of it happening.

Now once the evil people, who came up with this scam, get you thinking that way, you easily become a target for this action.

Quote from the UN's Own "Agenda 21": "Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level."

Then what is the use of living, if you have to live under those conditions? And what happens if you won't re-orient? That is a greater threat than what you suggest.

You have reversed the burden of proof. It lies with those whom hold that the AGW hypothesis is valid.

You are also utilizing the Precautionary Principle: if we don't know the probabilities, we should take action to eliminate then possibility of harm. Based on that logic, we should spend trillions building space ships to repel the next invasion fleet from Mars; we can't prove it's not going to happen.

The Precautionary Principle is a terrible way to make policy. It leads our society to commit resources to mitigate problems that will save few lives, at the expense of failing to fund other measures that would save more, at the same cost. You cannot make rational resource trade off decisions without understanding the weighted utility of each course of action.

Using EPA guidelines, you need to show that a course of action will save one or more statistical lives for every $8 million in costs.

Galliana & Green (2009) estimated the cost of decarbonizing the world economy by 2100 at $2280 trillion. That number was predicated on very optimistic assumptions about the rate of progress of decarbonizing technology, I.e. they assumed it would move forward at 3x the current rate.

Keeney (2012) showed that each $14 million in costs will induce one statistical death. That is in the US economy; in the third world, the number is certainly much lower.

Ex-EPA analyst Carlin (2011) indicates that the $2280 trillion number is dependent upon the climate sensitivity; if it is lower than the IPCC estimates, the cost of decarbonizing will be perhaps 10x higher. In his words:

"For the reasons discussed in a journal article I published last spring, it is clear that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis does not satisfy the scientific method and thus does not explain global warming/climate change. So what does? The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that they cannot think of any natural cause, so in their view it must be CAGW, but of course this cannot be correct given the negative findings using the scientific method."

The 'solution' to CAGW, then, will take between 162 million to 1.62 billion lives...all to deal with a problem that may not exist.

Before we embark on that path, we need a very high level of certainty that the solution is not worse than the disease. To date, the CAGW proponents have not demonstrated that their hypothesis has that level of empirical validation.

“It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.”

―Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, UN IPCC expert reviewer, professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo

Rolando Prico wrote: "When you don't know if what you do is harmful or not and 98% of the scientist tell you it is bad, the rational thing to do is stop doing what they tell you stop doing (in this case dumping the waste products from fossil fuels into the atmosphere)"

I'm curious....Have this same "98% of the scientists" given up their motor vehicles and their plane trips to climate conferences, research sites....etc., to show just how serious they are about their claim that waste from fossil fuel is "bad"??

I do not see how one can be "moderate" on whether or not millions were killed in the Holocaust, whether the square root is 16 is not really known, whether people walked on the moon in the 1970s, whether the earth is round or flat or orbits the sun or vice versa, whether species evolve biologically over millions of years, or whether a century of solid climate science is a socialist hoax or reality.

I also am aware of no real evidence suggesting that anthropogenic climate change has much of a chance of wiping out the entire human species. It could happen, of course, but it seems quite unlikely. The issue is more relevantly framed in terms of the HIGH probability of serious deterioration of the global economy, and of our general quality of life, for centuries to come. I think the chances of civilization (especially as we have known it since the 18th century Enlightenment and 19th century industrial revolutoin) coming to end is also rather small, but large enough and disastrous enough to pay very serious attention to. And, climate change is far from the only threat to our civilization. Homo sapiens is, however, many hundreds of times older than modern civilization.

U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...

“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpine...

“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”

“The Academy membership is composed of approximately 2,100 members and 380 foreign associates, of whom nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/...

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timel...

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index...