Is it worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight global warming?

Says the man who works for someone else and does not run his own business. Lets see how you feel when your out of work because it cost to much to do this silly things they want to do. The solar does not generate enough electric to pay for its self, and kills the birds that fly over it. The wind mills are the same they don't produce enough to pay for the cost. Now if you want to create Hydro electric, or Nuke its ok with me. Which we have done and it does pay for itself, so what are you people talking about renewable. Oil and Gas is made everyday by Mother earth and if you don't use it, it will come to the surface on its own it has and it will.

"Look at this logically."

OK, does the money we're spending going to reduce climate change? No, when you really look at it you'll find this is nothing more than a wealth transfer to other countries and does little or nothing to stop AGW.

"Look at this logically."

Was there EVER a time when the earth's climate wasn't changing? No the climate is always changing. In fact we have evidence that the earth was cooling a little over 5,000 years ago (at least enough to cause at least one glacier to grow) that has since retreated back to where it was.

"..we were wrong, we end up with clean air and nice weather."

Weather isn't climate, and we are putting in place laws for clean water and air and have done so for many years. If you don't think so look at pictures of LA in the 1960's vs today. Back then you had smog a lots of it, the brown haze of LA. Remember the Jimmy Buffet song Come Monday there is one part where he sings "I spent four lonely days in a brown L. A. haze." It was true L.A. was covered in a brown haze for days at a time.

Also you'd fine that most people want clean water, air and will support sensible regulation.

"...spurred the research we need to have sustainable energy ..."

No, it's the high price of oil, that has done that. As long as there is a cheap form of energy people and governments will use it. Take your own life for example, which would you buy a gallon of gasoline for $5 or a gallon of gasoline for $10? The $10 gallon was made using algae (yes there are some forms of algae who's oil can be refined into gasoline) which would you buy? But, the price of oil is high enough that companies are looking into alternative energy that fit into our existing systems. It wasn't the government who forced them to this, it was economics; the price of oil is high then the price of the alternative energy. In general I'm talking about algae oil in which there are a number of test plants in production right now.

"Therefore logic states we fight it as the penalty for being wrong is something good. While if we chose to do nothing and are wrong then the penalty may be species extinction."

The penalty for being wrong is about $1.75 trillion per year — about 12%-14% of GDP (Small Business Administration estimate). What could we do with that money if it wasn't spent of AGW. I don't know maybe give 3 million people a little over 5,500 dollars each and every year.

The penalty of species extinction is a red herring, there has been anywhere between 1 and 4 billion species that have existed on this planet, of which roughly 50 million still survive into the modern era given that man is a late comer to the game, if safe to say it's been happening for a long time. Also, at some point every species alive today including man will be come extinct.

Given the track record of environmentalist and their alarms it's would be a safe bet that they are wrong on this too, DDT, Population bomb, Global cooling, acid rain and forests, etc. And given that the math that the IPCC published doesn't work out, given that CRU can't reproduce their data set (they tossed out the original data) given that the government doesn't know if their weather stations meet their own standards, given that the models can't be set back more than a few hundred years and predict today's climate, give that they have (cru) proven at least some tree ring data is faulty (the divergence problem), given that the IPCC has use non-peer review data, and that they don't require the authors to give data, methods, math to the reviewers it's hard to trust the reports.