I won't lie: any day one of these child porn scumbags is caught is a good day.

Production of child pornography should obviously be illegal because it clearly harms the children involved. And distribution of illegally produced material should also be illegal.

But it is not reasonable to throw people in jail merely for web searches. Some people who search for child pornography do so because they watch it, and some people who watch child pornography go on to harm children. But making such reasoning the basis of law is a bad legal principle.

There's no sudden change anywhere in my arguments. ... +10C in a bit over 80 years would be an extinction level event. We *might* survive it, but it's very far from certain.

That's the problem: you are not making an argument at all, you're simply repeating your claims ad nauseam.

Please note that the +10C in ~88 years is not my prediction, it's set forth as a new possible worst case scenario after several indicators points to reaching the +2C goal

My guess is that you misinterpreted a recently published MIT climate model study, but since you are just picking numbers out of thin air, it's impossible to tell.

Given the timescales involved in the Eocene optimum, I have no doubt we would find a technological solution to the problem

There is no technological solution needed. Compared to 20000 years ago, we have had a +10C temperature increase and a 120m rise in sea levels. Are we reduced to cowering under plastic domes eating hydroponic food? Entire civilizations were wiped off the face of the earth and most people don't even remember. So why should another +10C and another 70m, even if they could occur, be any different?

however it might put a strain on our society past it's capacity to withstand, causing widespread hunger, wars and significant reduction of the population

It may, or it may not, but those are normal human conditions, not "extinction level events". My parents lived through the destruction of their country and massive refugee crises. People pick up the pieces, rebuild, adapt, and get on with their lives.

There are many waterproof Android phones on the market worldwide. The problem is that US carriers are so restrictive and have such a small selection.

Why would Apple be in trouble? They'll copy Samsung and Sony's phones, they'll patent the rectangular version of it, market the hell out of it, and finally sue everybody for stealing Apple's innovation. Apple has been getting away with that for thirty years.

Is it really so hard to look this up on Wikipedia yourself?

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

The study excludes suggestions of rapid melting: "Antarctica is not losing ice as rapidly as suggested by many recent studies. What’s more, snowfall in east Antarctica still seems to be compensating for some — but not all — of the melting elsewhere in Antarctica." It generally just seems to confirm what people had been assuming was happening anyway: a modest amount of melting in response to increasing temperatures. Note that melting from ice sheets only accounts for 20% of total sea level rise.

The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet", wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties, who together form the biggest block in the German parliament."

As opposed to... the German press and publishers, who have been abusing their position to misinform and manipulate public opinion for their own financial gain for decades.

So you propose a 50 year human exodus from the tropics for most of 3-6 billion people as a solution to us as opposed to just cleaning up the mess we made

I don't "propose" anything and there is no "as opposed to". Climate change is inevitable. We can't remove the carbon from the atmosphere, and nations aren't agreeing to stop adding to it either. Sea level rise has been happening independent of AGW anyway. You can either wallow in apocalyptic visions, or you can simply accept it and deal with it. And dealing with it doesn't require either mass death or a mass exodus.

The San Francisco bay expands engulfing the entire Silicon Valley and the wine country of the North Bay.

That's not going to happen because SF Bay is filling up faster naturally than any sea level rise; if it weren't for active conservation efforts, the bay would be disappearing. For the same reasons, Bangladesh's land mass is actually growing and will likely continue to grow for decades despite sea level rise. Your scenarios are unreasonable.

(Not that it's important to the discussion, but humans are less efficient at converting starch to usable energy than herbivores; and we cannot use cellulose at all)

Well, you brought it up not me. I'm just wondering what leads you to believe this. In humans, starch is converted to glucose by amylase and then used in aerobic respiration. What would be more efficient than that?

And humans actually can digest cellulose and even lignin directly to some extent http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8719737 But the usual means is to use a symbiote like a rabbit or cow.

Let's summarize. You put up the straw man that temperatures may rise by +10C, then you shift the goal even further by postulating that such a +10C change is extremely rapid. But you're still simply begging the question: you're assuming that if you just make conditions extreme enough, at some point humans will go extinct. And for good measure you add some ad hominems. That's not an argument, it's FUD and speculation; you haven't made your case.

I could rest my case here. But the Eocene optimum and the survival of species during large and abrupt changes during the past 100ky show that species have no trouble rapidly colonizing new habitats when conditions change and that they have places to go. An additional problem with your reasoning is that humans primarily depend on domesticated species anyway that we grow where we want. All this means that your statements about human extinction are not just unsupported but actually contradict what we know.

You just don't seem to realize what an extreme claim human extinction is. Human extinction would mean that there is no place on earth capable of supporting even a few tens of thousands of humans, despite the existence of numerous domesticated and wild food species in most environments, thousands of islands, and vast tracts of land at all latitudes, and despite the demonstrated ability of people to survive even in deserts and through ice ages.

You severely underestimate the changes a +10C increase would bring. Unless we build closed-loop habitats for ourselves well in advance, there is very little chance of the human race surviving. None of our domesticated plants or animals would survive.

Where do you get this from? Nothing is going to go above the Eocene optimum, a time when CO2 was at 2000ppm and there ice caps had completely melted (that may have been +12C). Mammals did just fine, as did lots of stuff we eat, so it's a good bet people would do just fine as well.

Our evolutionary advantage, our intelligence, comes at a very high price. We are fragile and we require a lot of energy in a very specific form. We are not very good at converting starch to usable energy.

Humans live and thrive anywhere from the high arctic to the Sahara desert with no problems. We survived several major ice ages, several periods of +10C temperature rises and falls, and hundreds of feet of sea level rise and fall. We're so energetically efficient that we can hunt and kill just about any creature on earth simply by following it until it falls over. Why on earth do you think we're these fragile creatures that go extinct at the drop of a hat?

(And starch is polymerized glucose; short of a glucose IV, there's no more efficient energy source for humans. That's why it's so fattening.)

What would you consider to be the real weak points of our current civilization then? Resource exhaustion? Climate change?

Same as always: nationalism, xenophobia, totalitarianism. If you keep a lid on those, humanity can cope with anything.

Insurance, like anything else that matters, is not about possibility, it is about probability.

Poor Bangladesh is already in deep guano. Water is rising, and they live on a flood plain. A population half that of the United States lives in profound poverty and they will be displaced by the effects of Global Warming in this century... where do they go? The likely answer is away.

We've had global warming and sea level rise for 20000 years and people have always coped with it via migration. The only reason Bangladesh is so strongly affected because it has been artificially separated from India, impeding the natural migrations that would normally happen in response to climate change. But even in the baroque system of modern nation states, AGW will open up plenty of new land in Siberia, Canada, and Northern Europe where people from any flooded areas will be welcome and needed.

Making borders more open for migration is certainly a lot easier and rational than the kind of costly and ineffective anti-AGW efforts you have in mind. And if you can't get people to agree to something as rational, simple, and beneficial as immigration, the kinds of policies you envision are never going to pass anyway.

You're misapplying that. The "argument from ignorance" fallacy tell you that just because you haven't seen something, you can't conclude that it doesn't exist. That's because you may not have looked or may not have had a chance to observe it. But police and media are looking for such cases, are capable of identifying them, and would be reporting them publicly. If you look for something that could happen to millions of people and you don't observe it, it is reasonable to conclude that it's rare.