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I agree, we should stick to the science. Here you go:

• The peer-reviewed Journal "Nature Climate Change" includes and references thousands of scientific papers on the subject.
• The IPCC's 1,500-page "Physical Science Basis" report cites hundreds of references and is authored by hundreds of experts. It clearly states what we know, don't know, and how we know it. It reviews its past predictions, notes where its models have errored, and takes into account an incredible wealth and scope of scientific observations over 150 years.
• The IPCC also makes all of its data and models available for review. So you can see for yourself.
• The US Government also recently updated its regularly scheduled report written by over 300 experts.
• The USGS has a Climate Model Browser that lets you try out all the different simulated predictions for Global Warming. You'll notice the specifics vary widely, but they all predict dramatic temperature rises.
• The NOAA has a National Climate Data Center where you can watch the temperature trends. Here's a visualization based on the data.
• The United States Defense department has several reports on the risks posed by Global Warming (see here, here, here, and here).
• The Center for Coastal Resources Management (CCRM) has produced some excellent reports on sea level rise due to Climate Change to inform local communities like Norfolk VA, where flooding is already a major issue, what to expect in the near future due to Global Warming.
• You can also watch the sea levels rise at the NOAA's Sea-Level Trends website.
• If you don't trust the government, then I recommend The Berkely Earth Project. It was funded by the liberal's favorite bad guys, the Koch Brothers, but its results were so compelling that the lead Climatologist, Richard A. Muller, wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing he was no longer a skeptic.
• Of course, it's always good to have a contrarian viewpoint in the mix, and for that, I recommend AGW skeptic Judith Curry, who presents valid challenges to the consensus with her strong scientific background. I don't find her convincing, but her challenges make for good food for thought.

If you dispute this science, then I recommend publishing your own peer-reviewed papers, your own models, and your own alternative hypotheses in the scientific journals. I see a lot of skeptics nit-picking the science, but not many actually taking the effort to publish in the scientific forums.

I eagerly await one of the skeptics out there to please post an equally substantive list of references to "balance" my citations, so everyone can review and compare them.

The US military disagrees with you. See, for example, this CNA report.

> Who knows what world leaders will do? Cheapest thing is probably just to beef up their militaries and shoot incoming refugees.

Precisely.
http://securityandclimate.cna.org/report/SecurityandClimate_Final.pdf

"By 2025, 40% of the world's population will live in areas suffering severe water shortages"

Is it necessary to defend the united states? No?

Apparently yes:
http://securityandclimate.cna.org/

multiple people so far have read your post as defending these practices.

I am not surprised when I remember to look at how effective the American school system is at teaching kids how to read.

What you are writing here is basically a defense of the practice of invading another country's sovereign territory simply because you do not like their environmental policy. Unfortunately, in order for such a policy to hold weight in an ethical sense, you must be able to prove your core assertion

What nonsense! Apparently your school taught you no more about science than about reading comprehension. There is really no way ever to prove cause and effect beyond any doubt (outside of artificial systems like pure math). You can bound the probability of your assertion, and you can be more sure that you're right than you are that the sun will rise tomorrow, but you can't be absolutely, positively sure ever. When I am pretty sure that you are harming me, I will act. When I have a pretty strong suspicion that you are harming me and a pretty strong suspicion that if I do nothing everyone will die, then I will act. That is reasonable.

If you are standing in your back yard, shooting a gun off vaguely in my direction, should I wait for you to hit me before I start shooting back? When I feel a bullet pass through my leg, should I believe that it was from the gun that I saw you shooting a split second earlier, or should I question even that, and not act until I can do projectile forensics? Even then the bullet could be a plant, made to look like it came from your gun by chance or an unknown third party. There is no proof--only evidence. And it is completely reasonable to act on good evidence, and indeed pretty fucking stupid not to.

Climate change is the poster-child in this case, there are plenty of well written peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the idea that our activities are seriously harming the environment, and just as many citing proof that this is not the case.

Find me a couple, could you? They are pretty scarce, especially recently as evidence pours in that many current observations are actually significantly worse than the "cautious" models predicted. Actually, the vast majority of the scientific community is pretty scared, and I'd love to know where you got the idea that that is not the case.

The idea that a war in a country half-way across the world away because they're burning coal into air that "does not respect human boundaries" is patently ridiculous

Why?

What is your obsession with political boundaries? You ought to know that they are completely arbitrary, created by humans for their own ends. No country anywhere has borders based on laws of nature, and few were established in the first place without bloodshed, without displacing some other people against any idea of justice. They are capricious and arbitrary. Furthermore, borders can change without much affecting the environment. The converse is not true, however: global warming could easily bring down many of the political systems and boundaries that we have now (see http://securityandclimate.cna.org/report/ for one analysis), is quite likely to lead to famine and war on a scale never seen before, and has absolutely no concept of only punishing those who deserve it.

The longer we go without acting, the more devastating the solution will be, and the less likely to work. We will never have absolute proof of cause, and we will not have absolute proof of result until it is too late. However, as of now, we are pretty damn sure that we have a very good idea of what's going on.

It's pretty disgusting to watch us fuck ourselves over so thoroughly, knowing that we're doing it and how to make things better, and yet doing nothing.

Yours is a refreshing view point. The way we say it is that the free flow of oil is in the nation's strategic interest. So, we spend a lot on making sure that it flows freely.

Ultimately we need the price of oil to fall below the cost of extraction but this will only come about by reducing demand to well below supply. Your method of taxing to reduce demand can be a part of this but I fear that doing this at the level that would cause productive wells to be shut down would be impoverishing. I suspect that rationing is the only equitable form of self restraint that will get us that far along the road to where we need to be.

Though there are some programs here to assist people with paying for home heating oil or gas if their income is low, most of our subsidies go to suppliers and producers rather than to buyers. Not all of the subsidies are in the form of money. Sometimes is is in the form of protection from liability or extreamly low royalites for using public land. And, for oil there is a blood subsidy as well.

We seem to be willing to spend as long as people are willing to lend so yes, there will be a time when continuing to borrow will be too expensive since people will no longer be willing to lend. I think we are begining to see some signs of this now as oil is starting to be traded in euros rather than dollars. This is the reason I am wondering about when we might seek a fixed exchange rate.

President Eisenhower made just the point you do. From my experience, however, from the inside, people feel that they are doing a very good thing protecting our country so that the coruption is easily overlooked. I don't know when spreading peace will become a priority again. There seems to be a slight turn happening here: http://securityandclimate.cna.org/report/.