The big debate over climate change hinges around the question of how much is mankind contributing to the perceived warming of the atmosphere around our pale blue dot? And if we are causing a shift in global warming then what should or can we do about it now? We know the Earth has ice ages and warming periods and it goes through cycles; controlling of such events or minimizing one set of events might shallow out a major pendulum swing, which if gone unchecked could place hardship on human civilizations with 10-30 Billion people on the planet in a few decades.
Consider if you will the potential eventuality of crop failures, lack of water, severe weather, natural disasters, etc.
Knowing the most you can about the cycles of normality and within the fuzzy boundary borders of the past and future we can better predict and perhaps intervene temporarily or enough to prevent a catastrophic event which could hurt mankind's civilizations and societies in the near term, but we must make sure we do not aid in a further pendulum swing later you see, that is why it is important to only act if you are sure and not necessarily due to scare tactics used to disrupt for shifting of wealth and resources unless and only if it is a win/win for the right reasons.
In other words everyone gets what they want and we solve a future issue.
Some of the climate folks believe it may be more wise to do nothing than to cause an unintended consequence and bring about early global cooling unnecessarily through a mistake.
Others say if we do not act then we are all doomed.
Yet, in reality if we act incorrectly we may initiate a horrific problem that indeed will then be its own self-fulfilling prophesy of the Global Climate Doom.
Creating a problem and then working to solve it is a manmade commonality, yet when it comes to the flows of civilization why disrupt unnecessarily and when dealing with cycles of nature, perhaps we need to understand what we are doing, experiment a little, work through the kinks, learn from our errors and proceed with caution all the while? So, maybe we should consider all this in 2006.