In reply to neilstubbs:
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> If everyone did their bit it would make a difference, but sadly there will always be people who choose not to care.
The human race has to come up with a way of dealing with the problem. We're on track for allowing bad things to happen (flooding various places first I guess) and then trying to cope with the consequences. I guess it's possible that we could find solutions to things as they crop up, and for everything to be alright. Personally I doubt it, and I think that the climate will change where it's good/bad/possible to live on the planet, and people will migrate and then fight over pressurized resources.
We've done it this way because we're human beings, and cooperation at a global scale is simply beyond us. It's how we've evolved - we're naturally driven to have interests much closer to home.
I don't think a realistic solution is to rely on individuals to make voluntary sacrifices. We don't work like that, no creatures do. I think we need policies imposed by cooperating governments that make it in our interests to make those sacrifices (James Oswald mentions taxes and stuff upthread somewhere, for a start) - I think these policies will come along once things start going really tits up. If we're going to stick with some kind of global free market as an economic system, then it needs some big trans-national regulation to make it work without just racing to see who can burn the most carbon as we do now.
I hope that as things start to go tits up, as a species we'll have enough time and intelligence to go for putting policies in place to slow down the process of climate change, rather than just going into chaos and war as people migrate around the place. So, it would be good if people were 'warmed up' to the idea of making some sacrifices and understanding the problem, even though those sacrifices won't have an appreciable impact in themselves.
On the other hand, if the public/consumers refuse to acknowledge the problem (by just saying "I don't believe it" in the face of mountains of evidence, for example) and aren't prepared to make any sacrifices, it will be far harder for governments to put in place policies when the pressure's really on. And if governments refuse to understand the problem and make sacrifices, then we're screwed: that's the route of carrying on making the problem worse until it's actually chaos. We may well end up with a disaster on our hands that we'd seen coming for decades, but simply couldn't cooperate enough to do anything about. We would at that point deserve to be wiped out as a species, I think.