If man-made global warming were real

[Latopazora]

… how would we go about dealing with it? I don't know if it is real, I don't know if the globe is warming or cooling or doing anything at all. But whether or not its real, I don't think the way the government and whole green movement is going about it the right way. Though, I personally believe that recycling, conserving, not littering, finding alternative means of energy… are all good ideas. But what I have a problem with are the taxes, mandates, brainwashing and just putting the environment above everything else. Some environmental laws are needed, like not dumping sewage into the local body of water.
This is a hypothetical question, so please don't answer with "global warming isn't real". What should we do about global warming that would make any difference?  

[Lord Bitememan]

For my money, it's probably real. I think the issues of real conflict center around whether or not advocates for curtailing it have wildly distorted the impacts of global warming, and whether or not we can take any practical action against it. The recent controversies out of the IPCC suggest that most of the fear-mongering around global warming is overstated. I also recall reading at least one cost-benefits analysis that suggests its cheaper to simply deal with global warming as it comes rather than try to prevent it. This calls into question whether or not we should take action to address the situation. Further, most action that has been taken so far seems to be a total waste of time. Europe wholesale committed to CO2 reductions in the wake of the Kyoto treaty. The result, some ten years later, was a net increase in CO2 emissions. And it cost them money just to do that.

CO2 emissions are inextricably linked with economy. As the economy grows, so too will CO2 emissions. So, we may simply be at the mercy of a self-regulating cycle where we trigger global warming effects, it causes economic contraction reducing emissions, and we enter a long term equilibrium of economic CO2 output and warming level. On the flip side, natural technological innovation may simply solve the problem for us without the need for action. In all instances, I strongly doubt anything can be done about it without hardships so great we will not bear them.  

[Latopazora]

I pretty much agree. If we do have an that kind of impact on the earth, then I think we should let it happen. Though, if I were to go back to my high school science class, billions of years ago when plants were starting to evolve, they released the pollutant, oxygen, which was poisonous to the organisms at the time. Due to the introduction of oxygen, it caused all of earth's life to adapt to the new environment. I thought I'd just put that out there.  

[Pumona]

I would like to say that right now they have no scientific proof that Global Warming is man made. All of the so called proof that Al Gore and others have had were proven wrong.
I do believe in being somewhat green myself, but we are not destroying Earth like some people claim.

This website explains some myths about Global Warming
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/green.htm  

[Lord Bitememan]

Pumona

I would like to say that right now they have no scientific proof that Global Warming is man made. All of the so called proof that Al Gore and others have had were proven wrong.
I do believe in being somewhat green myself, but we are not destroying Earth like some people claim.

This website explains some myths about Global Warming
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/green.htm

That's a bit of an overstatement. The claims Gore and others have made as to the effects of global warming have been demonstrated to be overstated by many orders of magnitude. The claims as to whether or not we can alter temperature through large scale release of CO2 have yet to be disproven to any substantial degree. The geological evidence tends to suggest two concepts that really put a monkey wrench into both camps, both the global warming camp and the skeptics. Geological evidence suggests that periods with high carbon content in the atmosphere coincide with periods of high temperature. That tends to disprove the skeptics on the proof of concept issue. However, these periods, geologically, also tend to correspond to times of wildly flourishing life on the planet. The Cambrian Period, for example, was a time when this world sported some of the richest diversity of life in our geological history, and it also coincided with some of the highest CO2 levels we have in our geological record. Furthermore, the Permian Extinction, one of the most largescale extinction events in geological history, coincides with the end of a trough period in the CO2 levels. So, this tends to suggest that high CO2 levels in the atmosphere for extended periods of time are not irreconcilable with flourishing life. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be any great benefit to low CO2 levels either.  

[DanskiWolf]

I like how Al Gore is always thrown into the debate as if the fact that he made a movie about global warming negates the fact that the vast majority of scientists on the planet have been saying anthropogenic global warming is real for years.