QUOTE(anthony @ Sat 24th July 2010, 7:13am)
Furthermore, I don't think it particularly matters whether or not global warming is caused by humans, because all the evidence I've seen is that it would be far too costly to stop it and much more reasonable to deal with it. I'd rather my grandchildren live close to the beach in air conditioning, than in the stone ages.
False choice. We can avoid the stone ages, or even very much of a change in civilization, by building 10,000 really big nuclear reactors (obviously including some fast breeders, else we run out of U-235 in a decade or two, whereas with breeders, our bridge-time to fusion or whatever, is a century or two).
Do this right, and about the only difference you'll notice is some smaller cars and a lot more mass transit.
We're about halfway though the planets' oil, and we've already burned the easy half. The remaining half can be used for airtravel, petrochemicals, and so on, so long as we quit wasting it on heat and ground transportation.
As for the remaining coal, God help us if we burn it all. It's not just a matter of being hotter and closer to the beach, it's a matter of dead ocean reefs from acid and just a few more degrees of temp. And with them, a whole ecology that we probably need, and that's not even being chicken little.
Of course, I doubt very much if we'll build those reactors when we need them. We'll do what we're doing now, which is more or less nothing. The eco freaks will keep us from doing it until gas gets to $10 and then $20 and then $50 a gallon, and then there will be much weeping and wailing and THEN we'll start to build reactors. Expect some dislocations in the meantime. Including no air conditioning. And I hope you don't like fish.