[conistonwater]

> Should we tax ourselves to feel good about it?

Respectfully, I think you might be entirely missing the point of why people want to do something about climate change.

> Then there is always curiously left out the consideration, now forgotten depending on your birthyear, that scientists of a recent generation were up in arms about global cooling instead

It is not forgotten, but it is untrue: see for example the discussion in The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1).

[command_codes]

Climate change destroyed civilizations. Any student of history knows this, and that, without even to tease apart the mysterious circumstances of, say the Bronze Age - it is as simple as Greenland getting too cold.

The impulse just "to do" something is a religious impulse.

Global cooling is an ancillary matter; it doesn't change the point. After all, the globe really will cool sometime in the future