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It's not so much a case of hysteria as it's a case of the media not understanding any of the science behind it and reporting on what little they do know. That some climate scientists are pushing this the way they are is more the case of them being over zealous about their beliefs than the real science. Sure, concentrations of CO2 have risen over the last 100 years, and especially over the last 50 or so years. However, what they don't tell you is that there's a lot more to the way the climate works (both short and long term) than they're saying. It's not just the simple "we've pumped CO2 into the atmosphere and it's causing global warming". It does, that is not a disputed fact, but there are many other factors which go into the warming and/or cooling of our planet. Quite a few of which they're still yet to get their heads around.
However, given that we are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an ever increasing rate, we should be erring on the side of caution. In any case, there are other reasons as to why we should be looking for alternative energy sources, and doing it quickly. One is...we're running out of oil and there are better ways of using it than burning the stuff. Oil is so important in many other manufacturing processes that we'd be better of conserving what we have for those purposes. I would much rather see us develop energy alternatives that'll replace oil and nuclear fission as our main sources of power. And I don't mean wind or tidal power because they're never going to be anything other than stopgap sources of energy for smaller scale, regional power supply systems. They're not as reliable as what many people think. However, what we need to do is concentrate on perfecting solar energy, new forms of power storage and look to some of the more exotic possible ways of generating power and put research money into those. They're for the medium to long term, but solar and power storage are shorter term solutions. In the meantime, we should try and cut down on petrol/diesel usage and move more towards LPG and hybrid technologies.
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