wulfy42 said:
If you want to see what global warming can obtain, look at venus. It's average temperature is actually hotter then mercury...due to it's high carbon dioxide levels, and constant cloud cover trapping the suns heat inside the atmosphere. Add in the huge lightning storms and high winds this causes and you could easily end up with no life on earth period, let alone no humans left.
Er...Venus has a totally different atmospheric content and orbits much closer to the sun. Yes, if the Earth turned into Venus suddenly, everyone would die. This is not going to happen.
wulfy42 said:
If the ice caps melt, and we have more water, and a hotter general temperature, we'll have more evaporation and cloud cover, which will trap in more heat, which will increase the temperature even more, creating even more evaporation and cloud cover. This can cause drastic differences in temperature which can cause very strong winds, and of course more clouds means more electrical discharges as well. If we got to a point where we had cloud cover over most of the earth, most of the time, eventually that would probably be enough to wipe out all life on this planet.
Nope. A lot of it, sure, but "all" is a tall order.
wulfy42 said:
This could especially be deadly due to the fact that we have technology available to obtain resources that might not be available after all the fighting is over. Add in the large number of very deadly weapons we have (nukes, biological weapons/viruses etc), and yeah, such a breakdown in society could easily lead to either human extinction, or yet again, absolute destruction of all life on the planet.
Again, only most of it. Humans are resilient creatures, and spread out all over the world. Plenty of people live in places that just aren't worth targeting, but would survive (in some form) the loss of everyone else.
wulfy42 said:
As far as nukes...well, I believe most of the nukes on the planet have been disarmed, from around 70k at max to under 20k now, that is still enough to set off some serious consequences that might cause huge valcano's to go off, global warming or winter, or even just enough dust to block out the sun for enough time to wipe out most plant/algae eventually making the atmosphere unable to support life at all. We might survive such a war, but there is really no way to know in advance.
As I understand it, current predictions say we would, though, yeah, let's not test this.
You are correct that nuclear weapons are generally smaller now...the Soviets tested the Tsar Bomba at 50 MT, the real thing was supposed to be at 100 MT, though whether it would have that much power is debated.
Nowdays most devices are much smaller, because it's far more cost effective to build them that way. In the old days, you couldn't guarantee the device would initiate anywhere near the target, so you had to build them big for you still hit if you missed by a lot, if yo see what I mean. With modern targeting this isn't such an issue.
wulfy42 said:
Heck, even biological agents could be released that might at least wipe out all human life (and possibly most land based animal life at least).
If you mean a disease, not really...firstly, why would anyone do that? They are just as vulnerable to it as their enemies.
Secondly, the more people you kill, the less are left to spread it to the survivors.
Third, diseases only affect certain organisms. You're not going to find something that most land animals can suffer from.
(OTOH, this means you can get a disease which attacks certain creatures and not others. If your enemy grows potatoes, and you do not, you can safely spread super potato blights. Not "kill all humans" level, but could make quite a mess)
wulfy42 said:
Science is also a possibility as well. If you play around with attempting to create small scale black holes for instance...and make a mistake...well, that could be all she wrote really fast as well, not just for our planet, but our whole solar system as well.
Nope. Now, releasing a small black hole would end up with all available matter being drawn in, yes, but that would end with the planet. Black holes don't have any more gravitational pull than what they were before they were black holes. The star that used to be a black hole would draw you towards it to the same extent.
If the Earth became a black hole, the moon wouldn't really notice, because the Earth's gravity would be the same.