If you're confused (like me) about what to believe and what not to believe regarding global warming, you may find (like I did) Bjorn Lomborg's WaPo op-ed piece to be a helpful primer.
Here's the upshot of his research: "It's wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we're causing it. But that's not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don't stack up." "We must accept that climate change is real and that we've helped cause it. There is no hoax. But neither is there a looming apocalypse."
Interesting quote: "According to the first complete peer-reviewed survey of climate change's health effects, global warming will actually save lives."
The Kyoto Protocol will save just one bear a year and will reduce the malaria risk by just 0.2 percent over the next century. If all the countries signed on to all aspects of Kyoto and stuck with it for the next century, it would only postpone the effects of global warming by 5 years. Lomborg suggests that this amounts to spending "enormous sums of money doing very little good for the planet a hundred years from now."