My ideology is fairly pragmatic: people have been predicting the end of the world since before the days of Christ, and have been, without exception, wrong. Despite our best efforts, we've dodged nuclear armageddon, global cooling, dozens of near-Earth asteroids, the evaporation of the ozone layer, swine flu, avian flu, SARS, smallpox epidemics, the worst wars in the history of mankind, and the collapse of several of the world's greatest empires. Is global warming going to be worse than any of the problems we've already dealt with, or had the good fortune to avoid thus far? Possibly. But doomsday prophets have a pretty poor track record. We will survive global warming. Things will be worse for some people and better for others.
It's worth pointing out, too, that the problem as it stands is not that global temperature can't rise too high. Biodiversity heavily favours warm areas--the vast majority of living organisms are not that far from the equator. This includes, to a fairly significant degree, humans, with a majority concentrated in near-equatorial Asia. There's huge expanses of land, in, say, Northern Canada and Russisa, that are essentially inhabited, not only by humans, but also by animals because it is too cold. There is no reason to think that our current temperatures, globally, or really, even locally, are optimal. The danger is not in the increase itself, but the rate of increase. Nature takes many generations to adapt to changes in climate. If, over the next thousand years, the temperature was to slowly increase by 2, 5, or even 10C, there probably wouldn't be a problem. We'd see some extinctions, sure. But mostly we'd see outward migration of species from the equator. We'd probably see the same in people. But if the same changes happen in 20, 50, or 100 years, the effects could be much more severe, because fewer species would have the opportunity to adapt. Humans will survive. We're remarkably resilient and we can adapt to change quickly, although not always correctly.
What bothers me about the whole debate is the way that the proposed solutions have been framed. Namely: reduce emissions or perish. I don't believe that this position is defensible because it ignores a whole host of measures that could be extremely efficient at dealing with the problem of global warming, although they may create other problems. For example, consider a geoengineering solution: rather than reducing warming emissions directly (eg. CO2), we could simply increase the amount of cooling emissions (eg. SO2) to compensate. It's been argued that we already produce more than enough cooling emissions that, properly deployed (namely in the upper atmosphere rather than the lower atmosphere where most of these end up), we'd be easily to easily overcome the effects of global warming. What's great about this is that it's a dynamic response system: we can design our instruments to eject coolants either into the upper atmosphere, and have a bypass that dumps into the lower instead. Thus we could tune with some accuracy the amount of cooling we want. Now, of course, we then have to deal with the consequences of dumping extra SO2 into the atmosphere, but if you believe that global warming is a problem of apocalyptic scale, then such solutions shouldn't be off the table. The utility of such a thing is almost certainly higher than allowing a genuine catastrophe. On the other hand, if you don't feel that global warming is such a problem to justify such solutions, how can you argue that people should be willing to severe compromise their quality of life to justify emission reductions? The utility of the geoengineering could well be higher than lowering carbon driven standards of living worldwide as well, at least until a renewable, cheap, replacement for fossil fuels can be found.
Hoping to win with every class, doomed. Archer, Barbarian, Bard, Beastfighter, Druid, Elementalist, Farmer, Fighter, Monk, and ULE Priest down.