The rate at which the earth will get hotter due to the sun getting hotter depends on astrophysical and geophysical processes that are possibly not yet fully understood (e.g., the metallicity of the sun, how much heat the climate absorbs).
On one hand, nailing down this science seems critical: it is the countdown to extinction of all life on earth. We would like to know as accurately as possible how much time we have left unless we do something radical, like mass migration to another planet or moving the earth.
On the other hand, global warming caused by human activity might doom us first, though global warming might not cause human extinction and almost certainly won't boil the oceans and cause the extinction of all life on earth, which the Sun eventually will.
Also, when the Sun does get hot enough to boil earth, it is still expected to be a main sequence star, so a linear approximations of temperature increase are probably fine. If we keep (and store) good records of temperature and the Sun's luminosity, intelligent life in the future will be able to extrapolate even more accurately. Maybe that's our prerogative now.
K.-P. Schroeder and Robert Connon Smith, Distant future of the Sun and Earth revisited.
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