And what do you suggest can be done to convince India and China to cripple their exploding economies by reducing consumption?

And how do you plan to feasibly introduce green energy for even 25% of the planet, much less all of it?

This ain't Star Trek. Ranting and raving about this impending "extinction" without a single viable solution to progress past it only makes you look foolish.

The economy is failing and people are losing jobs so lets increase taxes and make people suffer even more.  If only there were an organization in the US that forces plants to produce cleaner energy over time.  Wait, there is, it's called the EPA.  Let the EPA do it's job and over time less and less pollution will be made.  I mean, look how much cleaner cars and power plants have gotten since the 70's and how much research is being done to make cleaner coal plants.  With our current system there has already been a huge increase in alternative energy and it's being adopted more and more every year. 

I do believe in man-made global warming. However, the devastating effects many want to believe to come from it are far from being a reality and personally I'm appaled to see what many scientists, including some respectable men, are willing to accept as true when the evidence in contrary is so overwhelming and clear. A bit of extra heat won't make half of the planet suddenly turn into inhabitable wastelands.

To begin with, Extreme droughts are a feature of glacial ages, opposed to hot periods. If the glacial age was first studed in the tropics opposed to areas like the great basin which was about the only place in the world to get wetter in the last cold period the glacial age would be known as the dry age instead. Most people simply don't know the amazonian rainforest, for instance, is only some ten thousand years old if you take into account it's full extent simply because the region was too dry in the ice age for a jungle to thrive. Take out two or three degrees out from the atlantic and bam, bye bye monsoons and bye bye forest. To believe we live in an optimum and stable climate, and that any small change will fuck everything up is simply stupid. Tropical forests are ought to expand with extra heat, and deserts to retreat.

Some ponder that while tropical regions could get indeed wetter, the extra heat could somehow displace deserts like if they were static and solid entities and make them climb the map, going towards northern latitudes. It's amazing how they fail to comprehend atmospheric circulation is much more dependant on a planet's rotation than it's climate. The faster you spin, the more wind conveyor belts you end up having. Look at Venus, virtually no circulation and Jupiter with dozens of belts. Unless a bit of extra CO2 ends up slowing the planet by some kilometers per second, there is no reason to fear deserts will climb into Europe or that the Gulf Stream will suddenly fail. Only changes in insolation and axis inclination could somehow displace the wind belts, and this, my friend, were the means of some previous climate changes but not this one.

"Oh, but the polar bears and the corals". Oh, pretty please. Interesting to see how until a century ago polar bears were considered real plagues and anyone who lived near them feared the beasts and wished them to disappear. Have you ever wondered how they survived through periods like the ice age or even the early holocene temperature maximum when the arctic ocean was devoid of ice through the summer? It's not because humans are clever, at least some of them, that other animals cannot be. Capacity of adaptation is one of the main features of life, so to speak. Now if you want to blame their number shrinking by some loose icebergs, or Santa Claus' gnomes instead of human predatory action, you are free to.

And the corals... yes, the corals are indeed very sensible to temperature variations, even though bleaching doesn't mean death for them like some out there believe. The point is that even today we have corals that manage to cope with 35 c heat pretty much with no variation at the Red Sea, and there is no reason to believe similar species are nowhere to be found. Besides, one could wonder how did corals manage to survive when the sea level varied 250 meters in the last million years alone? My guess it's because they have to. I suppose there are some obscure species of weed coral that manage to climb or go down very fast everytime there's a great sea level variation, kicking in only when situation starts to look a bit grim for his relatives. How can we know for sure now? Anyways my point is that you should worry more about every kind of pollution actually killing corals instead of some few degrees anomaly.

I challenge you to go check virtually any chart of Earth's climate and vegetation back in some hotter period and you'll see that not only life copes with extra heating, but actually thrives with it. I could go on an on to show that it's a problem of humans and humans alone if they decided to built mainly coastal civilizations, melt the ice caps and then moan about it.

I'm a denier. Man-made global warming is a mith.

I remember when I was 15 in 1975 when we were on our way to a new ice age.  in the late eighties ted danson did tv spots saying "We only have 10 years". Funny stuff

Interesting list's of scientist who are  climate change skeptics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

well I didn't expect intelligent answers on page one but they come.

i'll jump on the bandwagon, yes it is real, yes it has been happening for millions of years, yes it is natural, and NO Taxing people for it will not make a difference we can't save us from it happening unless we find a way to go against nature.

I vote a big climate control button on the moon. and get someone to tweak it every now and then if the earth looks like it is in a bad condition lol.

This is the smartest thing said in this thread.

Why is "I don't know" always considered bad when you ask someone of authority? The reason Climate Change (updated from Global Warming because they were wrong) is such a hot topic, is because governments are spending billions of dollars with real world impacts, who don't even know what the problem is yet.

Is climate change man made? I don't know. Anyone telling you anything else, is wrong. We don't know yet. Why don't we worry more about finding out, instead of changing the world to fix something that might not be fixable?

Oh yea, people don't get elected using logic and reason. Never mind.

Ah yes, the old "the other guy does it so I do not have to change, too".

Here is the really frustrating part of it: Instead of spending all those billions in Irak, the US could have built/started to build, for less money nonethless, enough solar power plants to generate all the electricity required to run the country. Would have created new jobs, too. But who cares as long as big oil industry runs the country..

It's true.

What ALSO doesn't help is that pretty much every esimate and climate model has GREATLY been exagerated and keep getting proven false over and over again.  So it's rather hard to acually even tell the real results.

The whole field is politics in the way of progress.

Green Energy would be good for so many other reasons... but then everything turns out to be overexagerrated and possible just completely manufactured.

The only climate news I ever see on the BBC or anywhere is how some model or some prediction or something else, was way off and not as bad as people thought.

And everybody would be poorer... because solar power is way too expensive at current.  Solar Power doesn't work viably... outside of like... Nevada because of where it's located. 

The only viable way to really do solar power is individually.  Put solar panels on your roof and sell excess energy back to the grid if you can.  Actual solar power plants are WAAAAAAAY too costly to produce good results.

Plus honestly, they don't make very good primary power plants, because you never know how much power you are going to generate day to day, and the battery methods are still pretty shakey.  So you need to take up WAY more land then you'll probably use on most days, just for the few days you wouldn't.