Climate change - Misleading arguments

http://realclimate.org/

While real climate does often do a good job of explaining the climate science, I think their logic gets quite fuzzy and partisan when they are alluding to solutions.

The question isn't one of "Is there global warming? If yes, we need action, if no, we don't need action".

That's rubbish. There's fair consensus about what continued emissions of CO2 are likely to do to the climate. There's even some consensus about what we should do about climate change: In practise, everybody's going for a combination of supporting research, doing cheap and easy things to cut greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for some necessary adaptation.

There's a reason for the policy consensus (visible in action rather than rhetoric). Let me explain by example. Suppose we knew that say a meteroite had a 10% chance of turning Earth into cosmic dust by 2100, wiping out humanity, and suppose we could only deflect that meteorite with present technology, if we acted by 2010 and used 10% of world GDP to do it. We'd go for it and spend the money and not argue about scientific uncertainties or technological progress possibly enabling us to do the job cheaper.

But climate change is not like that. We know with very high certainty that it'll get warmer by 2100 (assuming reasonable emissions scenarios based on only incremental technological change) and that the new climate is going to be similarly hospitable for humans as the present climate. An extra half a meter of sea level, or tropical sea temperatures allowing hurricanes in a few areas that are marginal today is a far cry from a wipe out of humanity. It's entirely adaptable to and while there's disagreement about the cost, it's clear that it'll be modest compared to world GDP.

It's therefore hard to propose measures today that would have a far from modest cost.