Continued; this word limit is a bit short at 350.

Lato;
On your main point about China and India going full steam (ha pun)
ahead and no matter what we do will be just a waste of a great deal
of money. You are so right, we should do ourselves a favour and go
flat out to change our transport and farming systems away from oil
and to other means of achieving an alternative energy source.

I think myself that solar thermal is probably the best bet, but we
will need coal for quite some years yet. Coal world wide will peak
around 2035 so we have to get cracking. The energy from coal has
already peaked and the rest we are using is of lower quality from what I have read.

Another good source is the hot rocks scheme, if they can pull that off it will be a real bonanza.

Nuclear, especially now that so many countries are going to build
nuclear power stations has a shortening lifetime with peak around
2040 at the present rate. Trouble is if they build more nuclear power
stations the time of peak uranium will occur before the stations have
reached their lifetime limit.

Breeder reactors could be built but there seems to be reluctance to
go that route.

Answer to "Curmudgeon".
The data I have mainly relied on in terms of models, are those developed by the Hadley Centre Meteorological office in UK, http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/models/modeltypes.html
Whether the folk there are "Activists" or not would depend on your definition, - possibly if they were totally "in-active," ie did not even turn up for work, they might lose their jobs.
Anything else would be mere speculation.
I also read widely, an excellent article on Global Warming was put together by the University of Texas in America, although that is now partially out of date, I researched the WAIS, (Western Antarctic Ice Shield) info, as 3 years ago, just one section of that was estimated to be releasing 1 third of global sea rise water, and the whole WAIS contains enough water to raise sea levels by over 5 metres worldwide.
WAIS is a big one, a left over from the last ice age, and starting to show significant instabilities, see http://pigiceshelf.nasa.gov/
I was also involved in a group studying the effect of Global Warming for the 2025 plan for Cairns Australia where we used the extremely conservative predictions from the CSIRO and also an extremely conservative risk management process the defence department would sneer at, as it ignored any possibility below 50%.
Despite that it was obvious that Cairns would have to be mainly abandoned within 50 years, not a conclusion the Government was prepared to release.
Evaluation of the RISK of Climate Change, at a time when the Insurance companies of the world are working to exclude it as a basis for insurance claims, takes away the grounds for the argument that it is crazy to reduce our Carbon footprint.
Should the worst case scenario occur, civilisation as we know it will be destroyed, much less worse will see 3/4 of the world population die in agony, minimum of say 1 metre in world sea level rise will cost thousands of times more than the amounts considered by Mark S Lawson and co. to be "crazy".
Cheers,
Geoff Thomas,
Kuranda