Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
I think the threat of an actual nuclear war is pretty small, and always has been. Even politicians were pretty quick to realize that nobody wins a nuclear exchange. Even if you were able to wipe out your enemy their territory would be useless for millions of years, and the damage to your own population, land and infrastructure would be catastrophic.
The real threat in modern society is the whacko with a backpack nuke who has nothing to lose, nothing to live for and is only interested in taking as many people with him as he can. Whether a religious fundamentalist (any flavor) racial bigot (also, any flavor) or simply a nutjob going postal, they can cause a significant amount of damage and are almost impossible to stop.
Of course, there are nut job national leaders (see North Korea or Iran) who could possibly launch nuclear warheads against their neighbors, but that would be a relatively small exchange and not likely to destroy much beyond their own general area.
I agree, it is a small risk, has always been small, and smaller yet after the end of the Cold War. However, the threat is there as long as the weapons are there. A complete nuclear holocaust would probably be one scenario where mankind as a whole could be wiped out.

Yes, disease can be a problem. But even the most virulent of plagues rarely has a death rate exceeding about 75%. Even if you postulate a 90% mortality rate, with a current world population of about 8 billion people the survivors would still number around 800 million! Hardly a wipe out! Of course, they would be spread out across the globe and civilization as we know it would probably be destroyed, or at least set back quite a ways. But with that many survivors, and with all of the accumulated knowledge of humanity still available, recovery would be steady, if not necessarily rapid.

In fact, ANY kind of major catastrophe, other than the complete destruction of the planet or the destruction of the Sun, would invariably leave survivors, and in generally large numbers. Some of them, like nuclear holocaust or plague, would also have significant impacts on other species. But over all, the biggest threat is to our way of life, our civilization. And even then it's mostly a matter of a change in how we must live rather than complete destruction.
What I wished to point out was that there are scenarios that are, potentially, much worse than global warming. Sure, there is a smaller risk for them to happen, but we shall not neglect the risk because it is small.