Nick - I probably think the same thing, but am trying not to believe it. Here's my current prediction: in twenty or thirty year's time, we will probably have abjectly failed to curb co2 emissions, given that current solutions include technologies that haven't actually been tested on a large scale. At best, the rate of increase will have levelled out. As oil suppliles dwindle, presented with the choice of burning more coal or leaving it in the ground, we will have started burning more coal. At this point, God will be laughing his ass off. He likes presenting us with these choices he knows we'll have to fail; its in our nature. (I enjoy being an atheist angry at God.)

The effects of warming will either a) be impossible to ignore, and so those ideologically opposed to AGW will have been forced more solidly into a position that says: the warming is not human-caused. Or, it's human-made, but its due to de-vegetation, and increasing co2 will actually improve that situation. At any rate, something that means we can still burn coal. So we'll probably continue to increase atmospheric co2 up to the 21st century, at which point all bets are off. At the very least, major land icesheets will be on their way into the ocean by now, and we'll have bequethed collosal sea-level rises to people in the coming 2-300 years. Once Greenland starts going, it's a car-crash in slow motion - we can't do a fart about it. Actually, farting will make it worse - more methane. Or b) we're not warming. The anti-AGW people have all turned out to be correct: co2 is, in fact, not a greenhouse gas at all, and somehow we got the physics of it completely wrong for the past two hundred years, all those satellites measuring the change in IR radiation were measuring wrong, and all those natural changes that seemed to corroborate the theory were a temporary variation. Phew. Thank God for that.

Often, there's an argument that the case for AGW is *a bit* right, but not enough to worry about right now. The question then becomes: OK, so what amount of co2 is too much? Are you saying we can carry on up to 1000ppm, or what? Or shall we carry on right up to point where we start actually suffocating ourselves? This would clearly be another good tack for anyone wanting to oppose action now or in the near future: "I have a better model that says 1500ppm is the safe point. That's well into the 21st century, or even later - chill out."

Or perhaps: we warm the world just enough to put off the next ice age. Humankind in x thousand years will thank us for saving them from being driven to the equator by mile-high ice sheets reaching down to London. Yay for co2!