The consensus has indeed been forced into extreme caution when it came to dire predictions, there were so many voices accusing scientists of crying wolf. If someone in 1980 would have said that a heat wave would kill a tenth of the number of people it did in 2003, they would have been called dangerous extremists. In this respect nothing has changed, Termination Shock will be mistaken for a piece of history, like Dafoe's journal of the plague year...