After reading Thomas Fowler's essay, “The Global Warming Conundrum,” here are my thoughts

In macro terms the climate over the past 450,000 years follows a saw-tooth shape when seen on a graph, with samples taken from ice cores. Much cooler temperatures seem to be the norm, and there is a distinct cyclical pattern to the earth's temperature, with levels at the current higher temperatures followed by rapid decline, with the peaks of warmer climate relatively short.

CO2 seems to be related to temperature in a feedback loop that increases both: a warmer trend results in increased biological activity which produces more CO2, this speeds up warming and the temperature levels due to such things as the greenhouse effect, which then triggers global cooling again.

Human activity has in fact increased greenhouse gases and warming but the rise in temperatures could mainly be part of this larger macro cycle. The last 12 years we have seen cooling which was not supposed to happen given human warming activities. The huge cost of radically changing our living habits, our food and fuel habits, could hurt poor countries most who could not afford the higher prices of food and fuel, so we better be right about our predictions.

But even so, we should decouple the question of using fossil fuel and conservation from global warming, because there are enough good reasons to husband and conserve our dwindling fuel resources, to reduce pollution from burning fossil fuels, as well as reducing the vulnerability of importing oil from unstable regions.  This could please the global warming forecasters whether they are right or wrong.