But Probably on the Money

In Elizabeth Kolbert's devastating three-part series on global warming, called "The Climate of Man," and published in 2005 in three successive issues of The New Yorker (which used to do a lot of serializing, by the way, and now almost never does), she quotes David Rind, from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

"We may say that we're more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it's potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we're not only more technologically able; we're more technologically able destructively as well. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen. I guess -- though I won't be around to see it -- I wouldn't be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed." He paused. "That's sort of an extreme view."

--"The Climate of Man," The New Yorker, May 2, 2005, p. 71.

I highly recommend the series. It's no longer available online, though a few other shorter pieces by her on this topic are available at New Yorker dot com. She came out with a book this year, titled Field Notes from a Catastrophe. A Scientific American review of her book, posted on Amazon, says this of it:

The details are terrifying, and Kolbert's point of view is very clear, but there is no rhetoric of rant here. She is most directly editorial in the last sentence of the book, and by that point, she has built the case... For a friend of mine, Kolbert's New Yorker series was an awakening--the first time, she said, she really understood what was happening and why we must act.

Hear, hear.