I haven't thought about this for very long, but it seems to me that with a little bit of work and some creativity, global warming can be a pretty good thing for us.
The sun, essentially acts as a gigantic power plant that transmits energy. The earth receives some of this energy with some of it being absorbed and some of it being emitted away (with the emitted energy being gone). When you absorb more than you emit, you get global warming, and the other way around you get global cooling.
It seems to me, that if you were clever enough, you can use this extra free energy to your advantage. Most of our energy has come from the sun in one way or another. Solar power is obvious, but wind power comes from pressure changes caused by heat from the sun, hydro power relies a bit on water evaporation, and fossil fuels all used to originally come from plants that got energy from the sun. If we could get better at storing these forms of energy, which generally are endothermic reactions, you could at least use all this extra energy from the sun.
I guess one problem is that we simply don't use enough energy, and so many of these potential methods to use this extra energy from global warming are simply not economical because of it. Hmmm, we shouldn't be trying to cap energy usage then. I'm all for using energy more efficiently, and reduce waste, but we shouldn't reduce potentially productive uses of energy just so that we can stop this extra warming from occuring. Well, since it's not yet economical, we don't have the tech yet to grab all this energy, and I can see a reason to limit any warming that may occur, after all, we'd get lots of free energy if our planet was lobbed into the sun, but we'd kinda die from not being able to handle it.
Actually, if CO2 were the cause of global warming, it would be kinda cool in that regard. The more energy we use, the more CO2 put into the atmosphere, the more sun we get, the more energy we get to keep fueling our energy usage.
Hmm, have to think more on this. One question I have that I don't know the answer to right now is if energy usage is a net endothermic or exothermic reaction. I mean, I know using electricity gives off waste in the form of heat. But heat was usually behind the creation of energy in the first place. Take a coal generator. You burn coal, and that releaseses heat, which evaporates water to turn a turbine. Electricity goes to your computer, and your computer does useful stuff and releases heat. Is this whole process a net endothermic or exothermic reaction. Gut feeling tells me that it is endothermic net.
Sun light came to this planet and went into some plants that eventually became coal. This is endothermic. Coal was heated, and this was exothermic. Water evaporated - endothermic. Water eventually condenses and cools, exothermic. Power lines and electronic devices release heat - exothermic.
Now the electricity forms energy which originally came from sunlight. Only some of the energy becomes heat, because if all of it became heat, it would be 100% waste (unless the purpose of the electronic device was to become a heater). Electronic devices are not 100% wasteful, so therefore, some of the sunlight does not end up as heat. I think...
Point is, shouldn't it be possible to use all this extra heat to our advantage? Tired, and I probably made a few errors, but if anyone has any comments, would be glad to hear them.