Yes, climate change is real. Yes, adapting to the change will be expensive.
What is not real is that climate change will end the world as we know it - “real soon now”.
Earth's climate has been changing constantly since Earth became a planet 4.5 billion years ago. Sometimes the changes have been harsh - harsh enough to cause the mass extinctions that show up in fossil records. But even in those times life goes on, and the time span between mass extinctions is hundreds of millions of years. The last mass extinction, the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction, was 66 million years ago.
Because Earth’s climate is inherently stable, those who want to spend lots of time and resources on keeping it stable are supporting goat sacrificing. Those humans who deeply believe we can end the world as we know it with human-caused climate change are self-centered and vain - our world is not that human-centric. An interesting twist in this scenario is that scientists, not religious leaders, are the ones spouting “End of the World”.
The waste of goat sacrificing in this case is spending time, resources, and attention on either trying to prevent the change from happening or denying that there will be a change. Both points of view are not paying attention to harsh reality. The harsh reality is there will be change, and we should be looking at how to be cost effective in dealing with it.
First off, climate is complex - it's weather on steroids. This means predicting climate change is still filled-to-the-brim with uncertainties. Climate scientists may be certain, doom and gloom climate change enthusiasts may be certain, but the harsh reality is there is still a lot going on we humans can't predict. This 5 Oct 13 Economist article, “Clouds of (slightly less) Unknowing”, describes how much we are still learning.
Second, Earth, the planet, has been continuously habitable for 3.5 billion years. There was never a time in this period when there weren’t a whole lot of creatures living. The mass extinctions killed off lots of species, and large parts of the Earth became uninhabitable, but large parts remained habitable and life continued. When the climate mellowed out again, life spread widely again. This means that however strong the forces are that are trying to push Earth into uninhabitable, there are even stronger restoring forces that keep that from happening. The Earth's climate is not some kind of delicate, exciting high wire act. It's the old person taking a nap on the couch. It’s not going to change quickly or dramatically in a way that extinguishes all life.
Third, climate is a deeply emotional issue. Weather has been important to mankind since before mankind walked the Earth. This means that when we are making choices involving weather, we need to be extra careful that we aren't goat sacrificing - making choices that don't solve the problem but are valuable simply because they take away our fears, maintain our comfort level, and let us sleep better.
Much scientific research is funded by committees handing out grants. The scientist looking for money writes up a grant proposal that is either accepted or denied by the appropriate committee that controls grant distributions. These committees are made of people which means the choices are influenced by very human thinking.
Historically, weather and climate research funding were powered by the dream of understanding climate not by the dream of influencing it. Never the less, the first change to alter the weather was introduced through cloud seeding, which turned out to be a small scale way of starting rain and dispersing fog. It was not much of a breakthrough because it was not only small scale but also soft science, as in, the results and effectiveness are hard to measure.
Up until the 1990's the climate forecasters were predicting a coming Ice Age. They were requesting funding to study when it would come and how it would come about. The response to their funding requests was average because it was still simply an understanding issue, not a change-the-outcome issue.
Then the revolution hit: Researchers discovered that funding requests for researching human-caused climate change were far more likely to be granted - funding committee members feeling guilty that humans may have made a mess of the earth started opening the funding spigot a lot wider. And the rest, as we say, is history. We are now living with well-financed research aiming to prove that climate change is a human fault, and we should be spending big bucks to turn back the industrializing clock in various fashions to stop the change. Some people have responded to this by calling the doom and gloom scientists crazy. The response of the scientists and their supporters has been to call their critics “climate change deniers”. This has produced a lot of heated shouting back and forth that the media has loved covering, but no clear answer as to what we humans should be doing about climate change, if anything.
My version of the solution to this climate change threat is based on a Roger Truism: What technology takes away it can give again with greater prosperity. Poverty plays for keeps. In other words, we need to be researching solutions to climate change that are both relevant and have high cost benefit. An example:
Threat: Seas are rising due to global warming.
Solution One: For now fix this threat with dikes and moving away from low-lying areas, not with abandoning fossil fuel. Dikes and moving a few blocks away from a beach are a lot cheaper. Over the long run we will fix this threat with increased productivity. As our technology gets better, we will need less fossil fuel because our productivity - what we get from each pound of fuel - will steadily and constantly improve. If we are prosperous, we will need less fuel than if we are poverty-stricken.
Solution Two: Embrace nuclear power. By this I mean fully embrace it. Use it not just for big things such as big power plants, but for medium and small applications as well, such as powering cars and even artificial organs in our bodies. Embracing nuclear power will open huge doors in what we can accomplish and how efficiently we can accomplish it.
Wind and solar? Invest in them when they have demonstrated their cost-benefit. Right now they are being invested in because they feel good. This means they are taking time, resources, and attention away from better solutions. This is waste, and the waste is making us use even more fossil fuels. Right now, in the early 2010's, wind and solar are goat sacrificing.
Climate change is currently being treated like many other end-of-the-world scenarios. It's hyped as deadly by gloom and doom types, and they are being listened to because the topic is deeply emotional. The solutions being offered are romantic and emotionally appealing in the “let's get back to nature” category. These solutions won't fix the problem, unless goat sacrificing is considered an acceptable solution.