The title of this thread sparked my interest, but what has transpired here with the betting and the figures seem irrelevant to the intended discussion. Maybe it did, I am not sure.
I would love to get this discussion back on track. Agree this is a "climate" discussion, not a "weather" discussion. I think you should boil it down to the facts. Fact is that we continue to burn fossil fuels, which, if you know the science, are basically materials that trapped carbon on earth from millions of years ago that helped "cool" the earth down and allowed for plants, animals and human lives of today to begin and sustain. So now we are slowly but surely releasing them back into the atmosphere, and at some point we are going to hit that threshold where the temperature becomes deadly to life.
So in the interest of steering this discussion back on course - I do agree that global warming is a serious challenge. It's not an overwhelming or impossible challenge, but t this point, I believe it needs to be attacked from two fronts. Reduce the rate of release of Carbon into the air (the most obvious solution is to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, vehicle emission is the biggest offender in North America), and reduce the amount of Carbon already in the air (one of the simplest way is to plant more trees - they consume carbon to grow).
So with that said, does anyone think otherwise? Is the climate change trivial?