One of my degrees is in engineering and the others in computer science. It's good to have some technical people on the forum to balance out the Luddites, conspiracy nuts, and tinfoil hat wearers.
Cool. Nice to meet a CS grad!
I myself am not concerned about global warming. Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere's as simple as planting more trees.
I'm not overly concerned, in the sense that we need to outlaw cars and plug catalytic converters on the tail-ends of cows and zomg zomg zomg! Nor do I think we need to bankrupt our economy by setting untenable goals for ourselves, while the rest of the world belches pollution into the atmosphere.
But I think that it's both prudent and sensible to collect the sort of data we are collecting, analyze it, make scientific predictions based on the best theories we have available and then
act rationally based on those predictions.
Our best theories predict a warming trend - there is no dispute there. The questions are is the trend caused by human activity and is it something we should be worried about?
It's likely that human activity plays a role, although I don't think we can quantify, with great accuracy, how big that role is. But considering that human activity is something we have control over (unlike, say, cow farts) it seems sensible to see what effect we could have if we made changes.
Should we be worried about the climate? Yes, because if something does go very wrong with the climate, it's very likely that our species will die. Of course, this is a hugely complex system and one we don't have a great grasp on yet, so we should certainly be careful.
To that end, I think we need to (a) move to cleaner sources of energy by expanding the generation of power from renewable sources, (b) develop better filtering and sequestration technology for industrial CO
2 and NO
x emissions, (c) innovate and improve our technology by researching batteries, solar cells, steam turbines, gen IV reactors etc and (d) set aggressive, but still tractable goals (politically, economically and societally) for pollution reduction.
Tree count reaches three trillion:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366
More trees in America than there were 100 years ago:
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/more-trees-than-there-were-100-years-ago-its-true
While that is great, the reality is that trees alone aren't enough in the long term.