Which debate?
The debate in the journals? Pretty scientific.
The debate in parliament? A mix of ideologies, values, science and economics.
The debate in public? A matter of education and ideologies.
The debate in the media? Acts of sensationalisation to attract attention.
There is far from a single AGW debate.
Athon
Thanks for sparing me having to write much, Athon!
That there is global warming occuring is not really debatable; how much is human-caused is debatable, but only within certain error ranges. What to do about it is a wide-open debate that includes everything from religion to political beliefs to economic theory to personal whims.
It doesn't help matters that both "sides" are conveniently ignoring presenting their perspective with any acknowledgment of what is and is not known. An awful lot of the projections are, of necessity, based on computer models with a number of assumptions. That means there is a range of possible outcomes, and we don't know which ones are most correct. The same is true of the mooted "solutions": In the most basic split, there are 'adapters' versus 'reversers'; and within each of those groups, "marketers" versus "gov't enforcers"; within enforcers there is "nationalists" versus "internationalists", etc.
I freely confess I don't know the answers, but I do know that in my experience, neither governments nor corporations have shown any reason to be trusted with global authority to decide correct responses. (Witness the idiocy of the corn-based ethanol "green fuel" legislation in the United States.)
I suspect the most likely solution path will involve government set, internationally enforced, target values, with some kind of tradeable market in carbon and sulfur emissions letting the "low-lying fruit" get taken care of first. I also suspect that this is *not* the model that most governments or corporations will want to pursue.
Sort of like the attempts to eradicate infectious disease, we will need both private and public initiatives to achieve a limited success. And there will be setbacks and fiascos and 'needless' suffering -- but we'll gradually learn what does and doesn't work.
And the world will be very different than it is now, and it *will* cost a lot of money. It would help a lot if Every Damn Politician from Every Damn Party just admitted that up front. That doesn't buy a lot of votes, but it is the truth.
Just my opinion, MK