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1) Science Fact: There is an observatory on top of a dormant volcano in Hawaii that has been measuring the levels of CO2 (the "greenhouse gas") for the past 30 years or so, and the levels are rising precipitously every year, higher than even during the Pennsylvanian era (when Dinosaurs ruled the earth, and all the plant growth made the COAL) the ONLY source for this CO2 is man made hydrocarbon burning.
2)Science FACT: The global aveage temperature has been rising since the industrial revolution got started. Every year the earth's mean temperature goes up a fraction of a degree. And the glaciers are melting.
Just those two facts alone are enough to convince me that we are doing something that is changing the parameters of this little planet we inhabit.
Will we be able to adapt? Up until about a hundred years ago, earths population was remarkably stable at about 1 Billion Humans total.
It is now at 6 Billion and will add another Billion in about 20 years... I would argue that whatever "reserve" or adaptability that man and womankind had to adjust to climate change has been nulled by that fact alone.
Is doing "something" about this better than doing "nothing?" I don't know, that's for you and politicians to decide...
If the trends are real we need to understand what sort of adaptations might be needed, and figure out if there are actions we can take to stabilize the climate.
I will partly agree with your fact 1. It has been increasing, but there is some discussion as to weather it really is the highest it's ever been or not, but it's not a huge sticking point because even if it has ever been higher, it's gone way up. However I would question man made hydrocarbon burning being the ONLY source. I have heard one interesting argument. For ~100 years we put out EVERY forest fire we could as fast as we could. This prevented the release of CO2. Now we are letting them burn, we are even setting some prescribed burns, thereby releasing the CO2 in these dead trees. Does this account for ALL the increase? No, but it's a part of it. It's hubris to assume that we can out guess nature, as we have seen it set fires for a reason and we screwed with that for WAY too long.
On your fact number two. There is some question about that. First there is some question of if the locations that the sensors are in is still valid: http://www.dailytech.com/New+Scandal+Erupts+ove... some of sensors have had suburbia grow up around them and are getting less then ideal data. There's also controversy over some of the "new" points actually being "old" points due to a Y2K bug: http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+... so again it may not be as clear cut as some people want us to think.
Now given all that I am not going to be arrogant enough to say global warming doesn't exist. I believe that there is good evidence that it does; just not as much evidence as some people would like to claim and really not enough to adopt the extremist attitude that some people have.
I would also like to point out that 100 years ago, the population finished doing a long slow increase from 200 million people at ~1CE to ~2 billion people in 1920. The growth was fairly linear up till ~1910 or so. At that point advances in medicine and technology made keeping people alive and healthy ALOT easier. There are those that say the "turning point" was in the late 1800s when Pasteur confirmed germ theory of disease, and gave more credibility to vaccinations (which had been around since the 1700s but was a dangerous and often fatal practice until Pasteur made advances here. Some would argue that the "turning point" was in 1910 when the first antibiotic was released into the market. However it's likely a combination of the two. So the long slow steady growth stopped because the mortality rate of children dropped sharply and then people also started to not die from common illnesses due to better treatments. Also people knew better how top prevent thing from spreading (like washing hands and not touching dead things). These were just natural progressions that lead to more people. The fact that these developments line up with increase in CO2, the industrial revolution, the beginning of environmental data collection, and a whole host of other things does not necessarily constitute a correlation.
I think we should make changes to have less impact on the environment, but I also believe that the data presented to the American (and world) public is simplistic, full of inaccuracies, and designed to push an agenda. It's sad that too many people don't see the house of card that's being presented to they and don't ask to see more data. There's good evidence that we need to make changes, but not enough for the drastic reaction some people want.
I for one would chose an alternative fuel car if it met my needs and was not more expensive . However when I bought my jeep a few years ago there was not a vehicle that i liked that was alternative fuel. I won't buy one of those small, underpowered vehicles that they make now. The underpowered by the way is intentionally, it's how the auto industry held back this revolution in technology, for years that intentionally linked small, underpowered, and expensive with "fuel efficient". This is now hanging and that's good. It's just unfortunate that it took so long (and so many H2s) to get here. I gotta tell ya that Tesla Roadster looks cool...
We thought that we had to stop all forest fires for 100 years.....and did so. It was the wrong choice. Sometimes we need to better understand a process before we f**k with it.
That, or take steps to ensure the future of the species isn't tied up in the survivability of Earth.