In other words, if your concern is malaria, there are far more effective approaches to preparation and amelioration than reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. The same could be said of concerns about famine, dislocation, poverty, flooding, hurricanes, etc. etc. There are relatively cheap measures available that would drastically reduce the damage wrought by these phenomena -- and reducing CO2 just isn't one of them.

Forgive me for playing devil's advocate, but I've got two serious uncertainties about this approach (and no numbers to back them up, so take everything I say with a grain of salt):

1.) I don't necessarily accept that there are "relatively cheap measures" for dealing with some of these issues.  Specifically I'm thinking of famine and poverty.  Both are easy to rally people around, and to get governments to donate respectable sums of money toward, and yet I would argue that we've failed to make a significant dent in either problem from a global perspective.

2.) Even if we accept that there ARE cheap ways of dealing with all of the potential consequences of climate change, I'm not sure that we can extrapolate that dealing with all of them in the aggregate is cheaper than major GHG cutbacks.

I've never particularly worried about the impact of climate change on human societies--other than famines, I guess, but even those tend to be more political than environmental. I've no doubt humans have the ability to develop new technologies to adapt to the changes. What worries me are the rest of the critters out there--plants and animals--who cannot migrate or evolve fast enough to get out of the way of melting glaciers, rising waters, warming temperatures, harsher storms, etc.

I too must claim ignorance of the full content of 'Bringing Society back into the Climate Debate', but from the quotes and article commentary, I suspect that the elephant in the living room is once again studiously ignored. Famine, pollution, destruction of the environment, and most of the other issues concerning environmentalists have one root cause: too many people. Every biosphere has a carrying capacity for the resident species, and the human species has gone way beyond that capacity, and continues to add to the burden at a monstrous rate.
The tremendous costs quoted for natural disasters such as the recent tsunami is not because such events have not happened before, but because the population that was there to be affected was two or three times greater than just a few decades previous. Read up on the rate of population growth in the Third World, and it becomes glaringly obvious why attempts to stamp out famine and epidemic diseases must always fail: solving the food shortage and improving health immediately lead to greater reproduction, starting another boom and bust cycle.
Pogo had it right: "We have met the enemy, and they are us...". Until population control becomes Job One, all the well intentioned fixes of one factor or another are just going to be futile BandAids on a growing cancer.

I don't disagree with anything you say. I think a cap and trade program's a fine idea (though of course the devil is always in the details) for pushing the development of renewable energy technologies.

Perhaps my headline was poorly chosen.  I'm not saying that we should disregard CO2, or abandon efforts to reduce emissions.

What I'm saying -- or rather, agreeing with the paper about -- is that in selling CO2 reductions, saying that they will reduce climate's impacts on society is not the way to go. There are other, faster, cheaper ways to reduce those impacts. We should be pushing for CO2 caps, but not at the expense of supporting other social policy that could have faster results, and not while overpromising about the results.

www.grist.org

This string points out the problem with concerning oneself with the symptom of global warming instead of the cause of the problem, which is industrial society's immoral pollution of OUR atmosphere.  We should advocate that all pollution is immoral and that no one should ever be allowed to discharge any pollutants into OUR air, water, or land. Who would be willing to drive a car whose exhaust pipe ended in the passenger compartment?