I think that whether the Earth is warming up, cooling off or just deciding to fuck with us we should pursue "green" technology. Of course politicians and other assorted nut jobs fuck it up. But that's no reason to say that we should just ignore this. At the very least you have to realize that our current infrastructure is based on very finite resources and that developing real alternatives isn't just a fun way to spend billions of dollars; it is necessary to maintain our standard of living and potentially our very lives.
Here's what we know:
1. The earth is heading up
Here's what we don't know:
1. The main causes
2. Whether or not the main cause is something humans are doing
3. Whether or not we can do anything about it, even if we
are causing it
4. How to actually go about doing it if we could
The whole point is that it WILL affect our standard of living, possibly for no reason, and could even do harm in the long run. We nave NO idea whether its "necessary" or not to spend these billions of dollars you speak of. The only thing we can (barely) seem to agree on is that the the earth is indeed getting warmer. As for everything else, its anyone's guess.
If it was a case of "Oh its going to be slightly warmer" then we wouldn't be too fussed, but when it starts effecting crops (you know, those things we eat to survive) that?s when it becomes a problem. I mean in the sense of failing harvests and farmland being flooded by rising sea levels, as well as people being affected by floods, which happens more and more in Britain, and I'm sure those houses/railway lines/roads/shops/offices weren't intentionally built on land that floods every year.
If it ever got to a point where crops failed to grow because of the heat (unlikely, as we have greenhouses made
to heat crops; its often a condition we find
desirable) There's always genetically modified crops and selective breeding that can fix that problem too. That's the LEAST of our worries. And I'm not going to bother looking for the data but I'm fairly certain that the vaaaaaast majority of farmland is on the mainland and away from danger of these rising sea levels.
The only thing that would cause failing harvests would be to convert totally to "green" organic farming. All other arguments against it aside(and there are many), this would set us back to a time when crops DID fail all the time, and for no apparent reason.