If you are seriously interested in learning the answers to your questions, I strongly recommend spending an hour reading the IPCC's 'Summaries for Policymakers'

If you are seriously interested in learning the answers to your questions, I strongly recommend spending an hour reading the IPCC's 'Summaries for Policymakers'. Read the Synthesis Report, which covers everything, or one of the three working group reports for more detail ("Physical Science Basis", "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability", and "Mitigation of Climate Change"). http://www.ipcc.ch/ http://www.ipcc.ch/ The IPCC meticulously prepares these reports -- and I mean hundreds of scientists preparing reports reviewed by thousands worldwide, with extreme attention paid to wording about probabilities -- and then writes summary reports for non-scientific policymakers. If politicians have the ability and attention span to understand them, you can too. :) The hour spent reading will save you a hundred hours reading the nonsense that is 99% of what is written elsewhere. Also much of what you say is addressed.