The human evolved design isn't up to planetary civilization.

Climate Denial Normalcy Bias is ignoring signs of danger, like a gazelle who keeps munching grass while lions lurk and storms skirt the horizon. It includes keeping the danger as background while focusing on your immediate interests. It includes checking to see if others are reacting, before you decide there's really danger. Like a herd of gazelles, we stay calm and deny danger until it's really threatening life and limb, and then we all get scared together. We evolved only to respond to short-acting danger, not to large scale slowly unfolding dangers of planetary scale. Our evolved responses don't work when the threshold for response occurs early and later, when the danger is severe, feedbacks make it out-of-control.

Flight or Fight When we finally get scared, we're hardwired for either flight (become a refugee) or fight (run out of water and kill each other for it), or sometimes freezing (Climate Destabilization isn't a predator so easily fooled). We'd have to take a hand in our own evolution to rewire a "plan and execute plan" response to fear and panic. The response that might work is just missing.
Jaron's Paradox Technological innovation can't save us, because every time we make a process more efficient human beings exploit it even more. We're like a gas that expands to fill every volume. We just improve our lifestyle and make more people.

Neural Architecture Triune brain anatomy: each of us has three parallel processors, a reptile brain, a lymbic system, and a higher brain. The two primitive brains have no language or symbolic thought, but they make decisions such as what's true, what's important, reproduction, and response to danger. Our higher brain can think in language and make plans, but has no emotion. We just aren't wired to emotionally respond to statistics and computer models. We respond to pain and puppies, sex and food. Reading about projected global climate destabilization feels dry and intellectual, distant. We get no gut reaction, unlike WWF.

Civilization is a Heat Engine Climate Destabilization is much larger than CO2 rise. The flow of energy defines civilization. Constructal Theory is beginning to quantify this flow. If we organized miraculously to eliminate fossil fuel use, we'd still keep heating up the Earth. We'd have "cooling towers" from nuclear power plants dumping their excess heat into the air, or the rivers. We'd send microwaves from space, but that would still pump excess energy into the air/water/soil of Earth. We just don't know how to run an economy that doesn't keep using more and more energy.

Selfish Institutions We're so easy to manipulate by spin doctors and the media, by our entertainment, our corporations, and our religions. Every institution of the modern globalized world puts its own prosperity and growth above the commons, the ultimate commons of a sustainable planet. Primarily governed by short term profits, our institutional structure is fundamentally incompatible with the long view. Each one promotes its own truth, i.e. the view that serves its myopic self interest.

What hope do I see? First we have to admit our design failure. Then we have to reinvent ourselves, as Steven Hawking says, control our own evolution. This doesn't have to involve human/machine integration or breeding experiments. It could mean co-evolving with our information systems, involving the entire population of the planet in education... personalized visualizations about the future we're building or not for their town and region ... and in working together to create a plan we can all live with.

A bigger picture of Global Warming

Sobering news from Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet of Sweden. They "have calculated the total energy emissions from the start of the industrial revolution in the 1880s to the modern day."
"They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming, during that period."

"using the increase in average global air temperature as a measure of global warming is an inadequate measure of climate change"

Net heat emissions blows carbon sequestration and nuclear energy out of the water as solutions to global warming. We can't use so-called clean coal. We have to stop using fossil fuel all together. Because, whether it takes 100 years or 1000 years to burn it all, the net heat released will overheat the planet and make it uninhabitable.

It's like a choice between boiling ourselves alive over low heat or high heat; our only sustainable choice is to turn off that heat.

"Although nuclear power does not produce carbon dioxide emissions in the same way as burning fossil fuels it does produce heat emissions equivalent to three times the energy of the electricity it generates and so contributes to global warming significantly, Nordell adds."

Realizing that net heat emissions is the real problem means there will never be a long-term solution using fusion or fission power. To prevent civilization collapse, we'll have to redesign to depend entirely on renewables such as solar power, wind, tides, and geothermal ... methods that merely redistribute the earth's heat instead of increasing it absolutely. It also becomes clear that overpopulation is a REAL limiting factor, not merely a technological challenge.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713085248.htm

Aagh!