More people would be happy to support solutions to other environmental problems...the ones that happen to be real, causing real problems.

This post was gold, Squirrel.

Yes but what would be the point of doing this now? Today, in the middle of a financial crisis when any excuse is being metered to avoid action. Much like healthcare, the environment will be delayed for aslong as humanly possibe. My country will do its part since the majority of our wealth has come from cheap coal sales to china in the last decade. This is the problem, no one is going to do anything especially if people are kept naive about the real facts involved.

Since the economy is our "golden standard for living" on both sides of parliament this is the sollution that has been chosen. If you want to talk about liberty, sure lets talk about the liberty that allows one country to use 25% of the entire earths resources. Lets talk about that doubling because of China in the next 20 - 30 years.

Suppse that the country that uses 25% of the resources but is responsible for 25% of the development of new technology which will allow the rest of the world to live a better life while using less resources; what if the actions you perform to lower the usage of resources has a limited impact on short term consumption but prevents the development of the technology for future efficient resource usage?

Most of the areas you're upset that there isn't rapid enough progress on are also very complicated systems where the reaction to an action can be greater in scale and far more negative than the original problem was; and in this environment it is actually very dangerous to make large changes, and most changes should come little by little after you understand what the impact of the previous change was. As a demonstration consider affordable housing where the end result of several large changes to multiple organizations in an attempt to make housing more affordable made housing less affordable; and the eventual collapse of the artificial market conditions produced by these changes produced a crisis in the financial markets.

Its ironic that more money isn't being spent 'studying the issue of the century' as is being spent by running around like a headless chicken. I ask, one simple question; why aren't there massive computing projects underway to run these computer models in much higher resolution and detail? If this is the biggest issue mankind faces, then where are the several bigger than anything we've got so far super computers?

Too many banks to bail out and car companies to save, so global warming has to be put in a lower priority :P

@Squilliam, thats most likely due to the cost involved and the continued attempt to avoid investment by big firms in this research. Governments surely invest in research but when your considering a global study its got to be a difficult thing to achieve.

For the past couple of years I have thought that there needed to be a large open source climate modeling software package that is built with the assumption that most people would extend it through script-based plug-ins; and the licence would be written in such a way that all published results had to release the source code and all necessary inputs to achieve their results, and also would have to demonstrate how well the system performed at recreating the climate of the past 2000 years.

I have never acted on this thought because I am aware that it would never be used because it displays the "Wizzard" as a man behind a curtain ...

Haha, but seriously if they can afford $100B on the ISS, they can surely afford $10B worth of computers... They can even call it a tech industry bailout if they want.

Btw: How many climate models accurately predicted a drop in temperature these past few years?

Or the increase this year? You could mention that too Squilliam.