Global warming-fact or fiction and how do you propose we tackle it?

[Final-Fan]

POST TRANSPLANT!  (All the content of this post is drawn from my posts in thread 14218)

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

"These assessments have largely followed or endorsed the IPCC position that "An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities" "

15 out of 17 on that list agree and the other two (including "American Association of Petroleum Geologists") don't disagree. 

"...no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate."
(emphasis added)

I'm not going to bother putting pages and pages of data up here but I am going to say that the huge number of renowned scientific organizations supporting one side of the "controversy" and utter lack of them on the other side may not make it a fact, but it's damn well close enough to fact for me to take their word on it.  Certainly it's enough for me to take their word on it over the media or politicians or whatnot. 

There is no dispute in the mainstream scientific community that humans are affecting global climate and that the effect is higher temperature.

The only question is what the amount of warming will be, and how fast it will occur.

The current majority opinion is that the increase will be a small number of degrees in this century but that even a small change in average global climate will have large, possibly severe, and regionally devastating consequences.