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toto comments on The things we know that we know ain't so - Less Wrong
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1- I can't remember anybody stating that "global warming has a serious chance of destroying the world". The world is a pretty big ball of iron. I doubt even a 10K warming would have much of an impact on it, and I don't think anybody said it would - not even Al Gore.
2- I can remember many people saying that "man-made global warming has a serious chance of causing large disruption and suffering to extant human societies", or something to that effect.
3- If I try to apply "reference class forecasting" to this subject, my suggested reference class is "quantitative predictions consistently supported by a large majority of scientists, disputed by a handful of specialists and a sizeable number of non-specialists/non-scientists".
4- More generally, reference class forecasting doesn't seem to help much in stomping out bias, since biases affect the choice and delineation of which reference classes we use anyway.
Well, I do recall a scientist using explicit "save the word"/"destroy the world" rhetoric. Of course this was rhetoric, not a scientific claim. A lot of non-scientist environmentalists do seem to think that global warming threatens the whole biosphere, though that seems very implausible based on what I know.