http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR2007122701942.html...right after the global holocaust. It's hard to be happy when I know we are doomed. This is just blue-skying on my part, but I don't think it is unrealistic.
Here's the bottom line. The maximum limit for CO2 in the atmosphere for survival is 350 p.p.m. That's for survival--avoiding mass famine, water shortages, disease and the wars that our primitive minds will invariably start over diminishing resources. The damage from global warming will still be bad, just not fatal.
Presently, we are at 383 p.p.m. To get down to 350 p.p.m. will require draconian changes to how we live. That will not happen (most religions still oppose birth control) so we will not avoid catastrophe. Yes, we really are THAT stupid. We will eat, consume and produce ourselves to death. When crops fail, there will be no way to replace them. When mountaintops melt, there will be no way to replace that water. NYC, for example, home of the best tap water on Earth, gets its water from Adirondack snow. No snow-caps = no NYC. Now figure that for maybe a quarter of major cities.
Ecological disasters are nothing new to the Earth or the human race. It just has never been global within human existence until now. For most of human existence, people existed at a prehistoric, paleolithic level. Our present level of population and development is just an anomaly on the time line. Other living things have risen to great heights and have been wiped out overnight. We are no different. We are just animals, not only scientifically speaking, but in every real sense of the word. We have instincts we cannot control: to procreate, to consume, to control territory and to be violent and pig-headed. These win out over rationality most of the time, and the more people feel threatened the more conservative (tending to base instinct) we get.
In 2000, I was very anxious for a Gore victory because he understood global warming and I knew we did not have another four or eight years to fuck around. I felt it was our last chance. The rapid melting of the Arctic suggests it may have already been too late. Anyway, gut feeling trumped rationality sufficiently to allow for what happened to happen.
Evolution is harsh and unforgiving. It has no purpose, either. There is no human destiny. We are not owed survival. What I suppose will happen is that most of us or our offspring will die. There will be a global, catastrophic water shortage or crop failure and then in a few months or a few weeks there will not be many of us left. Natural selection will kill most of us and in a hundred years there will be little left--at least on the large scale--to remind anyone we were ever here. Still a few here and there will survive. They will necessarily be the smartest and toughest of us. And as the Earth rebounds from the human catastrophe, the remnants will rebound with it, smarter and stronger than we are now. The tens of thousands left will have an unspoiled world to themselves, the knowledge from previous centuries and an unlimited horizon. They can be what we obviously cannot--an enlightened society that lives in harmony with nature and who treats all people as family instead of enemies.