Climate Change - how to understand it?

I've been trying to decide my opinion on Climate Change. My instinct says that yes the climate is being altered by man made processes and we need to go towards sustainable least environmental impact business practices.

But what does the science and data say? What is the right policy decision? I'm trying to read various reports to get a sense of it. Why does Tony Abbot think it's "Crap"? What did Garnaut originally propose? What does the "intergovernmental panel on climate change" do? What is AR4 and AR5? and what were the East Anglia emails all about?

I haven't read enough. that's for sure. But - here's the deal as I understand it. Firstly, there are a bunch of gases - carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide ( see p26 of the garnaut final report). these gases cause the effect of warming the average global temperature which causes changes in the climate - longer hot spells, more extreme events.

If the parts per million of these gases is not held at a certain level we will have more than 2 degrees change in the temperature by 2015. The increase in ocean height from more water will be to go up enough to put bangladesh and the maldives underwater.

Wow.

The argument is about how much each country should reduce their emissions by, and, if you're developing and can't afford the bigger price for cleaner tech, then the developed world should pay for you.

That's hard and I'm not going to address it here.

In fact it's too late - I need to go to bed. I'll come back to this and address my thought issues later.