Climate Change and (in)action

It's tough for me to put out a wonky discussion of Climate Change, since it involves the hard sciences, which is a lot harder for laymen to understand than economics or other social sciences. It's easy enough for Climate Change deniers to dig up some wacko academic who disputes the common wisdom of the field and has a PhD, but I think one has to look at what the consensus is among scientists in that field, and it's pretty clear.
But I come back to this line of reasoning: there's a good possibility that Al Gore is right, and that Climate Change will keep accelerating, that we'll continue to see year after year set new records as hottest on record, that polar ice caps will melt putting Bangladesh under water, that deserts will grow and more of the planet will become uninhabitable, etc etc. If the worst of the predictions are correct, we're going to be REALLY sorry we didn't act, because every year we wait the problem gets harder to solve.

Now of course it's possible that the scientific consensus is wrong- after all, there was once agreement that the world was flat, and that diseases were caused by witchcraft. If that turns out to be the case, we'll have lowered carbon emissions for no good reason. Well, even that isn't right, because I think everyone agrees that carbon emissions leads to unhealthy air to breathe, smog, etc so there's some benefit even if Climate Change scientists are wrong.

So think about the relative downside of going the wrong way on either side: either we do nothing and confront a catastrophe, or we do too much unnecessarily and waste resources we could have used for other economic growth. Which one is worse? Seems pretty obvious to me. And to top it all off, the odds of Climate Change being real seem much better than the odds that it's not, seeing as nearly all climate scientists agree that it's real.