Oh, yeah, things will get pretty nasty before the earth turns into another Venus. But it's pretty hard to predict just how far it can be pushed before that tipping-point is reached. And there is considerably more than one chance in a billion of it happening, and assuming that it's hardly worth worrying about is a kind of dangerous way of looking at it. That's sort of like figuring that because the number of people who get run over by cars is relatively small, it's statistically perfectly safe to play in the traffic. We do know that it is possible. But we don't know exactly where that point is. If we did, we could deal with it better.

I've talked to planetologists and meteorologists who maintain that even if we stopped pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today, it may already be too late.

Don Firth

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
                           —T. S. Eliot