As I see it, the facts - such as they are - are like this:

1) We can't control the climate

2) We can control our use of resources

3) We only have one planet

To me it makes sense to get my water heated up by the Sun - it's 30p/litre if I want to burn oil to do the same job, and I want to use that oil to warm my house up in the winter time instead.

If the Sun's output is presently increasing (and the evidence seems to be there that it really is), then there's a whole lot of nothing we can do about the cause.

But it's not like this is new, the Sun's been doing what it does since way before we modern humans got concerned about it - no wonder there are so many ancient solar worship religions.

The only thing that's different now is that the impact of any catastrophic climate change event will be global mass-migration, population unrest and economic collapse and the politicians are finally waking up to the fact that whoever's holding the baby when it all kicks off is going to be in for a hell of a rough ride.

On a more local scale, one spring storm big enough to send a tidal surge up the Thamas that the barrier can't cope with and London's underwater.

What do you do when a couple of million UK citizens are displaced and the seat of Government and the UK economy plus all its infrastructure is flooded out, overnight?

Unless we remove our dependence on fossil fuels for energy, the only logical end result is that we will eventually use them all up. It took something like 500 million years (give or take) to create those resources in the first place and without them we wouldn't have a technological society at all.

*Irrespective* of whether the CO₂ released in their burning is the cause of global warming, the bigger picture is fundamentally that we either strip the planet bare of energy dense, readily usable fuel or we don't.

If we do, we condemn our species to being forever earthbound - ultimately in a non-technological society fighting it out tooth and claw with the rest of Nature just like we did hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Some would say that might not be such a bad thing.

--
Simon