There have been some things said in the last few threads here which to me defy common sense.

Please keep in mind the influence of the sun which we observe every day.
the sun shining on the ground produces many orders of magnitude of heat than anything that man does the problem with greenhouse gasses is that they keep a percentage of heat from radiating back to space.

Water tends to self regulate. On the one hand water vapor may trap heat near the surface, on the other, clouds, an obvious manifestation of water in the atmosphere, reflect much much more heat than air saturated to pre-cloud levels can trap.

In North America, especially in the southern, in my experience, the droughts have only been serious problems to those employing irrigation. So the problem is not people. It is lawns and monoculture.

In the west, particularly California, the problem is the same. However the dearth of snow in the Sierras means that the water resources will support an ever decreasing level of activity. Can California remain America's fruit basket?

Only the intentionally ignorant would deny that humans are increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. And knowing that Only fools would wait to see if that would affect the ecosystem.

We are living under two potential avalanches. The polar ice caps and the millions of acres of permafrost. The tipping point awaits. If both significantly melt more than they already have. Coastal geography will significantly change for the worse.

It would seem to me that the risk is much to great to ignore. The disaster in New Orleans looked inevitable. A pop song was written about it for gosh sakes.

Do we really need to wait for President Sarah Palin to promise gondola launches for the remaining buildings of lower Manhattan before this is taken seriously.

Don't look it as alarmism. Think of it as the passengers of a bus traveling toward the center of a lake with thinning ice. They know that eventually the ice will give way. They are doing anything they can to get the driver to at the very least, slow down.