The idea of skepticism is all well and good, but think about this: which psychological force is more powerful, intellectual honesty or human laziness? How much work have you personally done to try to understand our climate? While you are being skeptical, are you living with less consumption than you had before the possibility was as public, staking a middle ground between two possibilities, or are you continuing on as usual?<p>This is a global issue. You will find hyperbole and mistaken predictions, and yes, fraud, on both sides. Nature doesn't care. The question is: by how much can we alter the planet's ecosystem before it is unsafe? The IPCC's models predict about a 2C temperature rise in the 2090s from the 1990s if we have 450 ppm in the atmosphere. That temperature rise is further predicted to be the point we had better not go past, to avoid more severe damage. We are currently at 385 ppm, over 280 ppm from before the industrial revolution. That means we've used up 60% of the slack we had towards a pretty hard (and hardening) limit. Clearly, with the knowledge we have about the physics of greenhouse gases, there is <i>some</i> amount of CO2, some amount of radiative forcing, that is beyond what the world can handle without risking severe changes to the ecosystem and our way of life. It is not enough for skeptics to claim 'we don't know what that amount is, we have our doubts,' if it is followed by words or actions that support business as usual. There must be some agreement towards an acceptable limit to the dumping of a disruptive chemical, in massive quantities, into a finite atmosphere on a finite planet.<p>For what it's worth, I think it's more likely that carbon reduction policies will create a positive, rather than negative, effect on the economy.