To add one more thought before the main body of this post: I do think one thing to consider when analyzing climate change is the fact that we only know so much about the natural climate changes that have occurred over the course of the Earth's enormous history. There have been historically (read:geologically) obvious climate shifts that occurred naturally through out history.
One thing to consider is: how much of the current climate change is attributable to a larger, natural climate change cycle? This isn't to say climate change can be brushed off as simply a natural cycle. What it means is that we can better analyze our current man-made effects on climate if we can narrow the sources our human-caused impact down by eliminating some of the natural causes from the pool of all possible sources of climate change. A type of "partitioning the complete set of causes", if you will.
To the meat of this post, than...
The one aspect of climate change that I don't really see much opinion (or research) devoted to is the actual case of over-population and exponential population growth. There's obviously the connection made, for instance, between toxic/harmful emission being a result of more and more people using products that cause toxic/harmful emissions. My argument is more to the point of recognizing that the amount of humans, and the natural causes of their existence (individually and collectively), is also a cause of global warming. This is all probably going to seem extremely cold and callous, so I apologize in advance for all of the things I'm about to say. But I believe it's all honest, and when I'm done saying what I have to say I will at least attempt to offer solutions to what I view is a problem.
Water is an all-important contributor to...shall we say..proper climate hygiene. If there's more water available to be evaporated, then more hydrogen and oxygen elements are freed to create products (such as ozone) that are also necessary for proper climate hygiene.. As population grows to unsustainable amounts, the amount of water needed to sustain basic human function not only decreases the amount of water available to land (resulting in infertile, desiccated land), but also decreases the amount of water available for evaporation and creation of atmospheric elements.. Which in turn contributes to more direct sunlight and heat and melting of glaciers, ice caps, and other cooling elements made of..well, frozen water. Water that melts in an attempt to contribute to the evaporation process that helps maintain a cooler atmosphere than the one we currently have and the even worse one we're heading towards.
Another aspect of human population (especially our current, unsustainable population and it's exponential growth) that must be considered is...kind of gross to talk about, but...human waste and it's contribution to global warming. This is a less atmospheric type of warming. The amount of human waste created by 7.4 BILLION people has to go somewhere. It has to be disposed of somehow. Usually the way it's disposed of involves water (thus polluting, in bacterial/disease vector sense, the water if the waste water isn't treated). Other times, it's simply buried. Compost. If you've ever had a compost pile, you've seen how, over time, the pile will swell due to the heat created by the process of composting. The same thing essentially happens with human waste. The temperature of the ground under which it's buried will inevitably rise, which contributes to a general warming of the earth (it also traps water into the composting cycle, making that trapped water unavailable for the evaporation cycle during the composting cycle).
Human body temperature must also be considered. If you increase the number of people in a room, the temperature in the room increases accordingly (even if everyone stands perfectly still). It isn't terribly far-fetched to conclude that global population growth of the magnitude we experience in the last few decades does/will have a similar effect on global temperature (especially if global temperatures are also rising due to other causes, human-related or otherwise). One must also consider the temperature effects of decaying corpses (those not cremated) on ground temperatures (not terribly dissimilar from the temperature effects of composting waste).
I can list off other basic human-related factors that contribute to climate change, unrelated to resource consumption (outside of food & water). For better or worse, I'd rather not go into full Doomsayer Donny mode. Rather, I'd like to get to some solutions (or at least suggestions for solutions) to the problem of over-population and continued exponential, unsustainable population growth.
My (suggestions for) solutions:
1) Stop having kids so much! I personally do not want kids, but I can somewhat understand how a person or couple (or whatever) might want a little version of themselves. But the fact of the matter is, there are too many people on the planet. If you desperately need a child, adopt a child! Your personal genetics do not ensure that a child will be any more or less special than a child you adopt. Adoption-instead-of-reproduction not only stagnates population growth, it also alleviates economic disparity. If a middle class family adopts an impoverished child, the child is no longer impoverished and the family is just as well off economically than they would be if they had chosen to reproduce instead of adopt. The total net economic effect is strictly growth of overall economic well being for the total group.
1.a)Use birth control! Make birth control universally available, even outside of the 1st world! The pill, condoms, morning after contraception, whatever! Be vigilant, be protected, avoid unwanted pregnancy, and contribute to the stagnation of population growth! If you get pregnant, don't use a morning after contraceptive, and you don't want to gestate the fetus, have an abortion. If that sounds cold to some people, I'm sorry. The fact of the matter is that a person who doesn't want a fetus probably doesn't want the child it will become. I know the pain of being an unwanted child (whether that came from not being wanted as a birth child or foster child is not really relevant). It's a very, very unhappy experience.
2) If you absolutely MUST have your own flesh and blood children, limit yourself to,at most, 2. As much as you might think the world needs more little versions fo you, it doesn't. None of us are so great and/or so genetically perfect that the world needs 7 mini-you's.
3) Every few years there should be a voluntary global promise by every person to go the whole year without reproducing.
4) Don't give in to social pressure to have a kid if you don't want one. Some people (like me) don't want kids. Be ok with that. You can be a heterosexual and not breed. You can be a bi-sexual and not breed. You can be a homosexual and not breed, too. We are more free than ever, historically speaking, to live our lives the way we want. If you don't want kids, don't have them! Get a vasectomy or get your tubes tied or be very very vigilant with your contraception use. But be true to yourself and don't force yourself to have a kid/family you didn't ever want in the first place.
As a bit of a post script, the body temperature/natural human waste argument/consideration made above isn't, in my opinion, the biggest problem concerning climate change. My opinion is that it's a contributing factor, though that factor is only a small sliver of the "what's causing climate change" pie. Still, every piece of that pie has to be considered when we start talking about righting the climate ship (and mixing the metaphors, apparently).
Over-population obviously and directly contributes to resource depletion as well. More fossil fuels burned, more food that needs to be produced, more buildings that need to be built, etc. All of these things upset the natural balance of the planet. The materials needed to build your new house or action figure collection or XStation7 or whatever comes from somewhere. When hundreds of thousands of people are buying a new phone every year because iSam improves the camera or whatever..... that kind of thing adds up in terms of resource depletion (for example).
To add to that: I think that the development of automobiles that use alternative power sources as opposed to fossil fuels is great. Hybrid technology, fully solar, fully electric.... all of it is great. It's research that's crucial to the climate stabilization effort. But I think we should be working on ways to use new non-fossil fuel engine technology into existing automobile bodies. If the goal is really to conserve resources, then all of the steel and titanium and whatever other natural metals and other natural resources a new automobile body requires to be built.. you have to try and cut down on using and abusing those resources, too. Not just because it's environmentally responsible, but also because of the amount of fossil fuels a company has to burn to extract the resources from the earth (for example). You still end up using more and more fossil fuels (since extraction and the refinement/production processes require such large energy sources, fossil fuels are the only method most companies have to power the whole process) so all of the new electric cars won't necessarily have any diminishing effect on overall greenhouse gas accumulation that (essentially) causes global warming. So the best thing to do is find a way to put the new technology into the old, existing, already-dug-up-and-produced automobile bodies. I'd be just fine, and possibly overjoyed, with driving an automobile with a 100% Biodiesel engine or a Tesla engine or whatever, but inside of a '02 Chevy s-10 Blazer (maybe sadly, maybe not..but that's my favourite automobile) body. I'm just saying, if we were to replace all of the old standard fuel combustion automobiles with new alternative energy automobiles, the environmental cost of gathering all of the materials necessary to undertake that task (if we weren't to use existing automobile bodies) would be beyond catastrophic. It's good to get caught up in new ideas and technology and opportunities, but we have to plan and make sure we do it the right way.
Just a bit more to consider, anyway...