WE humans are about to be wiped out in a few decades. The grandchildren of many of us will not live to old age.

Hear it from Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University and the man who helped eradicate smallpox.

"Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years," he told The Australian this week.

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"It's an irreversible situation." Blame global warming.

But here's the odd thing. Just three paragraphs into this report announcing the - Oh My God! - end of the world, the reporter and Fenner were off talking about rabbits, Fenner's writing habits, his bookshelves, his student days, his war service and the weight of the book he wrote on smallpox - 3.5kg, actually.

Oh, and did he ever tell how he used to study skulls with Norman Tindale?

Now, you'd think when a reporter had just been told that thousands of years of human history were about to come to a screaming halt - with their own loved ones among the dead - that rabbits and recollections of Norm would be the last thing they'd want to discuss.

Back up a bit, they'd cry. Run that by me again: you mean, all human life on this planet is going to be exterminated? But, no. So used are we to sandwich-board doom-mongering from global warmists that we hurry them on to cheerier topics, like tales of old Norm and his skulls.

It's not that Fenner is a joke. He may now be 95, but he's a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society. And his views on the end of the world, however boring, were still deemed serious enough to publish in The Australian's prestigious Higher Education supplement.

This curious disconnect between prediction and reception happens relatively often now. Four years ago another warmist, Prof James Lovelock, creator of the influential Gaia theory of an interconnected Earth, was every bit as apocalyptic as Fenner.

We'd passed the point of no return, he groaned. The world was heating catastrophically. "Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

All that was left to do was to prepare "a guidebook for global warming survivors ... on durable paper with long-lasting print".

That should put a damper on any conversation. Yet when ABC warmist Phillip Adams soon afterwards interviewed Lovelock for Late Night Live, they first talked of walks in the country, horses, the absence of TVs back when they were lads and how people used to believe in ghosts.

Only after half an hour did they finally get on to Lovelock's prediction of the abrupt deaths of billions of people within just eight or nine decades.

It was like they'd left the boring bit until last. The bit where everyone dies.

Strange. It's like we privately agree that when these scientists say the end of the world is nigh, they don't mean it, not literally, but are just scaring us for our own good. Or that they do mean it, but are frankly batty.

After all, it's not as if even Dark Greens have resolved never to breed, to thus spare their child the horror of spending their shortened life in terror at the doom to come.

Yet we're still meant to treat everything else these scientists say as the gospel truth. As in: sure, they're way out there about the end of human life, but on the small stuff they are bang on.

Meanwhile, life goes on. We laugh. We plan. We invent. We build. We adapt.

And we talk of other things than the end of the world, and luckily so, because we'll be around a lot longer yet, if we keep our heads - and our hope.

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Originally published as 6. Our own extinction is forecast