Ridicule the global warming out of you

An interesting commentary in Monday's WSJ about the arguments surrounding global warming:

"You'd think this would be a rich time for debate on the issue of climate change. But it's precisely as sweeping change on climate policy is becoming likely that many people have decided the time for debate is over. One writer puts climate change skeptics "in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial," another envisions "war crimes trials" for the deniers. And during the tour for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore himself belittled "global warming deniers" as unworthy of any attention...

Global warming is too important a subject not to debate, and we in the U.S. may rue the day we rushed pell-mell into expensive and shortsighted solutions when much more rational and cost-effective ones were readily available."

I for one do not believe global warming should be treated like a fix-it-at-all-costs type of problem. Very few, if any, problems should be treated like that. (In fact, I can't think of any off the top of my head.) For example, I don't know the number of traffic fatalities that occur each year, though I know its significant, but I'm sure we could cut it by 99% if we strictly enforced a 15 mph speed limit (I can't recall where I recently heard that argument). We could also nearly guarantee that we never see another terrorist attack using airplanes if we quadrupled the security, backgrounds checks and random searches of passengers. The reason we don't go to these extremes is because we don't like the tradeoffs they impose, especially when we don't know the odds of their occurence.

I think the same goes for global warming. The odds of the worse case scenarios are still small. And going out 20-50 years requires you to make some serious extrapolations. I don't pretend to be an expert, but put me in the skeptical camp. The thing I don't like is that its almost turning into an argument that says that the fact you disagree with me gives me all the evidence I need to conclude that you're an idiot/stooge and not worthy to debate the issue.