My major disagreement with you here is that I would say instead: "we absolutely need to start changing that."
This is issue has been way 'over thought'. We're going to end up burying ourselves; our tombstones will say "Well, at least we thought about it!"
Since you answered here I'll reply here.
I don't disagree with you about the fact that we need to take action, but the question is what action? Is the Gore camp right and the carbon dioxide emissions are responsible? Are our previous beliefs that only CFCs caused ozone depletion the basis of the issue? I agree that we need to take action on the following things:
*use less petroleum
*waste less of everything, including renewable and nonrenewable resources
*be more responsible with the way we deal with all of the leftovers of our waste
I think those actions should be taken. However, we don't know for sure how to reverse whatever caused global warming, so I think we should spend a lot of money trying to determine what the true cause is, or else we stand a chance of making it worse with blind experimentation (for example throwing pulverized tires into a hurricane, which we have reason to believe would result in a significant fallout in the ecosystems involved, especially if it's thin enough to be inhaled by animals including humans).
On top of that I think both sides of the argument are bending the facts to their side. Not to divide it into liberals and conservatives (because I think it's more complicated than that), but the "Global Warmists" say that the increase in hurricanes and tropical storms are evidence of global climate shift. At the same time, the people in charge of determining weather policy (naming storms etc) are giving a name to every subtropical storm and classifying what was never considered a hurricane as a hurricane, massively skewing the figures to their side. The "Everything is Okay" camp claims that the weather is part of a natural shift (axis tilt, revolution change, etc) even though all evidence shows that the rate at which this change is occuring would be impossible for something that normally takes place over a few hundred years in the life of a planet.
So I honestly think we're pointing too many fingers at each other. We all want to fix the problem now but absolutely no one understands what's happening or why. It's like trying to pull a kid out of a well with a crane before making sure they don't have a rock stuck on their leg. Sure you'll get them out but they'll probably be missing a leg. If you do nothing they'll starve to death. So yeah we can't just sit around and wait for the planet to die, but I don't consider research a waste of time or money.
I'm not saying we should sit around and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime, we need to make more aggressive laws and regulations on the big producers of waste and possible warming issues (contrary to popular belief the US isn't the worst, we're just the noisiest about it), but a lot of the measures to reverse global warming include ways to counteract the main causes of them, not just reduce them, because we have no way of knowing if our environment even includes a mechanism to reverse changes to nonbiological climate factors, and we have a really good chance of doing something irreversible (if we're not already).
I mean that's just my opinion, it seems like the US is adopting a sit in a cave with fingers in the ears, but I'm doing my best to help, we're using less energy, disposing of our waste properly and recycling, but at the same time I'm not picketing anyone because first off I'm not sure who to picket, and second I'm not sure it'd do anything.