Earth having been around for millions of years, how statistically significant is a 29 years period in the grand scheme of things?
How statistically significant are each of us "in the grand scheme of things"? Not very. There will be no Hollywood biopic about my life, nor likely yours.
If you believe in an eternal afterlife of joy in a heavenly garden, then even a billion years of life on a single planet is statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of things. (Or, like Secretary of the Interior Watt; if you believe the Rapture will come in our lifetime, then why have an environmental management policy at all?)
If we are but a colony of some Galactic Confederacy, then again we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
If the Sun should go nova tomorrow, and destroy all life on Earth, is that really statistically significant in the grand scheme of things? No.
Yet despite all of that, I still think I'm significant enough that others - who are all just about as insignificant as I am - should still care about not littering, about keeping poisons out of my water, about keeping disease causing bacteria out of my food, about keeping CFCs from the ozone layer, and keeping the Earth's climate stable and in the current climate regime.
But of course, how statistically significant is one more piece of trash in the grand scheme of things? Not very. So why not throw that trash out the window?
In other words, I reject your qualifier "grand scheme of things" as meaningless, at least not without further clarification of which grand scheme you mean. Policy decisions must have a more concrete goal, with a more meaningful time span than the heat death of the Universe.
I am personally in the camp of plant more trees. It is a fact that sunlight falling onto a plant causes the energy to be converted into cellular metabolism and sequestering CO2. A desert however will absorb and then re-radiate a lot of that heat. We need to stop deforestation and take advantage of the higher c02 levels to grow more plants. Hell lets start some geo-engineering projects which will be useful for when we need to terraform other planets.
That may be one way to address it, but there's a lot to be done to have any effect there. Most of the places where massive deforestation is happening is where the most corrupt officials are.
There are many things that we can do to attempt to tackle the issue of a developing hostile climate. however trading carbon credits is not one. We need simple engineering solutions, but biological CO2 sequestration is quite efficient. especially algaes, plankton, grasses, insects, etc.
For convenience. It allows you to compare the last two 30 year periods: 1951-1980 vs 1981-2010
The age of the Earth isn't relevant at all. Imagine tossing a coin to see if it's a fair coin. How many times do you have to toss it to be fairly confident it's fair?
Now, how old is the coin?
I'm almost left speechless by the scale of this goalpost-moving. The earth will continue to exist and won't notice any climate change. It's mostly a ball of iron and rock. We, on the other hand, have a population that is heavily reliant on the climate not changing too much, and in so many different ways.
Keep in mind that the climate doesn't just 'get warmer'. It also has more extreme weather events - like a pot simmering on a stove, add a bit more heat and it gets a bit more violent.
What was your point again?
To clarify: my point is, even only taking into account only the period during which it has been inhabited by mankind, Earth has probably reached hotter and colder averages than what we've experienced over the past half century. Mankind did fine.
My point was that you're dead.
In a Sauna for a few hours. You will die. Statistics and average lifetime are not relevant.
Note the times - on the order of minutes.
You don't need a pressure cooker to kill a person from heat. The 70°C of a traditional sauna will do just fine.
Realistically I accept that this debate is not 'winnable' in any traditional sense. Even if the governments crack down on CO2, and the temperature drops back to non increasing fluctuations there will be no acceptance from some people who will always insist that it is/was a conspiracy the same as the moon landings and the UN. I suppose the only way that one side could convince the other is if the CO2 keeps increasing and the weather doesn't end up killing us all. Sorry for the digression.
I usually spend like an hour at 75 degrees celsius with some moisture. Which is totally non-lethal.
People are concerned about negative effects, not just surviving.