Nothing is going to change, get used to it.

[anvi]

I honestly haven't informed myself about this issue nearly as much as I should have by now.  If anyone can recommend good primers, I'm certainly interested.

In any case, in a debate that seems to feature poles of catastrophic alarmism and myopic resistance, intuitively it's the myopic attitude that concerns me more.  We seem to get bogged down in "metaphysical" debates about climate change, what proportions of it are man-made vs. environmentally cyclical, what parameter of degrees by which the temperature is likely to rise in the next century, identifying, based on current research and technology, exactly what needs to or even can be done, and so on.  Absent unanimous certainty about all these questions, we don't want to act and cause economic disruption.

If we adopted this kind of attitude about our individual physical health, it seems to me, we'd surely put ourselves at greater risk.  We don't necessarily know if smoking, eating cheeseburgers and drinking too much will ruin any given individual's health and greatly shorten their lifespan.  But we do know enough about the heightened risks to make recommendations about how that person can avoid possible major illnesses.  And we would probably think that a person who paid no heed to any of this was probably being fairly imprudent and perhaps irresponsible to their own dependent family members.  By analogy, we may not know with any certainty, especially given current data and research, whether increased greenhouse gas emissions will cause widespread and species-threatening damage to the planet in the next century or two or whether the effects from actions already done can be significantly reversed.  But we do seem to know enough about the greenhouse effect, the duration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and the consequences to which they may progressively lead to realize that we may well be running some risks to proximate future generations.  If we pay no heed to these increased risks, by not backing increased research into alternative energies, taking at least some measures to reduce emissions and encourage such measures on an international scale, that strikes me as just imprudent and perhaps quite irresponsible to future generations.  There are also possible economic benefits, including employment benefits, to such research and measures, not merely downsides.

But those are just my intuitions.  As noted, I'm not very well-informed yet about the science and so can claim little authority for those intuitions.